Welcome to the Department of Anthropology at Georgia State University!
Anthropology is the study of humanity across time and space. The discipline encompasses anthropological archaeology, biological anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. These sub-disciplines inform applied anthropology, the use of anthropological knowledge, skills, and strategies in understanding and solving human problems. Unique among other disciplines in its focus on ALL matters human, anthropology may be viewed as “the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.” To Alfred Kroeber's definition we would add, “and the most critical of the professions.”
We currently have ten regular faculty members serving over 200 majors and 35 MA students enrolled in our programs. Our areas of focus include applied anthropology, bioarchaeology, linguistic anthropology, medical anthropology, Mesoamerican archaeology, paleoanthropology and urban anthropology. The Department maintains two field schools. One of these, the Field School in Applied Anthropology, takes place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the other one, the Field School in Archaeology, takes place in Calhoun and Telfair counties in Georgia. The Department also hosts two exchange programs in Europe: at Ca’Foscari University in Venice, Italy and at the University of Aristotle in Thessaloniki, Greece. Faculty members maintain active research agendas in Brazil, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Russia, South Africa and the US funded in part through the Fulbright Foundation, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Geographic Society and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
A vibrant organ of the Department of Anthropology is the Anthropology Club which hosts a variety of lectures, service-learning experiences and social venues for the students and faculty. The Department of Anthropology maintains a number of laboratories available to students and researchers from other institutions:
Archaeology Laboratory committed to the preparation and analysis of artifacts recovered from excavations in Georgia and Mesoamerica
Bioarchaeology Laboratory dedicated to the preparation and analysis of stable isotopes from osteological and dental remains
Bioarchaeology Teaching Laboratory devoted to departmental instruction using fossil casts and the osteological teaching collection
Dental Microwear Laboratory featuring hundreds of dental casts and instrumentation to reconstruct fossil primate diets and paleoecology
Environmental Anthropology Laboratory containing instrumentation and reference collections to analyze paleoethnobotanical remains and ecofacts
Ethnographic Laboratory committed to visual, audio and text analyses from field work in sociocultural anthropology
MARTA Collection Laboratory dedicated to the curation and examination of thousands of artifacts recovered from the mid-20th century construction of MARTA in the heart of Atlanta
Recent Faculty Books
