Master Archaeology (Research MA) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The sherd was no bigger than a matchbox, and under a ×10 hand lens its broken edge showed angular grains of crushed burnt flint mixed with rounded, darker lumps that I eventually learned to recognise as grog, ground-up older pottery. I spent much of my final undergraduate year looking at edges like that one. For my dissertation I recorded the fabrics of around four hundred Middle Bronze Age sherds from a developer-led excavation whose archive had been deposited with a county museum service. The site report had grouped the pottery broadly by form. I wanted to know whether the choice of temper changed between the two clusters of roundhouses on the site, which the excavators had suggested were not occupied at the same time.

The work was slower and more repetitive than I had expected. I designed a recording sheet based on standard fabric description conventions, noting inclusion type, size, frequency and sorting, and I photographed a reference set so that I could check my own consistency across several months. Halfway through, I re-examined a sample of fifty sherds blind and found that I had been inconsistent in separating sparse from moderate flint, so I tightened my definitions. The final result was modest but real: grog-tempered fabrics were noticeably more common in one cluster, which fits the sequence the excavators proposed, although I argued that the sample from each feature was too small to treat this as more than supporting evidence. My supervisor's main criticism was that I had not engaged enough with why potters might choose grog, and that question is a large part of why I want to continue to postgraduate research.

Reading for the dissertation pushed me beyond description. Prudence Rice's Pottery Analysis gave me the technical vocabulary, but I became more interested in arguments that technological choices are social rather than purely functional, the idea, associated with work on the chaîne opératoire, that the sequence of steps in making an object carries learned habits that can be traced. Grog is an interesting case because it means putting old pots into new ones. I would like to explore, through a research project, how far fabric recipes can be used to identify communities of practice in prehistoric settlements, and how such interpretations hold up when tested against other evidence such as residue or petrographic analysis, which I have read about but not yet carried out myself. A research-focused master's would give me the methodological training I currently lack, particularly in quantitative approaches and laboratory methods.

Since graduating I have worked full time at a garden centre plant nursery. It is not archaeology, but it has taught me things I value. I manage watering schedules and stock rotation for the perennial benches, and when we changed compost supplier last spring I kept a simple record of which stock struggled, which helped my manager make the case for switching back. I have also become comfortable explaining practical detail to customers who arrive knowing nothing, a skill I suspect will matter whenever archaeology has to justify itself to the public.

Outside work I play cornet in a local brass band. Rehearsing one part among twenty, week after week, until it fits, is not unlike recording a fabric series: much of the satisfaction comes from patient consistency rather than individual moments of brilliance. I also volunteer occasionally at the museum store where I did my dissertation research, helping to repackage boxes into archive-standard materials, which has kept me close to the collections and given me respect for the people who keep archives usable.

I am applying for research-oriented study because my dissertation left me with a question I could frame but not answer. I would bring careful recording habits, experience of handling a real archive, and an awareness of the limits of my own data. I hope to leave with the training to turn a close look at a broken edge into an argument about the people who made the pot.