Students interested in working for Honors need to select a departmental professor willing to sponsor their Honors project.  This may be as early as the sophomore year; ideally during the junior year; and in rare cases, as late as first semester of the senior year.  Students should fill out the Archaeology Honors Program registration form and return it to the program coordinator. 
Specific questions about eligibility or requirements should be addressed to the Departmental Honors Coordinator (Professor David L. Browman, McMillan 118, or extension 5-5231). 

Time Schedule 
Once the sponsoring faculty advisor and the student have agreed upon an Honors topic, the student must inform the Departmental Honors Coordinator.  Individual departmental courses in each member department, such as Archaeology 492 and Archaeology 493, are available to allow the student to secure appropriate credit for the extra research involved in the Honors thesis. 

For students graduating in May: 

The Honors Coordinator must be informed by January of the thesis title and your intention to defend the thesis that semester in order to properly register you as an Honors candidate with the University.  A defendable draft of the thesis must be completed no later than March 5.  A three-member examining committee whose members are selected by the sponsoring advisor and the Honors Coordinator evaluates the Honors thesis.  This three-member committee decides on quality, exams, all other requirements, and makes its recommendations to the Department no later than March 20 on the level of Honors to be awarded.  The final copy, with all changes required by the committee, is due April 15. 

For students graduating in December: 

The same format applied but with dates changed to September 15, November 10 and December 10. 

Thesis Format and Length 
As a rough guide, honors theses typically consist of about 60 pages of text.  The thesis must use the university's official format for Ph.D. theses, available from the College of Arts and Sciences.  The student is required to supply the Department with a final copy of the thesis to be filed in the departmental library.  This copy must be spiral bound with a clear plastic cover.  The thesis should follow standard archaeological bibliographic and citation techniques appropriate for the relevant subdiscipline.  It is customary to provide the thesis advisor (and often committee members) with final copies of the thesis. 
 

There are also several practical benefits to doing an honors thesis: 
1) If you are potentially interested in going on to graduate school, this experience helps you to evaluate whether or not you are really interested in research. 
2) This experience also enables faculty members to get to know you well, and to make any recommendations that they may write much more substantive. 
3)   You receive university recognition for this work in the form of university honors. 
4)   Sometimes undergraduate honors research can be published. 

Considerations 
Doing an honors thesis is very demanding academically and takes a great deal of time and effort.  Students find that not only does doing the research take time, but writing the research up, and even the mechanics of making proper citations, putting together extensive bibliographies, and creating and referencing figures and tables is much more time consuming than they had ever imagined.  Occasionally, students are unable to complete the thesis in time for the spring deadline.  As the program guidelines suggest, it is best to start on honors research in you sophomore or junior year. 

There are several other factors you should consider when weighing the advantages and disadvantages of honors research: 
1) Although faculty will help you as much as they can, you will have to learn to work independently with no cohort support. 
2) The fact that you are doing an honor thesis may not help with applications for graduate school because the final results of your work towards an honors thesis work are not known until after applications for graduate school are due.
3) Sometimes students find that by spring of their Senior year, their GPA no longer qualifies them for university honors.  (In this case, however, if the research is outstanding, they will be considered for the Department of Archaeology award for research.) 

Mechanics

Choosing a Topic
It is important to work in an area in which you are especially interested and with which you have a solid academic groundwork, i.e., on which you have upper level coursework, written a paper, or done some preliminary research in class. Before agreeing to supervise honors theses, faculty will generally expect you to have taken upper level courses that relate to your topic. Past honors theses are on file in the Anthropology and Art History departmental libraries. These are useful for ideas about topics as well as for many aspects of working on theses such as methods, length, and format. You will need to discuss potential thesis topics and the data that may be available to address them with faculty before they agree to advise an honors thesis.

Research Method
Methods will vary greatly with subject and should be discussed in detail with your advisor. 

Human Subjects Research Review

Students with research involving human subjects must obtain approval from the Washington University “Hilltop Human Subjects Committee” before beginning their research.  Guidelines and downloadable forms are available on the HHSC website at: http://hhsc.wustl.edu .  These will require a description of the research project, plans for obtaining consent, etc.  Most students will qualify for “exempt status”.  The HHSC meets once a month to review applications; meeting dates are on the website.

Access to Laboratory Facilities
Those of you who are doing laboratory-based theses will need to obtain special permission for extra access hours to laboratory facilities. You will need to discuss this with your advisor and other professors ahead of time.

Expenses
Consider applying for research funds from the W.U. Undergraduate Research scholarship competition, or other research and travel grants listed at the Arts and Sciences web site (and on p. 17 of this handbook).  These are mainly limited to projects in the junior and senior years.  If you enroll for academic credit for your honors research, allocate the money usually spent for text books and other class expenses for your research.  We are always looking for funding outlets to assist in student research, so please let us know if you locate one we have not yet identified.