History

The Department of Anthropology was established at the University of Minnesota in 1918 under the direction of Albert E. Jenks, when the Department of Sociology and Anthropology was split into independent programs. Jenks exemplified the discipline of the day in that he was not aligned with one subfield, rather he pursued research through ethnographic, archaeological, and physical (human anatomical) methods. Early in his career he carried out ethnological research in the Philippines and in northern Minnesota; the latter included a collaboration with Aleš Hrdlička to determine the “racial purity” of White Earth Ojibwe tribal members. Beginning in 1928, Jenks pursued archaeology, excavating and collecting from New Mexico, North Africa, and Europe before turning his attention for funding reasons to Minnesota. While Jenks is sometimes credited for early contributions to the discipline of anthropology, his research pursuits were tremendously damaging to American Indian people in particular. The department today still works to redress Jenks’s harmful legacies.

The department remained small in its first several decades. Jenks was joined by Wilson Wallis, who was an ethnographer of Mi’kmaq and Dakota people in Canada. Upon Jenks’s retirement in 1938, Lloyd Wilford, who had worked with Jenks and developed an extensive Minnesota archaeology program, was brought on as a faculty member.   Robert Spencer, who was widely known and highly regarded for his work among the Inuit and other peoples, came to Minnesota in the 1940s. In 1954 Professor E. Adamson Hoebel joined the department and subsequently served as chair until his retirement in 1969. In addition to being a leader in the anthropology of law and in the profession at large, Hoebel was one of the first regents' professors at the University.

Replacing Lloyd Wilford in 1958, Elden Johnson continued the expansion of academic anthropology from the classroom to the community by developing the cultural resource management system in the state. 

The department expanded its faculty and started graduate training in anthropology in the 1960s into the 1970s. Both Hoebel and Spencer emphasized a four-field approach to anthropology and stressed the importance of training in all four subfields for each student: social and cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. This four-field influence is still present in our departmental community today, and our faculty pursue interdisciplinary research and training across a wide variety of fields. Currently, we have a total of 17 faculty whose expertise span all four fields.