General Examination & Qualifying Paper - Archaeology

A broad, comparative approach to graduate education is one of the most distinctive and valued attributes of the Archaeology Program of Harvard’s Department of Anthropology. To preserve this signature feature of the program while at the same time promoting publication of work early in a student’s graduate career, the Archaeology PhD program includes three-part General Examination consisting of a written examination, an oral examination, and a Qualifying Paper.  

The Written & Oral Examinations

The  written portion of the General Examination is “closed book” and conducted over an agreed-upon period of time during one working day, with that time being flexible depending on the particular circumstances of each student.  The  one-hour oral examination for each student is ordinarily scheduled to take place one week after the written General Examination and is attended by all archaeology faculty in residence. Students are strongly encouraged to review the content of their written exam and to be prepared to answer questions related to that exam in addition to any other questions that the faculty may ask.  

Both the written and oral portions of the General Examination normally take place in January before the beginning of the spring semester. In preparation for the exam, students are strongly encouraged to review the past 15 years of General Examinations given by the program, although starting in 2023 the General Exam questions will be explicitly related to content covered in courses taken by the student.

The primary focus of the General Examination essay questions will be broad and comparative. These questions will draw explicitly on two of the four required courses that incoming students take during their first three semesters of course work: Anthropology 2070: Archaeological Theory; Anthropology 2250: Contemporary Issues in Archaeology; as well as material covered in other courses taken by the student.  Theory and epistemology will be topics for essays in the General Examination as will questions comparing aspects of archaeology of societies from different parts of the world and different time periods.  Students are expected to tie together the content of courses and demonstrate a broad and critical understanding of the core issues in archaeology. 

The Qualifying Paper

 A Qualifying Paper is required to be submitted before the end of the fourth semester of classes. This paper is intended to evaluate student writing abilities prior to their focusing on dissertation research, with the goal of giving our students the opportunity to hone their writing skills to a professional level. The topic of the Qualifying Paper will be developed by the student in consultation with the student’s pre-prospectus Advisory Committee.  That committee will generally be composed of the three members of the faculty who were assigned to the student at the beginning of the first semester. 

In those cases where a student has already completed a Master’s thesis or published a peer-reviewed paper in a journal, that student ordinarily will be allowed to submit that work in fulfillment of the Qualifying Paper requirement so long as the student is the sole author and submits all of the peer reviews along with the thesis/published paper. An exception may be made for cases in which additional authors are listed on the paper as a courtesy. 

The entire Archaeology faculty will review the Qualifying Paper upon submission. If changes are required after the faculty review, they are to be submitted before the summer’s end to the pre-prospectus Advisory Committee. Ordinarily the “outside member” of that three-person committee will take charge of evaluating the consensus as to whether the work “passes” as a qualifying paper. If a resubmission is required, this three-person committee will consider and evaluate the resubmission, as above.