Anthropology and Archeology

Early investigations suffered from the problems that were common to all scientific fields in 19th century.

Their measurements were crude at best, and their knowledge of human anatomy and physiology was limited. But with each new discovery, another piece was added to the puzzle.

Anthropologist became more aware of the relationships between human beings and other animals.

They began to understand some of the obvious differences among human populations: they learn how physical features like skin color or how hair type or even height and general body structure were tied in with the environments in which people had lived for very long period.

Without evidence of past, there could be no anthropology. The evidence was provided by archeology.

Although in the nineteenth century archeology was not considered a branch of anthropology, its subject matter was of crucial important to physical anthropologists. Archaeologists are concerned primarily with prehistory – the period of human existence prior to the keeping of written records or historical accounts.

Their aim is to reconstruct the origins and spread of culture by examining any remains of past societies that we are fortunate enough to find.

Although archeology is best known for its dramatic discoveries of ancient cities, and the “great” civilizations of the past, it also provides us with vast amount of information about ancient people and their customs.
Anthropology and Archeology

Anthropology in Nineteenth Century

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that anthropology began to take shape as a separate field of study. It came together from many different directions, with roots in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and even humanistic disciplines like history and folklore. By end of the nineteenth century, anthropology had clearly narrowed its focus to four main areas:

1. Studies of physical aspects of the human species, including human biology and evolution.

2. Studies of language, mainly the diversity of the world’s spoken and written languages

3. Archaeologists studies of past civilizations

4. Studies of the cultural similarities and differences among existing societies, particularly those of non western world.

These four fields are still at the core of anthropology, and today every anthropologist is expected to be acquainted with them.

But it is interesting to look at the way these seemly diverse approaches were brought together as anthropology develop into a formal discipline and defined its boundaries its regards to other social sciences.

In the nineteenth century physical anthropology was perhaps most directly concerned with the concept of race, especially in the United States, where the tensions that led to Civil War fostered scientific investigating of racial differences.

The root of physical anthropology can be found in the natural sciences of that period, including biology, botany, and zoology.

These fields had a long tradition of recording all the diverse species of animals and plants discovered in different parts of the world and trying to figure out the relationship among them , as well as they had grown apart, and changed – other words, their evolution.
Anthropology in Nineteenth Century