Featured series 
Tag: Anthropology
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Campus & Community
Hearth and home — in Stone Age
Motivating Professor Amy Elizabeth Clark’s interest is what she calls a “feminist approach” to studying human history.
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Science & Tech
Bringing Stone Age genomic material back to life
Scientific breakthroughs will enable exploration of Earth’s biochemical past, with hopes of discovering new therapeutic molecules.
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Science & Tech
DNA shows poorly understood empire was multiethnic with strong female leadership
Biomolecular archaeology reveals a fuller picture of the Xiongnu people, the world’s first nomadic empire.
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Campus & Community
‘To understand the world but also to change the world’
Arthur Kleinman pays tribute to beloved student with new class that explores wide-ranging intellectual contributions of Partners In Health co-founder Paul Farmer.
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Nation & World
How to liberate African art
In a Harvard Center for African Studies workshop, scholar Ciraj Rassool urges fuller reckoning with colonial legacies.
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Science & Tech
New Faculty: Gabriella Coleman
Anthropology Professor Gabriella Coleman studies the rich, deep world of hackers.
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Arts & Culture
Portrait of the documentarian as a young man
“A New England Document” by Che R. Applewhaite ’21 profiles Lorna and Lawrence Marshall and details their extended expeditions with their children to Africa’s Kalahari Desert starting in the 1950s.
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Arts & Culture
Good things come in ancient packages
Project to make complete visual digital records of three 3,000-year-old coffins turns up a painting of a deity.
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Science & Tech
The archaeology of plaque (yes, plaque)
Christina Warinner says ancient dental plaque offers insights into diets, disease, dairying, and women’s roles of the period.
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Campus & Community
An insider’s guide to the life academic
In a new course offered by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, newbies learn the ropes of grad school and how to navigate the world of academia.
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Campus & Community
Inviting the community into design, decisions
In England, Rhodes Scholar Brittany Ellis will continue to promote collaboration between museums and communities in curatorial decision-making.
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Science & Tech
How violence pointed to virtue
Richard Wrangham’s new book examines the strange relationship between good and evil.
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Health
The mystery of the medicine man
A paper published earlier this year argues that shamanism develops as specialists compete to provide magical services to people in their communities, and the outcome is a set of traditions that hacks people’s psychological biases to convince them that they can control the uncertain.
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Science & Tech
Voices from the Incas’ past
An undergraduate deciphers the meaning of Incan knots, giving long-dead native South American people a chance to speak.
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Arts & Culture
The world in an exhibit
As Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology turns 150, a new exhibit highlights its pioneering efforts and the legacy of its cultural history.
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Science & Tech
Harvard students, meet the Stone Age
Students taking part in a new freshman seminar class learn to appreciate the sophistication of Neanderthals by manufacturing their own stone tools from scratch.
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Arts & Culture
The potter’s magic fingers
Native American potters offer hands-on insights into centuries-year-old artistry.
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Arts & Culture
‘Humanity’ through a telephone by way of a telescope
A large-scale, audio-video installation uses the Fukushima nuclear disaster as a starting point to examine the fragility of humanity. “Ah humanity!” was created by Harvard artists Ernst Karel, Véréna Paravel, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor.
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Science & Tech
New World devastation
A new study led by Harvard’s Matthew Liebmann examines the health and ecological consequences of European colonists’ contact with Native Americans.
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Arts & Culture
Weighed down
Harvard anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh’s new book, “Fat-Talk Nation: The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat,” delves deep into the national obsession with thinness.
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Science & Tech
Hierarchical differences
Female academics are less likely to collaborate across rank, a Harvard study found.
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Nation & World
The poetry of water
Harvard anthropologist Steven Caton made his name studying tribal poetry in Yemen three decades ago. But it was memories of a tribal war that drew him back to that nation in 2001, and the scarcity of water he discovered there launched him into a new avenue of investigation.
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Science & Tech
Projectile learning
Students in Matthew Liebmann’s “Encountering the Conquistadors” class recently got a feel for prehistoric life, trying their hands at an ancient weapon called the atlatl.
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Nation & World
The seeds of anthropology
Zongze Hu, who received his doctorate in anthropology from Harvard in 2009, has wasted little time fostering the discipline in his native China, establishing new graduate and undergraduate programs at Shandong University.
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Science & Tech
Mystery of Native Americans’ arrival
Research led by scientists at Harvard and University College London has shown that Native Americans arrived in three waves of migration, not one, as is commonly held and that at least one group returned home to Asia.
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Science & Tech
Images from long ago or far away
A new exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology traces the development of photography and its use in anthropology from the beginnings of both fields in the 1800s to the present.
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Arts & Culture
Illuminating an unseen history
In his new book, “Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico,” Assistant Professor of Anthropology Matthew Liebmann offers a first-of-its-kind look at how the Pueblo people lived during their brief independence from Spain.
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Campus & Community
Immersed in the body politic
Susan Greenhalgh, a new professor in Harvard’s anthropology department, studies China’s controversial one-child policy, finding lessons for American health policymakers, too.
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Arts & Culture
Unraveling a brutal custom
A research team at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is debunking myths surrounding the brutal practice of foot binding young women in China, tying it to handwork and weaving rather than marriage prospects.
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Arts & Culture
Faust digs Gen Ed
President Drew Faust paid a visit Nov. 17 to the popular undergraduate course anthropology 1010: “The Fundamentals of Archaeological Methods and Reasoning.” Faust’s attendance was inspired by a special meeting of the course at the Harvard Ceramics Studio, where students learned how pottery is made, and got to try their hands at making their own…
