For more information about the discipline of and careers in Anthropology, go to the website for the American Anthropological Association. For those interested in archaeology specifically, go to the website for the Society for American Archaeology. Skip to Content Accessible Browsing Information. Search Anthropology Go.
Archaeologists study human culture by analyzing the objects people have made. They carefully remove from the ground such things as pottery and tools, and they map the locations of houses, trash pits, and burials in order to learn about the daily lives of a people. Archaeologists collect the remains of plants, animals, and soils from the places where people have lived in order to understand how people used and changed their natural environments. The time range for archaeological research begins with the earliest human ancestors millions of years ago and extends all the way up to the present day.
Like other areas of anthropology, archaeologists are concerned with explaining differences and similarities in human societies across space and time. Biological anthropologists seek to understand how humans adapt to different environments, what causes disease and early death, and how humans evolved from other animals. To do this, they study humans living and dead , other primates such as monkeys and apes, and human ancestors fossils.
They are also interested in how biology and culture work together to shape our lives. They are interested in explaining the similarities and differences that are found among humans across the world. Through this work, biological anthropologists have shown that, while humans do vary in their biology and behavior, they are more similar to one another than different. Sociocultural anthropologists explore how people in different places live and understand the world around them.
They want to know what people think is important and the rules they make about how they should interact with one another. Even within one country or society, people may disagree about how they should speak, dress, eat, or treat others.
Anthropologists want to listen to all voices and viewpoints in order to understand how societies vary and what they have in common. Sociocultural anthropologists often find that the best way to learn about diverse peoples and cultures is to spend time living among them. They try to understand the perspectives, practices, and social organization of other groups whose values and lifeways may be very different from their own.
The knowledge they gain can enrich human understanding on a broader level. Linguistic anthropologists study the many ways people communicate across the globe. They are interested in how language is linked to how we see the world and how we relate to each other.
This can mean looking at how language works in all its different forms, and how it changes over time. It also means looking at what we believe about language and communication, and how we use language in our lives.
This includes the ways we use language to build and share meaning, to form or change identities, and to make or change relations of power. For linguistic anthropologists, language and communication are keys to how we make society and culture. Where were people going? Did people talk?
What did they say? What were people doing? Did anything happen that seemed unusual, ordinary, or interesting to you? Write down any thoughts, self-reflections, and reactions you have during your two hours of fieldwork. At the end of your observation period, type up your fieldnotes, including your personal thoughts labeling them as such to separate them from your more descriptive notes.
Then write a reflective response about your experience that answers this question: how is riding a bus about more than transportation? In some assignments, you might be asked to evaluate the claims different researchers have made about the emergence and effects of particular human phenomena, such as the advantages of bipedalism, the origins of agriculture, or the appearance of human language.
To complete these assignments, you must understand and evaluate the claims being made by the authors of the sources you are reading, as well as the fossil or material evidence used to support those claims. Fossil evidence might include things like carbon dated bone remains; material evidence might include things like stone tools or pottery shards. You will usually learn about these kinds of evidence by reviewing scholarly studies, course readings, and photographs, rather than by studying fossils and artifacts directly.
The emergence of bipedalism the ability to walk on two feet is considered one of the most important adaptive shifts in the evolution of the human species, but its origins in space and time are debated. Compare the supporting points such as fossil evidence and experimental data that each author uses to support his or her claims. Based on your examination of the claims and the supporting data being used, construct an argument for why you think bipedal locomotion emerged where and when it did.
Writing an essay in anthropology is very similar to writing an argumentative essay in other disciplines. In most cases, the only difference is in the kind of evidence you use to support your argument. In an English essay, you might use textual evidence from novels or literary theory to support your claims; in an anthropology essay, you will most often be using textual evidence from ethnographies, artifactual evidence, or other support from anthropological theories to make your arguments.
Many introductory anthropology courses involve reading and evaluating a particular kind of text called an ethnography. To understand and assess ethnographies, you will need to know what counts as ethnographic data or evidence. So what kinds of things might be used as evidence or data in an ethnography or in your discussion of an ethnography someone else has written?
Here are a few of the most common:. A fact or observation becomes evidence when it is clearly connected to an argument in order to support that argument. It is your job to help your reader understand the connection you are making: you must clearly explain why statements x, y, and z are evidence for a particular claim and why they are important to your overall claim or position.
In anthropology, as in other fields of study, it is very important that you cite the sources that you use to form and articulate your ideas.
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