Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Archaeology

at University of Otago

The Bachelor of Arts (BA) is Otago's most flexible undergraduate degree programme, enabling students to study from a selection of more than 40 arts and social science subjects, as well as papers offered elsewhere in the University. Academic breadth is complemented by in-depth knowledge gained through majoring in one or two subjects with the option of minors in one or two others.

Archaeology seeks to understand earlier human communities through the study of material evidence from the past. This evidence can include assemblages of portable artefacts such as stone tools, larger monumental structures like Mayan temples, and entire humanmodified landscapes. Archaeologists generate data through fieldwork and excavation, and use both laboratory science and interpretive theory to study that data. Archaeology is essentially a humanities discipline, since it studies human societies and their history, but it draws on a range of other fields, particularly from the sciences.