All students are required to write a thesis of not more than 15,000 words in their final year on either an archaeological or anthropological topic. 

Some of the subjects students have worked on in the past are:

• Powerful pens and cameras that lie
• The collapse of the Mycenaean palace system in the Late Bronze Age Aegean
• Killing cousins: An analysis of the transformation of apes from the status of sacred object to economic commodity in Equatorial Africa
• Imaginary Oxford: How is the city landscape experienced by residents, students and visitors? How does this differential experience affect familiarity with and preference for different parts of Oxford?
• Ancient Maya cave mortuary practice: A reinterpretation using isotopic evidence from west-central Belize and Naj Turnich, Guatemala
• Colonial regrets in Tasmania
• The Pompeiian house as a means to other worlds
• On the ecological niche of Pilo-Pleistocene hominids
• Anthropological images in the museum space: Three critical case studies
• Techological analysis of Late Middle Palaeolithic industrics from Gorham's Cave, Gilbraltar