Welcoming our MSc cohort! Great to meet so many new faces, and many of our returning undergraduates too, now joining us for our Archaeology, Arch of the North, Osteoarch, Bioarch, Biomols and Cultural Heritage programmes 🧑‍🎓

We are over the moon! Our archaeology department at the University of Aberdeen ranked no. 1 in the UK for Archaeology and Forensic Sciences in The Times Good University Guide 2026.

Many thanks to our wonderful students, our staff, and our wider archaeology community here in the bonnie north-east!

Our field season at the historic Old Kinord settlement is a wrap! The #archaeology of standing buildings is like an iceberg! The simple, surface story gives way to complex biographies that hint at changes in use, and how dwellings were maintained, altered and abandoned🪏

Ever wondered what life was like at the end of the Ice Age? What did people eat? How did they make tools? Come and meet the PALaEoScot team at Explorathon on Sept 14th 11am-4pm at UoA’s King’s College in Old Aberdeen and meet our living prehistorians at their camp! Link below ⬇️

Drs Jeff Oliver and Michael Stratigos are running our historical archaeology field school out at Loch Kinord - revealing secrets of past Scottish farming practices and rural life just under the surface!

Day Three is excursion day at the SEAA 2025 conference here in Aberdeen and our delegates have been touring north-east Scotland’s beautiful and bountiful archaeology. From stone circles to Pictish forts!

Day two of the SEAA 2025 conference in Aberdeen is off to a flying (and rather metallurgic) start! Now for refuelling in beautiful Elphinstone Hall 😋

Yesterday saw a wonderful first day at the SEAA conference which we have the privellge of hosting this year. Fantastic talks, wonderful food, restorative chats, and a warm welcome at the Town House by the Lord Provost!

Aberdeen's Jeff Oliver along with a team from Sheffield, Eryri National Park with local volunteers recently surveyed and excavated the remains of post-medieval cottages & their landscape. This research helps us to understand more about the lives of the rural poor & landless, less visible in history.

Congratulations to our newest PhD, Dr Ellie Graham. For her thesis, Ellie tracked erosion and damage to vulnerable coastal sites using drone technology - well done Dr Graham! #climatechange #archaeology #scotland supported by @ukri.org @quadratdtp.bsky.social

Jeff Oliver and collaborators from the University of Sheffield, Eryri National Park and the local community were up a mountainside in Gwynedd, Wales, surveying the abandoned farmsteads of settlers, encroachers and other landless folk who once called these parts home.

Surveying at the spectacular Cullykhan fort, Pennan, Aberdeenshire. Using our Sensys gradiometer cart for student projects. Cullykhan was dug by Colvin Greig and team in the 1960s and 70s, the fort has been shown to have Late Bronze Age, Iron Age, Pictish, Medieval and 18th century phases of use.

Today our 3d year students are presenting their dissertation research topics - with much excitement, anything from witches to hillforts to sheep :)

This week our super Cultural Heritage MSc students led us on a cheekily-titled ‘Shitty Heritage Walk’. Together we explored 19th C public health & urban reform, & were also reminded that the treatment of waste & waste workers reveals a great deal about who we are, then & now💩🚮

Today our students in the MSc Cultural Heritage took their spring project ‘Filth and Fury in 19th c Aberdeen’ on the road. Michael Cairns from Celsius Plumbing gave a tour of Edinburgh’s smelly history - from murky reservoirs, wooden drainage pipes, public wells and Victorian innovations.