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 research finds collection bias does not mask human skeletal variation
Forensic anthropologists build and test their methods using documented skeletal collections: curated sets of human remains where the donor’s age, sex, ancestry and other identifying information are known. But those collections have never been random samples of the population. Historically, they drew from unclaimed bodies, which skewed toward poorer and marginalized communities. Today, most come…
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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…