Archaeology, anthropology, history—it can be hard to keep all these disciplines straight. That’s why we asked the experts. Eric Thomas is a PhD student in anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a TIP Summer Studies instructor. Get the basics from him in the video above and the transcript below!
What are the difference between anthropology, archaeology, and history.
Anthropology is sort of a very broad discipline. If you’re interested in languages or politics, if you’re interested in everything from food to geography and topography, you can be an anthropologist. There are actually four fields within anthropology; archaeology is one of those subfields. Archaeologists tend to focus on historic populations, and they don’t typically work with populations that predate writing. They tend to work within the historical record. Before that, you get physical anthropologists who are looking at, for example, hominids like neanderthals and homo erectus.
Archaeology tends to work very well with historians. The example that I give my students all the time is information that’s just come to light recently about Richard III, who’s body they found sort of famously a couple of years ago under a parking garage over in Britain. A team of archaeologists who worked on the site obviously discovered the remains, and the discovery is challenging some of the historical record.
The historical record comes to us largely through Shakespeare, who was employed by the family that killed Richard III. You can see a lot of interesting relationships between what gets written down as history and what the archaeological record shows. I often think of archaeologists as fact checkers who go back and are constantly revising what we consider to be history. It’s really neat.
Geography should also be included in this. We work a lot with social geographers and with geographers who are mapping human settlements, mapping territories that are being exploited for resources, and things like that. It’s sort of a big family. The relationships are pretty strong between anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and geographers.
So if historians are using documents as texts, do archaeologists come along and say, “Hey, look, we’ve dug up this new text?”
Absolutely. One of the things that I like to point out to my students is that for most of human history the only people who were being written about and the only people who were doing the writing were elites—the one percent, if you want to put it in the conversations of today. But everybody leaves behind trash. Everybody leaves behind the remains of their house, if they have one. The archaeological record is very democratic, in a way. Everybody is represented in some form.
We can often go back and look and that and say, Well, we know that the court of Louis XIV looked like this, but we didn’t know that people living in the suburbs of Paris during that era were doing this other thing. I think archaeology has a lot to contribute to history. I think historians ought to pay more attention to the archaeological record, personally, but I have a lot of friends that are historians, so I try not to give them too hard a time.
Tell us a little about what you do.
I’m at the University of North Carolina as a graduate student, so I split my time between my own graduate coursework and teaching undergraduates. I also do field work in Chile, where I look at economic development. Specifically, I look at how states develop. I look at remote spaces and how they’re developing their frontier. In the United States the frontier is always conceived of as the west; in Chile, it’s always been conceived of as the south. I’m pretty far south. The region where I work is actually not connected by paved road to the rest of the country. You have to either cross through Argentina or take a seventeen-hour ferry. It’s pretty remote. I’m often there in the summer, which is always exciting because it’s their winter.