UCL Institute of Archaeology

Bronze Age

The Bronze Age is associated with some of the world’s great civilisations, the development of social complexity and long-distance connections between societies. The Institute has fourteen leading scholars in Bronze Age archaeology on its staff. They have numerous field projects and an outstanding spread of expertise - in textual evidence, material culture and archaeological science, and are at the forefront of creating comparative, global perspectives that feed directly into their teaching. Their studies encompass the development of agricultural systems, the commoditisation of material culture, trade networks, urban and palace societies, settlement and ritual landscapes, and metallurgical technologies – and geographically stretch from China and India to the ancient Western Asia, Egypt, the Aegean, Italy, continental Europe and the British Isles.

Research

Projects

• Ancient Chinese Bronzes (with special reference to European collections)
• The Ancient Levant
• Antikythera Survey Project
• The Archaeology of the Western Isles (Outer Hebrides)
• The Beaker People
• The Blackden Project
• The Bow Hill Project
• Commensality, Cooking, Dining and the Politics of Gastronomy in the Near East
• Digital Lahun Papyri
• The Emergence of Craft Specialisation in the Near East
• Experimental Archaeometallurgy
• Feeding Stonehenge
• Gender and the Emergence of Villages, Cities and States in the Ancient Near East
• Indus Geomorphology
• Knossos Urban Landscape Project
• Kythera Island Project
• Late Bronze Age glass production in Egypt
• The Making of the Middle Sea
• Personal Ornaments in the Ancient Near East
• Petrie Palestinian Project
• The Stones of Stonehenge
• Upper Esino Valley Survey

Centres

• International Centre for Chinese Heritage and Archaeology
• Centre for Applied Archaeology

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People

• Cyprian Broodbank
• Richard Bussmann
• Sue Colledge
• Dorian Fuller
• Sue Hamilton
• Susanna Harris
• David Jeffreys
• David Kertai
• John Merkel
• Mike Parker Pearson
• Mark Roberts
• Stephen Shennan
• Ulrike Sommer
• Rachael Sparks
• Marc Vander Linden
• David Wengrow
• Todd Whitelaw
• Katherine Wright

Degrees

• BA in Archaeology and Anthropology
• BA or BSc in Archaeology
• MA in Archaeology and Heritage of Asia
• BA in Egyptian Archaeology
• MA in Archaeology
• MA in the Archaeology of the Middle East
• MA in Egyptian Archaeology
• MSc in Environmental Archaeology
• MA in Mediterranean Archaeology

Courses

undergraduate

• World Archaeology: the deep history of human societies (formerly Past Societies)
• World Archaeology: evolutionary origins to the earliest states
• World Archaeology: from early states to globalization
• Introduction to Egyptian and Near Eastern Archaeology
  
• Introduction to European prehistory
• World Archaeology: an outline of the deep history of human societies (for BA Arch & Anth students only)
• Archaeology of Ancient Egypt
• From Farmers to Metallurgists in Prehistoric Europe
• Archaeology of the Near East: prehistory – 2000 BC
• Archaeology of the Near East from 2000 to 300 BC
• Bronze and Iron Age Britain
• Archaeology of Early South Asia
• Understanding complex societies: Egypt and Mesopotamia in 3rd millennium BC
• Late Bronze Age Aegean in the Mediterranean world
• Iron Age Europe
• The Age of Stonehenge

graduate

• Archaeologies of Asia
• British and European Prehistory: Neolithic to Iron Age
• Themes and issues in the archaeology of the E Mediterranean and Middle East
• The Aegean from first farmers to Minoan states
• The Late Bronze Age Aegean
• Society and Culture in Ancient Egypt
• Near Eastern Material Culture I: Neolithic and Early Bronze Age
• Near Eastern Material Cultures II: Middle Bronze Age through the Iron Age
• Pattern and Process in the Archaeology of the Middle East
• Funerary Archaeology
• Mediterranean Dynamics
• Mediterranean Prehistory

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