Roman archaeology personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The Roman road that runs north from Manchester passes about two miles from my house, though for most of its length it is now a hedge line, a farm track and a suspiciously straight stretch of B road. I noticed it first on a walking map and spent a wet Sunday trying to follow it. What interested me was not the road itself but the gap between the map and the ground: how much interpretation sits behind a dotted line and the word 'course of'. That question has shaped how I read about Roman Britain since. I want to study Roman archaeology because it forces two kinds of thinking together. There is the textual Rome of Tacitus and inscriptions, which I find genuinely absorbing but which mostly records the priorities of men who wrote things down, and there is the material record of pottery fabrics, animal bone, field boundaries and building phases, which tells you about people who never appear in a text. Reading about the Vindolanda writing tablets showed me how rarely those two sources meet, and how ordinary the surviving voices are when they do: requests for socks, accounts, a birthday invitation. I am drawn to the northern frontier in particular, less as a military story than as a question about how supply, settlement and local economies worked around garrisons. A degree course attracts me because I have reached the limit of what I can work out from books and maps. I want training in excavation and recording, in dating techniques and in handling finds, so that I can judge evidence rather than just admire other people's conclusions about it.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A levels in History, Geography and English Literature have given me a useful mix for archaeology. In History I study Tudor England and the Russian Revolution; neither is ancient, but the coursework on historical interpretations taught me to ask who produced a source and what they were trying to achieve, which applies just as well to a Roman inscription commissioned by an officer. Geography has been more directly relevant than I expected. Working on drainage, soil and land use for fieldwork gave me the vocabulary to think about why settlements sit where they do, and mapwork and cross-sections have made me comfortable reading contour and relief information, which I now use when tracing the road line. English Literature has improved how I structure an argument and handle close reading, and I find that unpicking a poem's ambiguity is not far from unpicking a vague excavation report. Because my school does not offer Classical Civilisation or Latin, I have worked through the first half of a Latin textbook borrowed repeatedly from the library, at roughly two evenings a week. I am nowhere near fluent, but I can now work slowly through simple tombstone inscriptions with a glossary, recognise the standard abbreviations and understand why an epitaph's phrasing matters. I have also read Guy de la Bedoyere on Roman Britain and parts of Mary Beard's SPQR, which changed how I think about who counted as Roman and how citizenship spread. Alongside this I completed the free online introduction to archaeology material I could find and keep a notebook of terms I do not yet understand.

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

My main piece of practical preparation is a small project I set up myself, since there is no dig near me that takes volunteers under eighteen. Over about fourteen months I have been recording what I can see of the Roman road and the Roman-period finds from my area, using the county historic environment record and the Portable Antiquities Scheme database, which are both free. I walk marked sections when the fields are accessible and the light is low, photograph earthworks and hedge alignments, note grid references and keep a simple spreadsheet of nearby recorded finds by type and date range. Most entries are coins and brooch fragments and none of it is new knowledge, but assembling it taught me how uneven and biased distribution maps are: my map shows where metal detectorists have had permission, not where Romans lived. I have visited the Roman collections at Leeds City Museum three times, once specifically to compare real samian ware with the photographs I had been relying on, and made a day trip to Ribchester on a coach and two buses. Working Saturdays and two evenings in a bakery has taught me to be accurate when tired, to follow a process exactly and to deal politely with people who are in a hurry, all of which I expect to matter on site. At home I help get my younger brothers to school and hear them read, so I am used to planning my study around fixed commitments. I also volunteer at a monthly community litter pick along the canal, which is cold, methodical and oddly good practice for fieldwork in a Yorkshire spring.

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