Anthropology Fall 2026 Courses

ANTH 1001 - Human Evolution    

Instructors: Gilbert Tostevin & Michelle Brown

Course Description: What does it mean to be human? This question, central to the discipline of anthropology, has provided inspiration to scientists, philosophers, and artists for many centuries. In this course, we will begin to answer this question using the scientific study of the biological and cultural evolution of the human lineage. The first half of the term will introduce you to basic concepts in evolutionary theory: natural selection, genetics, behavioral ecology, and comparative anatomy. Using these tools, we will then spend the rest of the semester reconstructing the ecology, diet, anatomy, and behavior of our early ancestors, from the first apes to walk on two legs to the modern humans that conquered the globe. Weekly readings and lectures will provide the theoretical framework for understanding the evolutionary biology of Homo sapiens; laboratory sections will give you an opportunity to apply these theories and evaluate the fossil evidence for yourself. Through this combined approach, we will tackle such important questions as: What features define the human lineage? In what ecological setting did our ancestors become bipedal? What role did global climate change play in our evolution? How did tool use and cultural evolution feedback into our biological evolution? When and where did modern humans originate and what behaviors characterized this emergence? Why were there many species of humans in the past but only one today? Why is it important for the future of humanity for the average citizen to understand the principles of evolution as applied to the human animal? Upon completion of this course, you will have a broad knowledge of the role biological anthropology plays within the discipline of anthropology. More importantly, however, you will acquire a better understanding of the biological heritage of our species and our place among other forms of life on our planet.

Satisfies the Biological Sciences Liberal Education Requirement"

ANTH 1003W Online - Understanding Cultures    

Instructor: Erin Durban    

Course Description: This course is an introduction to culture and the making of humanity, past and present. What is culture, and what are the everyday practices, values, beliefs, and resources that go into the making of the human? We will ask questions such as the following: What makes jokes funny? How do identities and unequal social orders get made and reproduced? How can we understand human cultural variation and diversity? Why is there so much socio-economic inequality in the contemporary world, and how can we make sense of it to help address massive social problems and challenges?

This course is also an introduction to what it means to ""to think like an anthropologist""—which entails challenging our own assumptions and cultural preconceptions about ourselves, other people, and the world around us. What does it mean to understand ""the natives' points of view""? What if the exotic ""others"" are actually ""us""? What is ""us,"" anyway? In addition to making the ""strange familiar"" and the ""familiar strange,"" we also investigate what is at stake in doing cultural analysis that is both grounded and responsive to people's lived experiences and makes claims about the larger world. Key topics to be explored are power and inequality, race and ethnicity, colonialism, globalization, economy and economics, suffering and violence, gender and sexuality, kinship and family.

ANTH 1101 - Imagining Asian America    

Instructor: Karen Ho    

Course Description: What are the histories, cultures, and experiences of Asian Americans, the fastest-growing group in the United States? How do they fit into the U.S.'s history of immigration, race, and citizenship? Is the ""model minority"" myth really true? This course is an introduction to Asian American Studies, an interdisciplinary field that uses ethnography, literature, histories, films, memoirs, and other texts to study how the history of Asian immigration to the United States has visibly shaped existing Asian American communities and identities, and how “Asian America” is central to a more general understanding of American popular culture and public life.

The course is roughly organized chronologically. We will first begin with an introduction to the field of Asian American Studies by asking the questions: What is Asian America? What is Asian American Studies? We will then examine important concepts, categories, and processes before exploring the rich history of Asian migration to the United States and contemporary issues facing Asian Americans today.

One of the core principles of this course is to encourage active and interdisciplinary learning. This means that we will be learning in a variety of ways to explore and understand the material (reading, writing, watching, listening, seeing, discussing, presenting). We will be drawing from a wide range of disciplines (history, law, sociology, education, cultural studies, psychology, etc.). And we will be using a variety of materials (memoir, scholarly articles, historical documents, government records, newspapers, films, photographs, popular culture, etc.) Your active participation in these activities is essential.

ANTH 3001 - Intro to Archeology    

Instructor: Gilliane Monnier     

Course Description: Archaeology is the study of humans in the past, primarily through the material remains they left behind. It seeks to answer fundamental questions, such as “When did humans first become dependent on fire?”, “What factors led to the development of agriculture?”, or “How can we explain the rise and fall of early civilizations?” The study of each of these big questions relies on answering many small questions that are asked in the context of archaeological excavations and laboratory analyses. A common theme underlies them: archaeology aims to reconstruct and understand why past human cultures changed.

The goal of this class is to provide an understanding of the methods and techniques used by archaeologists in their investigations. It includes not only hands-on learning of specific analytical techniques, such as faunal and lithic analysis as well as site survey and excavation strategies, but also focuses on the theoretical approaches that guide the questions we ask and the methods we apply to answer them. This class, therefore, prepares students for more upper-level classes in archaeology. It also leads to a new way of thinking. This way of thinking is primarily critical and analytical. It leads one to think about how data are interpreted, and how theoretical frameworks as well as innate biases color these interpretations. Seeking solutions to interpretive problems requires the creative application of multidisciplinary approaches. Therefore, the study of archaeology leads to a new way of thinking about and doing science.

ANTH 3003 - Cultural Anth    

Instructor: David Lipset    

Course Description: Topics vary. Field research. Politics of ethnographic knowledge. Marxist/feminist theories of culture. Culture, language, and discourse. Psychological anthropology. Culture/transnational processes.

ANTH 3004 - Controversies in Anthropology     

Instructor: David Lipset    

Course Description: Notable controversies in anthropology: Is human "reason" the same in all cultures? What makes up evidence/truth when we study people? Whose "voices" should be heard? Should anthropologists support contemporary attempts at economic 'development"? Is it possible to agree on a set of universal individual or cultural rights? Can we make qualitative judgments about cultures? What civic/political responsibilities does the anthropologist have at home and with the people whom she or he studies? In-class debates.

ANTH 3005W - Language, Culture & Power    

Instructor: David Valentine    

Course Description: Studying language as a social practice, students transcribe and analyze conversation they record themselves and consider issues of identity and social power in daily talk.

ANTH 3008 - Introduction to Flintknapping    

Instructor: Gilbert Tostevin    

Course Description: Hands-on experience in replication of prehistoric stone tools as basis for archaeological analysis and as art form in itself.

Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for: ANTH 5008

ANTH 3009/8009 - Pathways to Civilization    

Instructor: Peter Wells    

Course Description: How did complex urban societies first develop? This course addresses this question in ten regions of the world including Maya Mesoamerica, Inca South America, Sumerian Near East, Shang Civilization in East Asia, and early Greece and Rome.

Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for: ANTH 8009HIST 3066

ANTH 3043 - Art, Aest. and Anth    

Instructor: Hoon Song    

Course Description: ""Food Sovereignty in Africa"" critically evaluates how the physical environment and historical processes shaped agricultural productivity in Africa, as well as exploring the subsequent relationship the continent has had with the rest of the world. The course uses multi-disciplinary resources to examine historical factors that have contributed to contemporary food security issues, and discusses grassroots food movements that embrace the ethics and values of African societies in their efforts to achieve both food security and environmental sustainability. It also examines the interplay between food security, indigenous knowledge, and environmental sustainability by comparing various standpoints on African food production, scrutinizing the challenges the continent is facing and the unique perspectives it offers in terms of agricultural development in the globalized world. Finally, the course examines how agricultural systems in Africa are affected by the new global land rush. After taking the course, students will have better knowledge of emerging research directions on Africa and will be equipped with sufficient research and practical skills to pursue independent studies beyond the classroom.

Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for: AFRO 3015AFRO 5015ANTH 5037

ANTH 3306W - Medical Anthropology    

Instructor: Karen-Sue Taussig    

Course Description: The relationship of art to culture from multiple perspectives including art as a cultural system; the cultural context of art production; the role of the artist in different cultures; methodological considerations in the interpretation of art across cultural boundaries.

ANTH 3327W/5327W - Inca, Aztec, Maya Civilizations 

Instructor: Sofía Pacheco-Fores    

Course Description: Relations among human affliction, health, healing, social institutions, and cultural representations cross-culturally. Human health/affliction. Medical knowledge/power. Healing. Body, international health, colonialism, and emerging diseases. Reproduction. Aging in a range of geographical settings.

prereq: 1003 or 1005 or entry level soc sci course recommended

ANTH 3405/5405 - Human Skeletal Analysis    

Instructor: Sofía Pacheco-Fores   

Course Description: This course is an intensive examination of the emergence, growth, and conquest of native civilizations in ancient America, focusing on the Maya, Aztec, and Inca states. Lectures and discussions examine the culture and history of these Native American civilizations, while also introducing students to anthropological theories of the state, religion, aesthetics, and history.

Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for: ANTH 5327W

ANTH 3501/5501 - Managing Museum Collections    

Instructor: Matt Edling     

Course Description: Structure, design, and variability of modern human skeleton. Anatomy, functional morphology, development, evolutionary history. Bone histology/biology, excavation/preservation, taphonomy, pathology, forensic analyses. Differentiating between males/females, adults/sub-adults, and humans/non-humans.

Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for: ANTH 5405

ANTH 3601/5601 - Archaeology & Native Americans    

Instructor: Kat Hayes    

Course Description: This course provides a hands-on and research experience in collections management utilizing artifact, archival, and digital collections. Museum collections, the objects or specimens they contain, the information associated with them, and their care and maintenance are a crucial part of both the sciences and the humanities. While seemingly disparate, many of the issues faced by those responsible for collections are quite similar: how to preserve and care for those collections, legal issues surrounding the materials they contain, how to organize and classify the items, how to facilitate discovery and access, and how to make the information contained in them available to the broadest audience possible. The course includes lectures by museum professionals, hands-on activities and selected readings.

Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for ANTH 5501

ANTH 4002/5002 - Epidemics in Evolution    

Instructor: Maria Nieves-Colón    

Course Description: This course examines the global human experience with health and disease through an archaeological and historical perspective, from the early days of our species to the present. We will survey major infectious and noncommunicable diseases that have affected human societies, including tuberculosis, plague, influenza, syphilis, HIV/AIDS, and leprosy. You will learn how humans have responded and adapted to many of these conditions, and how disease organisms have evolved in tandem. Course content examines large-scale disease and health patterns over time with a special focus on global pandemics and major epidemiological transitions such as those brought about by the introduction of agriculture, the Age of Exploration, colonialism, and industrialization. You will become familiar with the methods and approaches used by anthropologists and archaeologists to study disease in the past and how these inferences influence understanding of present-day health. The course will end with a discussion of emerging health challenges such as the rise of antibiotic resistance, novel zoonotic diseases, and the prevalence of health disparities.

Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for: ANTH 5002

ANTH 4019 - Symbolic Anth    

Instructor: Hoon Song   

Course Description: Pragmatic/structural aspects of social symbolism cross-culturally. Focuses on power, exchange, social boundaries, gender, and rituals of transition/reversal.

prereq: 1003 or 1005 or grad student or instr consent

Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for: ANTH 8211

ANTH 4022 - Talking Evidence    

Instructor: David Valentine    

Course Description: This class brings together the linguistic concept of evidentiality with ongoing debates about the nature of evidence—and associated concepts such as responsibility, intention, and authority—at a historical moment when what counts as “evidence” has become a political flashpoint. The course examines how these concepts are both used and theorized in anthropology, linguistics, history of science, philosophy, quantitative sciences, medicine, and law, but it foregrounds the anthropological insight that the production and evaluation of evidence—whether in ordinary conversation or in specialized fields of knowledge—is a social practice.

This class aims to give you expertise as a linguistic anthropologist in recognizing micro-level evidential structures in ordinary daily talk and train you to become attuned to how people construct arguments around what they know, how they tell you they know it, and how they evaluate what they know (which is what linguists mean by “evidentiality”). The focus on the history of the concept of evidence in law, medicine, science—and how it is used in ordinary talk—will further equip you to participate productively in a broad array of conversations where questions of what counts as evidence are at stake. This is central to the LE you will earn for this class, “Civil Life and Ethics.”

This class, therefore, has a double focus, switching off between anthropological and linguistic studies of evidentiality on the one hand and interdisciplinary discussions of the problem of evidence in relation to the history of anthropology, science, medicine, and law on the other. The course has three primary sections: (1) A review of debates about evidentiality in linguistics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology; (2) Anthropological and historical accounts of evidence in scientific, medical, and legal contexts; and (3) “domains of doubt” where the problem of evidence and evidentiality come up against entities—ancestors, spirits, gods, UFOs—that exceed our expectations of evidential standards and evaluations. The primary goal is to think about how applying linguistic anthropological understandings of evidentiality may give us insight into highly varied cultural practices of evaluating evidence.

ANTH 4049 - Religion and Culture    

Instructor: Aisha Ghani    

Course Description: Our subtitle is “sacredness.” The operational presupposition of the class is that sacredness is more than a mental phenomenon: it involves objects and bodies. Modern perspectives on religion have long downplayed this “material” aspect as they privileged iconoclastic spirituality. The anthropology of religion aims to go beyond the material/spiritual opposition and asks how rituals employ objects and bodies in order to capture the effect we might call spiritual or mystical. Intellectually, this is an extremely difficult wisdom for the moderns to grasp because the binary oppositions between the spiritual and the material, between mind and the body, subtend modern society’s very sense of order and rationality. This class is successful if we can have even a glimpse of how much difficulty we moderns have in seeing beyond these binaries. Take, for example, sacrifice. It is almost intuitive that the human condition abides in the requisition of sacrifice: redemption is found by suffering, abundance secured by loss, and the gift of life enabled by death. Such an intuition is as universal as its practiced intent is ambiguous to us. Ambiguous because the following questions immediately rise: For whom or in whose ""eyes"" is a gesture of sacrificial offering supposed to be accounted for? If one facilitates one’s own death in the hands of one’s enemy in a redemptive gesture—which is, arguably, the case of Jesus Christ—would the enemy part of the redeemed? We will raise the most impenetrable of such questions through compelling examples in contemporary politics, such as the post-9/11 category of so-called religiously-motivated protest suicide. As Talal Asad argues, one of the reasons the ""suicide bombing"" is so disconcerting to us is not because of the extent of its violence—which is not remarkable compared to technology-driven terror tactics—but because the act violates our dearest binaries: victim/victimizer, dying/killing, means/ends, and crime/punishment. At the bottom of these binaries, as we will see in this class, is the binary opposition between materiality and spirituality. This issue will be expanded into modern society in the latter part of the class.

There are no prerequisites for this class.

Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for: RELS 4049

ANTH 4329 - Primate Behavior    

Instructor: Michael Wilson   

Course Description: This course examines the evolution of social behavior in Primates, the order of mammals that includes humans. In this course we will examine how studies of the behavior and ecology of species in this diverse order have provided insights into the evolution of many traits, including: aggression, altruism, cooperation, mating systems, social bonds, group size and composition, intelligence, and culture.

prereq: BIOL 1009 or 1951 or 3411 or ANTH 1001 or instr consent

Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for: EEB 4329

ANTH 5442 - Archaeology of British Isles    

Instructor: Peter Wells    

Course Description: Have you ever wondered how archaeologists interpret the vast amount of archaeological evidence from the British Isles, one of the most studied and best documented parts of the world? And how do archaeologists and governmental agencies protect the heritage of Britain, from major monuments such as Stonehenge, Roman forts, and Shakespeare’s theaters, to the minor products of craft industries such as personal ornaments and coins? This course teaches you about the archaeology of the British Isles, in all of its aspects. You learn how archaeologists study the changing societies of Britain and Ireland, from the first settlers about a million years ago to modern times. You learn about the strategies that public institutions employ to preserve and protect archaeological sites, and about the place of archaeology in tourism in the British Isles and in the formation of identities among the diverse peoples of modern Britain.

ANTH 5444 - Archaeological Ceramics    

Instructor: Kat Hayes    

Course Description: Ceramics as material, technology, and cultural/social trace. Methods of assessing technology/use. Research, design, and interpretation of ceramic analyses. Students work with collections and propose/answer a research question about a ceramic assemblage. Readings, discussion.

prereq: 3001 or instr consent

ANTH 8114 - Primate Behavioral Ecology    

Instructor: Michelle Brown    

Course Description: Course focuses on the behavioral ecology of primates, including humans, with a focus on how the evolution of social behaviors relates to ecology. The course serves as one of three Biological Anthropology Graduate Program Seminars, which provide training in the foundations of biological anthropology. For Biological Anthropology graduate students, the take-home exam for this course will stand as one of the three required Preliminary Papers. Students outside of Biological Anthropology are welcome to enroll pending permission of the instructor.

prereq: Anthropology graduate student or instr consent.

ANTH 8810 - Sociocultural Anthropology    

Instructor: Karen Ho    

Course Description: Seminar examines particular aspects of method and/or theory. Topics vary according to student and faculty interests.

Course is repeatable for 3 completions and a maximum of 9.00 credits.