We offer our students numerous opportunities for hands-on research training through our courses, laboratories, and field schools.
We are the only undergraduate anthropology program at a public university to require a two-sequence senior capstone experience. All our anthropology majors are required to write a senior thesis under the mentorship and direction of a faculty member and to present their work at an oral defense. Many of our students also present their research at student and professional conferences. Each spring, faculty celebrate the accomplishments of our seniors with our own graduation ceremony, Rites of Passage, an over three decades long tradition.
The department offers an undergraduate program in anthropology. Professional anthropologists usually specialize in a particular sub-field of anthropology. An anthropological education, however, begins with learning the fundamentals. T
his means taking courses representative of all four major sub-fields: archaeology, anthropological linguistics, cultural anthropology, and biological anthropology.
Anthropology is the study of people. It is also the collective name for a group of humanistic and biological sciences that deal with a basic question: What makes us human? Anthropology is a discipline concerned with people in their entirety: our evolution and physical variation, the remnants of our prehistoric past, the cultural and linguistic diversity of human societies past and present.
