Anthropology - Archaeology, Culture, Evolution

anthropology

Table of Contents

Introduction
Overview
History of anthropology
- Fieldwork
- Social and cultural anthropology
- American anthropology since the 1950s
- European anthropology since the 1950s
The major branches of anthropology
- Cultural anthropology
  - American cultural anthropology
  - French theoretical contributions
  - The configurational approach
  - Cultural change and adaptation
  - Culture and the humanities
- Social anthropology
- Linguistic anthropology
- Psychological anthropology
- Archaeology
- Physical anthropology
  - Paleoanthropology
  - Primatology
  - Genetics
  - Human ecology
  - Bioarchaeology
  - Growth and development
  - Anthropometry
  - Forensics
World anthropology
- Anthropology in Africa
- Anthropology in Asia
- Anthropology in Europe
- Anthropology in Latin America
Special fields of anthropology
- The anthropological study of religion
- Museum-based study
- The anthropological study of education
- The study of ethnicity, minority groups, and identity
- Urban anthropology
- National and transnational studies
- The study of gender
- Political and legal anthropology
- Medical anthropology
- The anthropology of food, nutrition, and agriculture
- Environmental and ecological studies in anthropology
- Development anthropology
- Applied anthropology
- Visual anthropology
- Ethnomusicology

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Archaeology is fundamentally a historical science, one that encompasses the general objectives of reconstructing, interpreting, and understanding past human societies. Isaiah Berlin’s perceptive comments on the inherent difficulties in practicing “scientific history” are particularly apropos for archaeology. Practitioners of archaeology find themselves allied (often simultaneously) with practitioners of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities in the project of writing history. In the United States archaeology developed within the discipline of anthropology as a social science, contributing an explicitly historical dimension to anthropological inquiry. In Europe archaeology is more closely allied with humanistic pursuits such as classics, philology, and art ...(100 of 23980 words)

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