The departments listed below place different emphases in their teaching throughout this interdisciplinary range, and, although there are accepted base-lines which most consider they must present, it is worth the prospective candidate making enquiries to discover the emphases of the departments they are considering applying to. Joint and combined degrees will normally cover the majority of these components, although in less detail. Most departments elect to teach this foundation as core or compulsory courses throughout the 3 or 4 years of the undergraduate degree. However, choice is being increasingly offered by means of optional components. These, perfectly properly, tend to reflect lecturers' spheres of research interest and expertise.
Details are available in department prospectuses, or at department open days.
The main trends in archaeology teaching may be characterised under four principal headings, although to do so necessarily involves overplaying distinctions between them. It is closely related to aspects of historical study in its empirical use of textual evidence, combining material evidence with conventional written sources to create a common sense narrative of events, economies, social organisation and lifestyles. In this style of teaching, current philosophical and theoretical debates and structures are used much more explicitly as a guide to our understanding of the past today. As such, teaching is quite firmly rooted in sociological and anthropological theory, and is largely thematic, identifying issues, key ideas and types of society as agendas for study. Thus themes such as monumentality, gender, or power relations, which might be taught across the boundaries of time or cultural space, are prominent.