Research dissertation
You will undertake a research project and produce a dissertation which is submitted on an assigned date in mid-August.
The final element of the programme is a 15,000 word dissertation (60 credits), which students complete during the summer months. This is an independent, primary source-based research project supervised by one or more members of academic staff. Students have considerable freedom to define their own dissertation project — so long as it is a feasible project that one or more staff members have the expertise to supervise.
Example dissertation topics
Past dissertation topics have included:
-
An Experimental Investigation of Sharp Force Skeletal Trauma with Replica Bronze Age Weapons.
- Prisoners versus privileged: A test of the Coimbra method on two Post-Medieval collections in order to reconstruct past social status and lifestyle habits.
- The Thames beater: an analysis of blunt force trauma and interpersonal violence in the early British Neolithic.
- A biocultural approach to interpreting the experience of congenitally impaired individuals from Medieval London.
- Human sacrifice in the royal tombs from the Shang Dynasty.
- A bioarchaeological study of the relationship between health and socio-economic status in a Classical Greek and Hellenistic skeletal collection from ancient Messembria (Nessebar), Bulgaria.