Contact Information
(541) 346-5102
(541) 346-0668 fax
http://www.uoregon.edu/~anthro/
Undergraduate Anthropology degrees: B.A, B.S.,
Undergraduate Anthropology Minor
Human experience: culture, prehistory, and biology
At the UO, the Department of Anthropology is divided into cultural, physical, and archaeological studies. While the curriculum requires majors to take courses in all three categories, you can focus your studies in the area that most interests you.
Maybe you’re like Margaret Mead, interested in the cultural details of a group—how certain people speak, what they eat and wear, what they do as a group to survive and endure—that distinguish the group as a culture. Anthropology at the UO has an impressive group of cultural anthropologists who study groups in places like Papua New Guinea, Central and South America, Eastern Europe, and the South Pacific.
Maybe you’re a Jane Goodall, more interested in the physical aspects of anthropology. Here, you get to look at issues of evolution and science. We have specialists in primate behavior and in human and primate skeletal studies. Students have supervised access to the physical anthropology lab that stores dental collections from South Asia and other skeletal models for study.
Or maybe you’ve always wanted to be a real-life Indiana Jones, hunting for ancient relics and artifacts. The archaeology program at the UO is renowned for its work in Northwest archaeology, Pacific Islands archaeology, and digs in the California Channel Islands. The UO offers a
summer field school where undergraduates go on actual digs in western and central Oregon. You get to camp out for six weeks while you survey and hunt for artifacts. Eventually, collected materials end up in the archaeology lab at the UO, where students identify and document their findings. This is hands-on learning at its best.
The UO anthropology department has much to offer: an award-winning faculty, fascinating classes, and a curriculum that allows students to explore and focus within this broad topic. Once you decide which of the three areas interests you most, an adviser will help you plan your academic path and serve as an invaluable source of knowledge about what to do with your anthropology major in the professional world.
Points of Interest
- Courses offered by the Department of Anthropology span the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and provide a broad understanding of human nature and society.
- Participatory Learning Experiences (PLEs) allow archaeology students to analyze and document artifacts from actual project sites such as Tecolote Canyon and the San Juan Islands.
- The UO’s Department of Anthropology is actively affiliated with the Northwest Primate Conservation Society and the Southwest Oregon Research Project (SWORP), which involves the repatriation of 110,000 archival documents to forty-four Tribal Nations in the greater Oregon area.
- The has several laboratories that are available for teaching and research in archaeology, cultural anthropology, and physical anthropology.