Course Catalogue

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This module provides an overview of how societies responded to climatic and environmental changes in the past and introduce students to the principles of environmental change; the techniques used to reconstruct past environments, including chronological uncertainty and to critically consider how we link climate and environmental change during the Quaternary with periods and activities of archaeological interest. The course will use problem-based approaches: students will be taught and gain confidence in handling and analysing relevant datasets that they will then interpret in the form of reports. They will focus on discussing the nature and significance of archaeological datasets and critically evaluate cause and effect when linking archaeology and environmental change.

6x1hr seminars, 14x1hr workshops over 10 weeks as scheduled in MyCampus and may not run every year. This module will be co-taught with an Honours class of the same name. Workshops should be timetabled together, but seminars should be scheduled separately.

Standard entry to Masters at College level.

People in a Changing World: ARCH4076

None

Science Critique (1500 words) 30% 

Report 1 (1500 words) (30%), with data handling and numerical analysis to be done by the class in workshops and personal report write up; 

Report 2 (2500 words) (40%), with data handling and numerical analysis to be done by individual students and written up as individuals.

Each assignment will be incremental and allow the students to apply what they have learnt in each prior assignment and will be designed to test their abilities to meet the module's intended learning outcomes.

This course aims to:

■ Understand the principles of climate and environmental change over the course of the Quaternary, including the processes that drive climate and anthropogenic change

■ Critically evaluate the techniques we use to reconstruct past environments, including understanding chronological uncertainty

■ Understand how we link climate and environmental change during the Quaternary with periods, events and activities of archaeological interest and gain an understanding of the main debates of interest

■ Advance numeracy skills, through the practice of using simple to more complex data analytical methods for analysing environmental and archaeological records and displaying these in a variety of platforms to a high standard

■ Familiarise students with using online databases for asking powerful archaeological research questions around environmental change

Develop report-writing skills to a high standard

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Evaluate and utilise the diverse range of proxy evidence and approaches that palaeo environmentalists use for interpreting the archaeological and long-term record, and their interpretational challenges;

■ Demonstrate understanding and evaluation of the main ways in which organisms, ecosystems and landscapes behave in response to anthropogenic, ecological and climate changes over the Quaternary period; and the main processes of environmental change;

■ Critically evaluate how environmental changes impacted past societies and how we link environmental and archaeological records within a chronological framework;

■ Analyse and compare appropriate scientific datasets, choosing relevant analytical tools and approaches and assess the reliability and validity of these; 

Present results of analyses as professionally produced written reports;

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.