Archaeology personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Stripping out a kitchen in a 1930s semi last year, I lifted three layers of floor covering: cork-effect vinyl, patterned linoleum and, underneath, quarry tiles set in lime mortar. Nobody would call that archaeology, but it made me think about how a sequence is read, and how the most recent layer is often mistaken for the whole story. I have spent eight years fitting kitchens and doing joinery, and the job trains you to see a building as a series of decisions made by people you will never meet: a blocked doorway, a joist notched for a long-gone gas pipe. Archaeology asks the same questions of much older and far less forgiving evidence, and I want to learn its methods properly. I am particularly drawn to the study of everyday material, such as timber, tools and domestic space, and to how archaeologists move from physical traces to claims about social life. Reading Matthew Johnson's Archaeological Theory: An Introduction showed me that this move is contested, and that interpretation is argued over rather than simply uncovered. That is what I most want to train in: being able to defend a reading of evidence and to recognise when the evidence will not bear it.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I left school with GCSEs and started a joinery apprenticeship at seventeen. Last year I completed an Access to HE Diploma in Humanities at my local college, studying two evenings a week alongside full-time work. The history units taught me to handle primary sources critically. For one assignment I compared two nineteenth-century descriptions of the same market town and set out where they disagreed and why. My extended project looked at timber-framed buildings in my county, using listed building descriptions and published surveys to compare how dates had been assigned. I learned how much confidence dendrochronology allows where it has been carried out, and how much more cautious stylistic dating has to be where it has not. Writing was slow at first. My early drafts described rather than argued, and my tutor's feedback pushed me to build each paragraph around a claim. By the final units I was achieving distinctions. Alongside the diploma I read Francis Pryor's Britain BC, which made me curious about prehistoric landscapes. I also completed a free online introduction to archaeology, which gave me the basic vocabulary of contexts, stratigraphy and site recording before I saw them in practice.

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

Last summer I spent two weeks volunteering on a community excavation run by our local archaeological society on the site of a post-medieval farmstead. I was a beginner and was treated as one. I trowelled, sieved, filled in context sheets under supervision and learned to wash and bag finds without damaging them. What surprised me was how much of the work was careful recording rather than digging, and my habit of measuring twice suited it. Over the winter I have helped at the society's monthly finds-processing sessions, mostly sorting pottery sherds and clay pipe fragments. Being self-employed for the last three years has taught me to price a job honestly, to explain problems clearly to people who are not specialists and to keep working in a cold, half-demolished room late on a winter afternoon. On Saturdays I look after my seven-year-old nephew while my sister works, so I have become good at planning study time around other people. I also walk most weekends, and I now notice field boundaries, holloways and earthworks I would once have passed without a thought. Returning to full-time study will be a big change, but my diploma has shown me that I can manage academic work, and I am ready to commit to it fully.