Overview

This course will provide a foundation for the period demonstrating the main developments using examples and showing how interpretations have changed. For the Roman Period, the course will examine the conquest and military archaeology; the countryside (villas, native settlements, farming and mineral extraction); towns; craft and the economy; religion and burial; and the end of Roman Britain. For the Early Medieval Period, the course will examine the archaeology of western Britain from the fifth to seventh centuries; Anglo-Saxon settlement and pagan cemeteries; Anglo-Saxon rural settlement; the origins of Anglo-Saxon towns; the conversion and Anglo-Saxon monasteries and churches; the Picts; the Viking impact; and the archaeology of late Anglo-Saxon England. For the Later Medieval Period, the course will examine the Norman Conquest and castles; rural settlement; the countryside; urban settlement; craft and trade; and church archaeology, including that of monasteries. Wider context for understanding medieval archaeology in particular is provided by examination of industrialisation and more recent archaeological topics.

Assessment Strategy

-threshold -Threshold students (D- and D) will have done only a minimum of reading, and their work will often be based partly on lecture notes and/or basic textbooks. They will demonstrate in their written assessments some knowledge of at least parts of the relevant field, and will make at least partially-successful attempts to frame an argument which engages with archaeological controversies, but they will fail to discuss some large and vital aspects of a topic; and/or deploy only some relevant material but partly fail to combine it into a coherent whole; and/or deploy some evidence to support individual points but often fail to do so and/or show difficulty weighing data (thereby relying on unsuitable or irrelevant data when making a point). Alternatively or additionally, the presentation of the work might also be poor, with bad grammar and/or punctuation, careless typos and spelling errors, and a lack of effective and correct referencing.

-good -Good students (B- to B+) will demonstrate a solid level of achievement and depth of knowledge in all the criteria in the C- to C+ range, and will in addition exhibit constructive engagement with different types of archaeological writing and interpretation. Ideas will be communicated effectively and written work will include a good range of reading and demonstrate a clear understanding of the issues and of the existing interpretations expressed in a well-structured, relevant, and focused argument. Students at the top end of this band will engage with and critique the ideas that they come across, and synthesise the various interpretations they find to reach their own considered conclusions. Written work will be correctly presented with references and bibliography where appropriate.

-excellent -Excellent students (A- and above) will show strong achievement across all the criteria combined with particularly impressive depths of knowledge and/or subtlety of analysis. In written work, they will support their arguments with a wealth of relevant detail/examples. They will also demonstrate an acute awareness of the relevant historiography and give an account of why the conclusions reached are important within a particular archaeological debate. They may show a particularly subtle approach to possible objections, nuancing their argument in the light of counter-examples, or producing an interesting synthesis of various contrasting positions. Overall, the standards of content, argument, and analysis expected will be consistently superior to top upper-second work. Standards of presentation will also be high.

-another level-Students in this band (C- to C+) will demonstrate a satisfactory range of achievement or depth of knowledge of most parts of the module, and will make successful, if occasionally inconsistent, attempts to develop those skills appropriate to the study of archaeology at undergraduate level. In the case of the written assessments, the answers will attempt to focus on the question, although might drift into narrative, and will show some evidence of solid reading and research. The argument might lose direction and might not be adequately clear at the bottom of this category. Written work will be presented reasonably well with only limited errors in grammar, punctuation, and referencing, and not to the extent that they obscure meaning.