Archaeology
Admissions
Course requirements
Archaeology spans a very broad subject area, and the course allows study of topics ranging across the humanities, the social sciences and the sciences. Applications are welcome from applicants studying humanistic fields such as History, English, Classics, and ancient languages, social sciences such as Geography, Sociology, Psychology, or Anthropology, and sciences such as Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics. Applicants for Egyptology and Assyriology are strongly encouraged to study an ancient or modern language.
Admissions process
Applicants are not expected to have any standard background in archaeology, as the field is highly varied, there are many relevant backgrounds and the subject is often not taught at schools. Applicants should, however, be prepared to discuss their relevant interests and the potential direction they wish to follow.
All applicants will take an at-interview assessment and this will be based on the reading of material. This assessment is designed to assess the ability to interpret text and to write clearly and effectively. No preparation or prior knowledge is required.
Applicants will also be required to submit one piece of written work. Further details can be found on the following website: www.arch.cam.ac.uk, and any enquiries should be address to: Undergraduate-secretary@arch.cam.ac.uk or to the Admissions Office at Pembroke College: email adm@pem.cam.ac.uk
Pembroke Archaeology Teaching Staff
Prof John Robb - Director of Studies
John Robb received his first training in medieval English literature (BA, University of Chicago, 1983), and then went on to study anthropological archaeology at the University of Michigan (MA, 1989; PhD, 1995). His PhD thesis dealt with inequality and gender in Italian prehistory, combining evidence of human skeletons, archaeology and prehistoric art. After a brief post-doc at Southern Illinois University (1995-6), he taught at the University of Southampton for five years (1996-2001). Since 2001, he has been teaching at Cambridge, becoming Professor in 2015. He became a fellow of Peterhouse in 2015.
John has run major projects on southern Italian archaeology, the biographies of ordinary people in medieval Cambridge, and the theoretical history of the human body. Besides these topics, he is interested in material culture theory, burial taphonomy and ritual, and prehistoric art. As this suggests, he specialises in being a generalist.