Course Essentials
Welcome to the Foundation Year of your Archaeology BA. This is the beginning of your exciting four-year degree journey and over the next 12 months you will learn the core skills that will allow you to confidently begin the main Archaeology degree next year. I’m Dr Jay Ingate, the Course Director of the Archaeology BA, and together with the course team I look forward to helping you take your first steps in Higher Education, starting this September!
Jay Ingate
Course Director
Your Teaching Timetable
Teaching for your course will begin w.c 21 September 2026.
To help you plan your first few weeks, you can view an overview of the teaching activities for your course.
View your first semester teaching timetable.
On a mobile device, click the arrow next to “Search” at the top right of the page to view your timetable.
If your course is taught in groups, the overview will show activities for all groups. You will only need to attend sessions for your allocated group.
Once teaching begins, your individual timetable and group allocation will be available in MyTimetable provided you have completed online registration and created your computing account.
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Your Semester 1 Modules |
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The Big Picture* |
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The Fearless Learner |
*All Foundation Year students take The Big Picture during Semester 1. The module includes shared lectures and smaller seminar and pastoral groups.
Seminar groups are arranged broadly by subject area so that discussions, examples, and activities can connect to your intended degree course.
The Unitimetables page shows an overview of all scheduled teaching for the module. You will not be expected to attend every seminar shown there.
Your confirmed lecture, seminar, and pastoral group will be available in MyTimetable once course registration and group allocations have been completed.
Key dates
Academic Calendar: Semesters
View key dates for this Academic Calendar for 2026-27 including when teaching starts and finishes and when you break for holidays.
Welcome
As a Foundation Year student, you will initially be part of a much wider student community, taking modules alongside students from a range of different subjects. Your welcome week will reflect this, with three key official events.
Firstly, you will have an overall welcome event for all Foundation Year students at the University who are starting their courses in September. Next, you will be able to attend a smaller introduction for students taking closely aligned courses in the humanities and creative arts. And finally, you will also be invited along to our Archaeology pub visit, where all year-groups on our Archaeology degree come along and socialise!
Getting started
We know that Foundation Year students come from a variety of different learning backgrounds.
As such, this first year is an essential step in you acclimatising to university study, rather than diving straight into high level subject specific content.
You should expect your modules to be broad in scope and to share the classroom with a variety of students and lecturers from different subjects.
As the year progresses, you will have more Archaeology-centred sessions, but the main aim of this year is ensuring you are confident and capable of stepping up to the degree-proper next September.
In the first term, you will be taking two core modules:
The first is the The Big Picture which has been designed to show how university differs from school and workplace training, and how your subject and other ones, too, connect to real issues. The aim is disciplined curiosity and growing confidence across university disciplines. The lectures will be event-style sessions, with large numbers of students attending, and the seminars will be smaller-scale subject clusters to create a forum for relevant discussion.
The second module is The Fearless Learner where students will be helped to settle into university study and to understand what academic work looks like in their subject area. Early sessions will focus on confidence, curiosity and the idea that not-knowing is a normal and productive part of learning. Students will begin to think about what makes a strong answer in different disciplines, using simple frameworks such as standards, evidence, reasoning and limits, before applying these ideas in seminars and group activities.
As mentioned above, in the second term you should expect more Archaeology specific content, with our course team contributing to teaching on The Power of Arts, Humanities & Education and Canterbury in the World.
Your Must Do Tasks
Once you have been invited to register for your course, there are some key tasks you'll need to complete to make sure you are ready to become a CCCU student.
Registration invitations are sent towards the end of August. We'll send yours to the email address you used when you applied, so please check this inbox regularly to make sure you don't miss any important information.
Pre-course reading
Many of your assignments on the Foundation year will be broad and not require specialist archaeological literature. However, if you want to start exposing yourself to content in the subject area, we recommend any of these introductory books:
Greene, K. and Moore, T. (2010) Archaeology: An Introduction. Routledge.
Hunter, J. and Ralston, I. (eds) (2009) The Archaeology of Britain. Routledge.
Renfrew, C. and Bahn, P. (2020) Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice. Thames and Hudson.
We also recommend having a look at the following websites for new discoveries, stories and events in the world of archaeology:
International student success programme
International students: don't miss out! Make sure you register for our international student success programme which provides practical advice on preparing to live and study in the UK.
Contact details
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