Q: Has the field of anthropology changed in recent decades?

A: Anthropology has undergone dramatic changes in recent years. One important change is a shift in emphasis away from the study of tribal peoples and toward the study of urban societies and ethnic minorities. At the same time, anthropologists have shown a new concern for issues such as gender; economic, social, and cultural development, mainly in the developing world; industrial working conditions; and health care (medical anthropology).

The discipline is becoming increasingly multidisciplinary in its approaches, but it still encompasses the four traditional subfields of anthropology: archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology.

Q: How do archaeologists determine whether animals were wild or domesticated?

A: Good question! Unfortunately, the bones of wild and domesticated animals are often very similar, especially those of wild and domesticated dogs, sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs.

Zooarchaeologists (animal bone experts) distinguish between wild and domestic animals by using careful measurements of teeth, bony horn cores, and the ends of limb bones. They have discovered minute differences between wild and domesticated individuals, and these differences become accentuated as domesticated animals are selectively bred for size and other qualities. 

Another popular way of telling the difference is measuring the mortality curves of wild and domestic animal populations, as revealed by the age of teeth in complete jaws. Herders tend to kill surplus males at young adulthood, keeping the females for breeding and milk purposes, skewing the slaughter curve. Wild populations are more evenly distributed.

Q: Do archaeologists really have adventures like Indiana Jones’s?

A: I wish! The early days of archaeology were indeed an adventure, at a time when even Egypt was a remote country and difficult of access. In those days, you could literally go out and find an ancient civilization in a week. English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard discovered two ancient Assyrian palaces in northern Iraq in a month, while his French colleague Paul Émile Botta had unearthed the Assyrian civilization from complete historical obscurity a few years earlier. American traveler John Lloyd Stephens and Scottish artist Frederick Catherwood revealed the glories of ancient Maya civilization to an astonished world in 1841, after adventures that were quite unlike any of modern archaeologists. Today’s excavation is patient and slow moving. We move as much dirt in a month as a 19th-century digger would remove in a day.

As for Indiana Jones, he is a figment of Hollywood’s imagination and a fictional amalgam of three or four well-known archaeologists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Which ones? Your guess is as good as mine!

Q: How do scientists determine weather conditions of the past?

A: Advances in paleoclimatology have given scientists a wide range of tools for understanding ancient climates. A combination of tree rings; annual rings in ice sheets, such as those in Antarctica and Greenland; and coral growth rings from the Caribbean and South Pacific Ocean provide detailed climatic evidence for the past 10,000 to 12,000 years. The evidence extends back to the end of the last Ice Age. The study of fossil pollens from organic deposits often provides information about changes in ancient vegetation. Fossil pollens, for example, have helped scientists pinpoint the moments when humans deliberately cleared forests to make way for grasslands and cultivated plants.