The Laboratory of Archaeology (LOA) is an autonomous research and teaching unit of the Department of Anthropology and was created by Dr. Charles Borden in 1949. Throughout the 1950s, LOA was located in the basement of the Mathematics Building. Initially, LOA concentrated on teaching the archaeology of B.C. and the Old World to undergraduate and graduate students at the M.A. level. By the 1960s, LOA occupied extra storage space in the UBC Power House.
The organization of collections and records into systematic storage began in 1965 when Miss Moira Irvine became the first Academic Research Assistant.
During the 1970s, LOA acquired added laboratory and storage space in Brock Hall and the Department of Metallurgy. Since 1977 the Laboratory has occupied space in both the Anthropology & Sociology Building (ANSO) and the Museum of Anthropology (MOA). The ANSO building houses faculty offices and research areas, GIS laboratory, archaeological soil and midden samples, image collections, a wet chemistry lab in ZooMS (collagen peptide mass fingerprinting). and field gear. LOA facilities located in the Museum (MOA) accommodate collections storage, the Borden Research Room, the LOA Archives, the ADαPT Facility for the extraction and analysis of ancient DNA (aDNA) and proteins, and faculty research bays for analysis of collections. Collections include belongings (artifacts), field documentation, faunal comparative collection, and botanical comparative collection.

In 2011, the LOA archival collection was re-housed in the current LOA archives location (room 221A at MOA)

For more about the Laboratory of Archaeology please visit our website at: https://loa.arts.ubc.ca/