About the Department of Anthropology

The mission of the Anthropology Department at CSU is 1) to offer and maintain instructional programs that provide an understanding of people and their cultures, past and present, and knowledge of their social, political, economic and environmental systems; 2) to conduct research in our programmatic areas within the various sub-disciplines of anthropology, in order to advance and expand knowledge of the field of anthropology; 3) to participate actively in programs of interdisciplinary research.  One of the ways we accomplish these things is through the synergistic effects of an active program of field and laboratory research and the teaching and training of students.

To fulfill our mission, the Department of Anthropology currently has 11 full-time faculty and one half-time faculty member whose other half-time appointment is in CASAE, the Center for Applied Studies in American Ethnicity.  Two of our faculty are advising faculty in the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology (GDPE), three more are member faculty of the GDPE, and three are advising faculty within the Sociology Department. We have about 125 undergraduate students and 55 master students. 

Undergraduate Academic Program

One of the missions of the Anthropology Department is to offer and maintain instructional programs that provide an understanding of people and their cultures, past and present, and knowledge of their social, political, economic and environmental systems.  The program prepares undergraduate students to describe and explain the human condition through exposure to the anthropological lens of human variation across the world’s societies and throughout time.  Emphasis on the use of multiple tools to understand behavior and biology is fundamental to an anthropological approach to studying humankind, and invaluable in helping students examine contemporary issues in their lives and the world.  The Anthropology faculty has developed programmatic areas that represent common issues among the subfields within the discipline in  Environment, Globalization and Development.

1. Environment: The Anthropology faculty look at how past and present human activities affect the environment and how ecological processes affect human evolution and the human condition today.  The faculty also look at how various processes (e.g., disease, policy) affect the human condition.
2. Globalization: Today globalization refers to the rapidity and intensity in the flow of commodities, capital, peoples, ideas, and media around the world.  Our anthropological approach to these developments concerns the study of how local societies respond to global influences and the extent to which cultural meanings, beliefs, institutions, structures of inequality, and social relations between gender and among kin are changing as a result.  Our faculty who are focused on problems of globalization also address the conflicts and dilemmas posed for peoples caught between the promises of globalization and the realities of localization, conflicts that give rise to new social movements, and to less visible manifestations of cultural resistance.
3. Development: Processes of economic development (defined as an improvement in the basic aspects of life) here and abroad affect human welfare.  Our faculty who pursue issues of development are specifically focused on the issues of food security, environmental and economic sustainability, and paths to economic growth and human achievement.

Experiential Education
We pride ourselves on providing our undergraduate students experiential learning and research opportunities through active integration in our research and laboratory projects.  The Department of Anthropology has six different laboratories, two field schools (AP442 and AP464), and has an active series of practicum projects (AP486). The faculty often support undergraduate students in ongoing research activity.  Each of our three sub disciplines (archaeology, biological, and cultural) often require student involvement in laboratory work and data analysis.  In addition, many other opportunities for undergraduate involvement in research are available, centering on the three programmatic areas that crosscut the sub-disciplines of biological anthropology, cultural anthropology and archaeology. Through course work, Department events, and one-on-one mentoring, students experience how the different sub-fields of anthropology address similar concerns through on-going faculty research.

The three subfields of anthropology each contribute primary data to build these understandings: 

Please review each of the three subfield pages to learn more about the particular strengths of anthropology at CSU. 

• Biological - Archaeological - Sociocultural

At Colorado State University, our 12 departmental faculty offer expertise in archaeology, biological, and sociocultural anthroploogy. As a department, we strive to fairly represent the most important currents of each of these subfields of anthropology. We have also worked to develop a series of theoretically, geographically, and topically clustered faculty. These "research clusters" offer students the advantages of depth in key areas and encourage both communication and collaboration among faculty. 

Our current research clusters include the following areas: studies in the Americas and in postcolonial areas of the world including Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and Africa;  We focus on culture change, modernization, development, evolution, adaptation, and human ecology; and orientations which are focused on placing the local in its global context.

• Undergraduates interested in American ethnic studies should learn more about the Center for Applied Studies in American Ethnicity at http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/CASAE
  
• Graduate students interested in human ecology should go to http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/GDPE/Homepage.html to learn more about graduate-level opportunities at CSU in that field.
  
• Graduate and undergraduate students interested in an interdisciplinary course of study in international development should look at http://www.international.colostate.edu

For more information please contact us:

By mail: Department of Anthropology, Colorado State University, C207 Clark Building, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1787
Telephone: 970.491.5447

Careers in Anthropology

A major in anthropology, as with most other liberal arts majors, provides an advantage in any job requiring knowledge of contemporary or past cultures, good writing and thinking skills, and a creative approach to solving problems.  Since a BA degree is not sufficient to prepare fully for professional work as an anthropologist, students interested in becoming a professional anthropologist go on to do graduate study in anthropology.  The Department of Anthropology at CSU has placed students completing its BA program in prestigious graduate programs around the country.

There are a number of things that students do once they get an anthropology BA degree. They include:

• joining the Peace Corps;
• nursing school, and then work in community health programs of various sorts;
• going to medical or dental school;
• becoming a K-12 teacher;
• working for county, state, or federal departments in various capacities;
• working for sustainable living non-profit organizations;
• archaeology for private contract firms, the BLM, the National Forest Service, or other organizations;
• law enforcement or crime scene labs;
• working at museums;
• working for various businesses such as data management and storage, various software companies especially those that focus on Geographic Information Systems;
• getting jobs with some universities in various administrative departments such as admissions or financial aid;
• banking;
• getting a double major particularly focusing on a foreign language or a set of technical skills such as  GIS or remote sensing and using those to find various types of jobs that demand these skills.

The department has six teaching and research laboratories: Center for Paleoecology, the Ethnographic and Ethno historic Research Lab, the Bioanthropology Laboratory, the Laboratory of Human Origins, the Laboratory of Public Archaeology and a new Geoarchaeology Lab. All labs provide experiential training and classroom instruction for undergraduate and graduate students in the design, implementation, and analysis of anthropological research.