Among all the liberal arts disciplines, anthropology is unique in its goal of bridging the humanities, natural and social sciences, and in its long view of human time. Topics of study range from primate morphology and evolution, to brain development and cognition, early, past and present social and political formations, cultural practices and culture change, hermeneutics and textuality, representation and interpretation. Cultural anthropology studies living and historical societies.
Archaeology attempts to understand prehistory through the study of artifacts.
Linguistic anthropology studies cross-cultural variation in language structure and use. Physical anthropology focuses on the biology and evolution of the species Homo sapiens . Although we frequently invite visiting professors to offer courses in regional archaeology and archaeological theory, the majority of our courses are in cultural anthropology and linguistics, reflecting the specialization of our two full-time faculty. Our upper level courses are coded at the 200 and 300 levels. So, for example, courses on Native North American, MesoAmerican, Chinese, and Tibeto-Burman peoples are coded at the 200 level, while courses on kinship, social movements, linguistics, ethnicity, religion, etc., are coded at the 300 level.