Anthropology is the systematic study of humanity, with the goal of understanding our evolutionary origins, our distinctiveness as a species, and the great diversity in our forms of social existence across the world and through time.
Anthropology is divided into four subfields.
Sociocultural anthropologists interpret the content of particular cultures, explain variation among cultures, and study processes of cultural change and social transformation. Linguistic anthropologists study languages and other aspects of human communication. This work may be contemporary, or it may involve reconstructing the history of a language no longer spoken. Davis linguistic anthropologists study language as it is used to create and maintain gender and ethnic identities, the effects of linguistic diversity on communication between groups, the connections between language and worldview, and the origins and use of non-alphabetic writing systems of the world. Archaeologists study the material remains of present and past cultural systems to understand the technical, social, and political organization of those systems and the larger culture evolutionary process that stand behind them.