Undergraduate

Anthropology is concerned with how humans and human societies evolve, with the differences and similarities among human cultures, and with the cultural and biological basis for human behavior. Anthropology integrates a wide range of perspectives on human behavior, culture, and society. Pitt anthropology majors learn the basic concerns and approaches of four subfields of anthropology: archaeology, biological anthropology, and cultural anthropology, and anthropological linguistics.

• The archaeology program offers courses covering many geographic regions (Latin America, North America, Asia, and Europe), techniques of analysis, and issues in prehistory. Museum collections, internships in cultural resource management, and summer field projects provide opportunities for student involvement in archaeological work.
• The biological anthropology program offers classes on evolutionary theory, osteoarchaeology, and human and nonhuman primate evolution, anatomy and morphology.
• Cultural anthropology is represented by a wide variety of courses on culture areas including the Pacific, Latin America, China, Japan and South Asia, Eastern Europe and the United States. Classes provide cross-cultural studies of topics such as medical anthropology, food, social and political organization, sex roles, kinship, ethnicity, folklore, and religion.
• Linguistic anthropology examines the relationship between language and other aspects of culture and society.  Courses offered regularly in our department include language and culture, writing and recording, ritual, digital media, and language ideologies.