About us

The Centre for Archaeology, Technology and Cultural Heritage brings together researchers from seven different Schools and Departments across the University, making it a truly multi-disciplinary Research Centre.

Social Anthropology is a forward-looking and diverse, Humanities-based department within the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. It has a strong international reputation and its staff have a number of academic specialisations, backed up by field work conducted across the globe.

The School of Art History is one of the top five places in the UK to study the history of art, according to the Guardian, and Independent newspapers and The Complete University Guide (2013). The School is lively, friendly and supportive, with 24 staff (19 academics and 5 support staff) and over 500 students each year.

The School of Classics is the largest in Scotland to specialize in Ancient History with a total number of students well in excess of a hundred every year. The School offers a broad range of modules that provides coverage not only of the more central periods of Ancient History, but also of less familiar though no less important periods, such as the Hellenistic Age or the Later Roman Empire.

The School of Computer Science is a centre of excellence for computer science teaching and research, with staff and students from Scotland and all parts of the world. The School is active in research in the fundamentals of computer science, networking and distributed systems, artificial intelligence, human computer interaction, and software systems engineering.

The mission of the School of Geography and Geosciences is to promote world class teaching and research across a broad spectrum of Geography and Geosciences. The Department of Geography & Sustainable Development is a leading centre for geographical scholarship. It integrates the study of the earth system with its landscapes, peoples, places and environments. The Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences is part of a rich and ongoing tradition of research aimed at understanding our planet, with connections back to the earliest beginnings of the science in the 17th and 18th Centuries.

The School of History has one of the finest faculty and diverse teaching programmes of any School of History in the English speaking world. Over forty full time members of staff research and teach on European, American and Asian history from the dawn of the Middle Ages to the present day.

The University has been collecting books and manuscripts, and its own archives, for its entire six centuries, and the photographic collections have been developed since the birth of photography around 1840. The Library Special Collections, with almost 20 permanent posts, was designated a Division of the University Library in 2013. It curates and makes accessible over 17 linear kilometres of material, which is available for use in teaching and research across all disciplines.

The Museum Collections Unit  manages the University’s collections of over 113,000 artefacts and specimens, acquired since its foundation between 1410 and 1414 as the first university in Scotland. Areas represented include fine and applied art, furniture, textiles, numismatics, archaeology, historic scientific instruments, geology, zoology, psychology, chemistry, anatomy and pathology and ethnography. The collections are displayed in three free public Accredited Museums within the University: MUSA (The Museum of the University of St Andrews), the  Gateway Galleries (temporary exhibitions) and the Bell Pettigrew Museum (natural history). Stored collections can be examined by appointment in the MUSA Collections Centre.