I. ETHNOLOGY (Greek: ethnos=a people), also known as cultural anthropology, emphasizes the learned social, linguistic, technological, and familiar behaviors of humankind. Ethnographies are the written, primarily descriptive studies of contemporary or modern cultures.

North American Ethnology
Dr. Peter Whiteley is Curator of North American Ethnology. He studies the cultures, social structures, social histories, and environmental relations in Native North America from the 17^th century to the present. He is currently engaged in an extensive comparison of the cross-cultural evolution of kinship systems.

African Ethnology
Dr. Alex de Voogt is Curator of African Ethnology. His research interests are diverse but concentrate on the dispersal of board games and expertise of some master players, and on the development and history of scripts. The complexity and adaptive ability of scripts is its central topic.

Asian Ethnology
Dr. Laurel Kendall is Curator of Asian Ethnology and Chair of the Anthropology Division. Her long acquaintance with South Korean life began in 1970 as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer where a chance encounter with female shamans led her to subsequent anthropological fieldwork.

II. ARCHAEOLOGY (Greek: archae=beginnings) is the study of the human past through the systematic recording and analysis of material culture. As a sub-discipline of anthropology, archaeology has the following objectives: construction of a cultural chronology, reconstruction of past lifeways, discovery of the processes which underlie and condition human behavior.

North American Archaeology
Dr. David Thomas is Curator of North American Archaeology. Over the past 40 years, his research interests have focused on aspects of Americanist archaeology. He has worked to understand human adaptations to the relatively harsh Great Basin area of the western U.S., concentrating geographically on the state of Nevada and on the Holocene post-glacial period.

Meso-American Archaeology
Dr. Charles Spencer is Curator of Mexican and Central American Archaeology. His ongoing research focuses on the development of pre-Columbian complex societies in Mexico and Venezuela. He is also interested in addressing general issues in ecological anthropology and cultural evolution.

III. BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY (Greek: bios=life) studies humankind as a biological entity. Areas of study include: human evolution, humanity's primate context, human variation. It studies human beings - and by extension other primates - as biological organisms. It embraces such distinct fields as paleoanthropology, functional morphology, paleopathology, developmental studies, and primate systematics, ecology and behavior.

Biological Anthropology
Dr. Ian Tattersall is Curator Emeritus of Biological Anthropology. He carried out both primatological and paleontological fieldwork in Madagascar, Vietnam, Surinam, Yemen and Mauritius. His current research interest lies in systematics within the genus Homo and in the origin of modern human cognition.