Yale’s Council on Archaeological Studies believes that archaeology is a mingling of science, theory, and comparative prehistories and histories, and that the best way to teach archaeology is by exposing our students to as many different research problems, fieldwork styles, and prehistoric regions as possible.
Our students are exposed to the research styles of our contributing departments — Anthropology, Classics and Classical Civilizations, Geology and Geophysics, History, History of Art, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (including Egyptology), Religious Studies, and the Yale University Art Gallery and Peabody Museum of Natural History, and at the same time receive a solid grounding in theory and analytical sciences common to all. We are fortunate to attract some of the brightest minds in the future of the field yet maintain an atmosphere wherein students receive personal attention from professors.
Graduate Programs
Master’s Degree The Master’s Program in Archaeological Studies aims to give students the coursework needed for the following: teaching in community colleges and secondary schools; providing the opportunity for teachers, curators, and administrators to refresh themselves on recent developments in archaeology; facilitating career advancement in cultural resource management; and providing the academic background needed for admission to a Ph.D. program. For more information on the Graduate Archaeological Studies program, click here.
PH.D. Programs The Department of Anthropology offers a Ph.D. program with various subfields including archaeology, sociocultural anthropology, and biological anthropology. The subfield Archaeology focuses on ritual complexes and writing, ceramic analysis, warfare, ancient civilizations, origins of agriculture, and museum studies. For more information on the subfield Archaeology Ph.D. Program, click here.
Undergraduate Program
Undergraduates have the opportunity to choose Archaeological Studies as their major. Our majors come with the different orientations of our contributing departments and are required to take a variety of courses in various subgroups, which allows for exceptional flexibility within the major. Archaeological Studies majors understand that archaeology is the science of writing the deep-time history of all peoples of the world. While electing courses from any of our departments, all majors receive a uniform foundation in theory, current laboratory methods, and all spend a summer of field method training. It is not at all uncommon to find one of our Classics-oriented majors taking geophysical dating samples at an early first millennium BCE site in Italy. For more information on the Undergraduate Archaeological Studies program, click here.