Archaeology and Ancient History MA (Hons) personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

On a school trip to the Grosvenor Museum in Chester, I spent most of the lunch break in front of the Roman tombstones, trying to read them with my GCSE Latin. The abbreviations defeated me at first. Once our teacher explained that D M stood for Dis Manibus and H S E for hic situs est, though, the stones began to read like short, formulaic biographies: a name, a unit, an age, years of service and sometimes the person who paid for the memorial. What interested me most was how much the carving added that the text left out, such as clothing, weapons and whether a family was shown at all. I want to study archaeology and ancient history together because questions like this need both. An inscription tells me what someone chose to record. The object itself, where it was found and how it was made tell me about the people and resources behind it. I am particularly drawn to the Roman provinces. There, written evidence is thin and often military, so much of what we know about ordinary lives comes from excavation. I would like to learn how archaeologists build arguments from fragments, and how those arguments can be tested against ancient writers whose purposes were very different from ours.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

A level Latin has taught me to read closely. Translating extracts of Tacitus' Agricola meant weighing individual words, and class discussions about how far Tacitus was praising his father-in-law made me ask what each source wants its reader to believe. In History, my coursework on enclosure in a nineteenth-century parish used a tithe map alongside estate correspondence. Matching field names across the two showed me how a visual record and a written one can support or complicate each other. Geography fieldwork gave me habits I expect to use: recording measurements consistently, labelling samples and writing up methods so someone else could repeat them. My Extended Project brought these together. Using the online Roman Inscriptions of Britain database, I compared ten soldiers' tombstones from Chester and Caerleon, recording which details each one included and how the figures were carved. Unit and length of service appeared almost every time, while age and family were less consistent. With so few examples, my conclusions were cautious. I argued that the stones reflect what mattered to the army and to those who commissioned them, rather than giving a full picture of soldiers' lives. I presented the project to younger students, which made me explain Latin formulae without jargon.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Last summer a friend and I offered to record the medieval font in our parish church for the local history society, which wanted an image for its website. We took around 150 overlapping photographs on our phones. She handled lighting and measured the bowl with a tape so we had a scale, while I learned to process the images in free photogrammetry software. The first model had a hole where the light had been too flat. We went back, re-shot that side and produced a model the society now uses online. It showed me how much careful recording matters before any interpretation begins. On Saturdays I work at a garden centre, pricing stock, loading compost for customers and answering questions about plants. It has made me comfortable speaking to strangers, and I now notice soil texture more than I used to, which has added to my interest in how deposits form on sites. I play bass in the school jazz band, which needs steady attention and listening to others rather than leading. I have also walked several sections of Offa's Dyke with my dad, reading about the earthwork beforehand and comparing the descriptions with the bank and ditch in front of us. Seeing how its size changes over short distances made me curious about how such monuments were planned and built, which I hope to explore further at university.