Program Overview

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Anthropology Program

The Anthropology program at Ohio State University is designed to broadly prepare students in each of the three major anthropological subfields: physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology. This program leads to a Bachelor of Arts degree and provides training for a variety of career options.

Program Description

Anthropology is the study of the biology, prehistory, and culture of human society in a worldwide setting. Anthropologists study people from all times and all places, focusing on human and non-human primate evolution, cultural history, and past lifeways. The program examines the behavior of living societies to understand differences in contemporary cultures, including topics such as language, kinship, religion, ecology, urbanism, and culture and personality.

Curriculum

The anthropology major requires a minimum of 34 credit hours, including:

• One prerequisite course, Introduction to Physical Anthropology
• Core courses (15 hours): World Prehistory, Peoples and Culture, History of Anthropological Theory, Fundamentals of Archaeology, and either Human Evolution or Human Variation
• An additional course in each of the subfields of anthropology (nine hours): archaeology, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology
• Six additional hours taken from any subfield of anthropology

Internship

Internships are strongly encouraged in a range of settings, including museums, contract archaeology firms, and local, state, and federal agencies. A forensic field school is usually offered every summer on the Columbus campus, and the department regularly offers an archaeological field school in the United States or Europe.

Honors and Scholars

The Department of Anthropology offers Honors sections of introductory courses, and Honors students may pursue graduation with distinction in anthropology by completing a senior Honors thesis. Non-Honors students may also graduate with research distinction by completing a senior thesis.

Research

Undergraduates can become involved in diverse laboratory and field-based research opportunities. The department is on the leading edge of undergraduate training of anthropological scientists and offers various research projects, including:

• A premier paleoethnobotany laboratory
• A state-of-the-art bioarchaeology laboratory
• An extensive collection of human skeletal remains
• Laboratory resources and comparative materials for forensic studies
• Archaeological field projects in Ohio, Hungary, and Yemen
• Bioarchaeological field projects in Italy and Turkey
• Paleoanthropological field experience at fossil hominid sites in South Africa
• Cultural ecology and human biology field experience in the Amazon and Cameroon
• Economic anthropology with an emphasis on Mexico
• A human biological anthropology laboratory with genetic, anthropometric, and physiological equipment
• An established research station with habituated non-human primates in the Ivory Coast
• Dental anthropology with analysis of human, non-human primate, and human dentitions or dental replicas

Student Organizations

The undergraduate student organization, the Anthropology Club, offers a chance to get to know other students and hear from faculty about research and field study opportunities.

Possible Careers

A variety of employment opportunities exist for graduates with an anthropology degree, including:

• Contract or government archaeologist
• Admissions counselor
• Museum curator
• Mental health consultant
• Social service worker
• Laboratory assistant
• Foreign service agent
• International business associate
• Forensic anthropologist Graduates in anthropology from Ohio State have found employment in a range of careers in business, health professions, engineering, government, law, education, social services, and museums.