Exploring humanity’s diversity and driving global change
The Department of Anthropology advances knowledge through participatory fieldwork and comparative perspectives, addressing the biological, cultural, and environmental interplay of the human experience.
Subfields
Socio-cultural & Linguistics
Biological
Archaeology
Medical
Featured News
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MSU anthropology senior Megan Berry finds big questions in archaeology’s smallest fragments
A summer sorting microscopic fragments led anthropology senior Megan Berry to an unexpected interest
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Rethinking “contact”: what Michigan’s earliest trade goods actually show
At an inland site in Marquette County, archaeologists have recovered iron scissors, lead shot, kettle fragments, glass beads and a small assemblage of iconographic rings. Radiocarbon dates from charred material and moose bone there average to the 1630s. It is some of the earliest evidence for European-manufactured goods in Michigan. How those objects got there…
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Challenging the sacrifice narrative in Maya cave research
When human remains turn up in the caves of central Belize, the default interpretation has often been the same: sacrifice. Dr. Gabriel Wrobel, professor of anthropology at Michigan State University, has spent two decades testing that assumption, and the evidence keeps pointing somewhere more complicated. In a recent guest presentation for Aztlander, Dr. Wrobel makes…