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A N T H R O P O LO GY

P R E S E N T E D BY:R A M V I L A S J A I D U PA L LY

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CONTENTSIntroductionHistory Vision of AnthropologyDifferent Fields of AnthropologyCultural Anthropology Linguistic AnthropologyBiological AnthropologyArchaeologyDental Anthropology

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INTRODUCTION • Anthropology is a global discipline where humanities, social,

and natural sciences are forced to confront one another. • Derived from two Greek words, ‘Anthropos’ mean MAN &

’logos’ means STUDY/SCIENCE.• According to Webster  the science of human beings;

especially :  the study of human beings and their ancestors through time and space and in relation to physical character, environmental and social relations, and culture.

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• Anthropology seeks to understand and explain why people do

the things they do and say the things they say.

• It seeks to find the generalities about human life while also

explaining the differences.

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HISTORY• Some interest in man and his cultures is found in nearly all human

societies, past or present, regardless of their level of cultural development.• Anthropology traces its roots to ancient Greek historical and philosophical

writings about human nature and the organization of human society.• Herodotus, a Greek historian (400 BC).• Wrote a book named “HISTORY”, mentioned about different cultures.

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• During the Middle Ages (5th to 15th centuries ad) biblical scholars dominated European thinking on questions of human origins and cultural development.• The Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, who lived in the 14th AD, was

another early writer of ideas relevant to anthropology.• Both Khaldun and Herodotus produced remarkably objective,

analytic, ethnographic descriptions of the diverse cultures in the Mediterranean world.

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• The European Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries marked the rise of scientific and rational philosophical thought.• David Hume, John Locke of England, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau of

France, wrote a number of humanistic works on the nature of humankind. • They based their work on philosophical reason rather than religious

authority and asked important anthropological questions. • Rousseau, for instance, wrote on the moral qualities of “primitive”

societies and about human inequality.

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IMPERIALISM AND INCREASED CONTACT WITH OTHER CULTURES

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• Europeans came into increasing contact with other peoples around the

world, prompting new interest in the study of culture.

• The increasing dominance of global commerce, capitalist (profit-driven)

economies, and industrialization in late-18th-century Europe led to vast

cultural changes and social upheavals throughout the world.

• Europeans suddenly had a flood of new information about the foreign

peoples encountered in colonial frontiers.

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• In early 19th century systematic approach towards the study of

anthropology had started.

• In 1836 Danish archaeologist Christian Thomsen proposed that

three long ages of technology had preceded the present era in

Europe. He called these the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.

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• Modern anthropology, in both its physical and cultural aspects,

begins roughly with the 20th century.

• Anthropology becomes a recognized academic discipline: data

on physical and cultural anthropology are collected by

professional field workers trained to these tasks.

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EVOLUTIONARY THEORY• n 1859 British naturalist Charles Darwin published his influential book

On the Origin of Species.

• Darwin’s theory was later supported by studies of genetic inheritance

conducted in the 1850s and 1860s by Austrian monk Gregor Mendel.

• English social philosopher Herbert Spencer applied a theory of

progressive evolution to human societies in the middle 1800s.

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• He likened societies to biological organisms, each of which

adapted to survive or else perished.

• Spencer later coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" to

describe this process.

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES• During the late 1800s many anthropologists promoted their own

models of social and biological evolution.

• According to Morgan, human societies had evolved to civilization

through earlier conditions, or stages, which he called Savagery and

Barbarism.

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• Like Morgan, Sir Edward Tylor, a founder of British

anthropology, also promoted the theories of cultural evolution

in the late 1800s.

• Tylor attempted to describe the development of particular

kinds of customs and beliefs found across many cultures.

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• Beals and Harper says “ Anthropology is the study of origin and

development and nature of human species”

• Thus the subject matter of anthropology includes the earliest

fossil bones and human like creatures.

• The artefacts and traces left in the earth by our ancestors and

all of the living or historically described people of the earth.

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• Anthropologists take the help from historians and archaeologists.

• Previously their study was limited to tribal and small societies but

now they have expanded the field of their study.

• In studying all these they are using many approaches as methods.

These are

– Holistic Approach

– Participant Method

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VISION OF ANTHROPOLOGY

• It is useful to think of theory as containing four basic elements: • Questions • Assumptions, • Methods• Evidence.

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HOLISTIC APPROACH• Through this method study of all possible aspects of man is

done.

• Also study the varieties of people.

• Previously the individual anthropologists tried to be holistic and

cover all aspects of the subject, but at present there are

different disciplines in the field of anthropology.

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PARTICIPANT METHOD

• Here the anthropologists live in the societies for a minimum period of one year or more.• They are concerned with many types of questions like when, why

where, how etc.• They are curious about typical characteristics of human

population and how and why such people have varied characteristics through ages.

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DIFFERENT FIELDS OF ANTHROPOLOGY• Cultural anthropology – examines cultural diversity of the

present and recent past.• Linguistic anthropology – considers how speech varies with

social factors and over time and space• Archaeology – reconstructs behavior by studying material remains• Biological anthropology – study of human fossils, genetics, and

bodily growth and nonhuman primates

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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY• Studies the origins of man’s cultures their evolution and

development , and the structure and functioning of human cultures

in every place and time.

• All the cultures interest the cultural anthropologist, for all

contribute some evidence of reactions in cultural forms to the ever

present problems posed by the physical environment.

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• Culture includes all behavior of people in their everyday lives, from daily rituals (for example, washing dishes) to beliefs about abstract concepts (for example, time), and is learned and transmitted from one generation to the next.

• It can be the food people eat, the clothes they wear, the shelter they live in, how they move from place to place, how they defend themselves, what they learn, and the languages they speak.

• Cultural anthropologists are anthropologists who study both past and present cultures.

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ARCHEOLOGY

• Archaeology, the “study of the old”

• Archaeology is the study of the ancient and recent human past

through material remains. It is a subfield of cultural anthropology.

• Archeology or prehistory deals primarily with ancient cultures and

with past phases of modern civilizations.

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TYPES OF ARCHAEOLOGY

• Prehistoric archaeology focuses on past cultures that did not have written language and therefore relies primarily on excavation or data recovery to reveal cultural evidence. • Historical archaeology is the study of cultures that existed (and

may still) during the period of recorded history--several thousands of years in parts of the Old World.

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• Underwater archaeology studies physical remains of human activity

that lie beneath the surface of oceans, lakes, rivers, and wetlands.

• It includes maritime archaeology—the study of shipwrecks in order to

understand the construction and operation of watercraft—as well as

cities and harbors that are now submerged, and dwellings, agricultural,

and industrial sites along rives, bays and lakes.

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• Industrial archaeology focuses on social change during and since the Industrial Revolution. • Cultural Resource Management archaeology, known as “CRM”

refers to archaeology that is conducted to comply with federal and state laws that protect archaeological sites.• Some of the other specialties within archaeology include urban

archaeology, bio-archaeology, archaeometry experimental archaeology.

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LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

• Linguistic anthropology is devoted to the study of communication, mainly among humans. • Linguistic anthropology has three subfields: historical linguistics, the

study of language change over time and how languages are related.• Descriptive linguistics, or structural linguistics, the study of how

contemporary languages differ in terms of their formal structure. • Sociolinguistics, the study of the relationships

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• Anthropologists' study language in everyday use, or discourse, and how it relates to power structures at local, regional and international levels (Duranti 1997). • Second, they look at the role of information technology in

communication, including the Internet, social media such as Facebook, and cell phones. • Third is attention to the increasingly rapid extinction of

indigenous languages and what can be done about it.

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ETHNOLOGY

• Ethnology (from the Greek ethnos= nation) is the branch of

anthropology that compares and analyzes the characteristics of

different peoples and the relationship between them.

• Ethnology in its theoretical aspects is devoted very largely to the

problem of explaining the similarities and differences to be found in

human cultures.

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ETHANOLOGY

• The scientific analysis of the socio-economic systems and cultural heritages of the people, of low technological level, based upon, ethanography and undertaken to reveal the origins, functioning and processes to change of their cultural features. • This is done by using participant method.

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• It is concerned with patterns of thought and behaviour such as marriage,

custom kinship organisation, political and economical systems, religion folk

art, music and the ways in which these patterns differ in contemporary

societies.

• Ethanohistorians, investigate written documents to determine how the

ways of life of a particular group of people has changed over the time.

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• The other type of enthanologists is the comparative or cross

sectional researcher who studies the data collected by the

ethanographers and the ethanohistorians.

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BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY• Physical/ biological anthropology is the study of the past and

present evolution of the human species and is especially

concerned with understanding the causes of present human

diversity.

• It deals with the exploring of the human origins and human

variation.

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• Biological Anthropology looks at the physical or biological differences

(DNA, genes, phenotype) characteristics in humans.

• There are three ways in which Biological/physical anthropology study

human variation and human evolution: human genetics( traits that

are inherited), population biology(environmental impact on

humans),  and epidemiologist( the study of diseases).

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DENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY• The discipline of dental anthropology can be defined as the study

of teeth and jaws of living or prehistoric people and their ancestors for insights concerning human behavior, health and nutritional status, or genetic relationship of populations to one another.

• Teeth exhibit variables with a strong hereditary component that are useful in assessing population relationships and evolutionary dynamics

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• Teeth can also exhibit incidental or intentional modifications, which reflect patterns of cultural behavior.

• As the process of tooth formation is highly canalized (i.e., buffered from environmental perturbations), developmental defects provide a general measure of environmental stress on a population.

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WHY STUDY TEETH??

PRESERVABILITY

• Teeth preserve exceptionally well in the archeological record (due in part to

the chemical properties of enamel) and are frequently the best represented

part of a skeletal sample.

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OBSERVABILITY• Most variables of interest to human osteologists can be

observed only in prehistoric and protohistoric skeletal remains.

• Teeth, on the other hand, can be directly observed and studied in both skeletal and living populations (e.g., through intraoral examinations, permanent plaster casts, extracted teeth).

• Because teeth are observable in both extinct and extant human groups, they provide a valuable research tool for the analysis of short-term and long-term temporal trends.

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VARIABILITY

• Because teeth are critical in food-getting and food processing behavior, their development is controlled by a relatively strict set of genetic-developmental programs. • The dentition interfaces directly with the environment, teeth

are also modified postnatally by physical factors associated with mastication and disease factors related to the interplay of dietary elements and a complex oral microbiota.

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TEETH AS INDICATORS OF AGE• An accurate determination of age and gender is fundamental to any

inquiry relating to human skeletal remains in both archeological and forensic contexts. • One characteristic of the dentition, which makes teeth useful in aging

individual skeletons, is a predictable sequence of developmental events, including crown and root formation calcification and eruption.

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• Before the age of 12 years, teeth are the best and most readily available indicator of age. • Because tooth wear in adulthood has a strong cultural

component, it is necessary to apply different standards to spatially and temporally circumscribed populations.

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INFERRING HISTORY FROM TEETH

• The derivation of historical relationships from dental data

requires variables with a significant genetic component.

• As most historical analyses focus on tooth size and morphology,

this discussion is limited to metric and morphologic variables.

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TOOTH SIZE• The studies on human tooth size variation used measurements

such as maximum crown length [mesio-distal (MD)diameter] and maximum crown breadth [ bucco-lingual (BL) diameter]. • In some instances, measurements are reported for crown

height and inter-cuspal distances, but crown wear must be minimal or the landmarks used for measurement are obliterated.

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• A comparison of individual crown diameters within a single population

usually shows that male teeth are 2-6% larger than those of females.

• This dimorphism is most pronounced in canine dimensions.

• In the human dentition, a high degree of dimensional inter-correlation

exists, i.e., the size of one tooth is not independent of the size of all

other teeth.

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• In addition to interdimensional correlations, crown diameters are also associated with other variables, including hypodontia, hyperodontia, and, to some extent, crown morphology. • Within European populations, large-toothed (megadont) individuals

are more likely to have supernumerary teeth, whereas small-toothed (microdont) individuals are more likely to have missing teeth.

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CROWN AND ROOT MORPHOLOGY

• Teeth exhibit two types of morphological variation. First, there is variation in the form of recurring structures (e.g., labial curvature of the upper central incisors).

• However, most morphological crown and root traits that have been operationally defined take the form of presence/absence of variables.

• That is, within a population, some individuals exhibit a particular structure while others do not.

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• Morphological root traits are most often defined in terms of variation in root number; lower molars, for example, can exhibit one, two, or three roots. • For most crown and root traits manifested as presence-absence variables,

presence expressions vary in degree from slight to pronounced.• Although some morphological variables exhibit significant sex differences

(e.g., the canine distal accessory ridge), the majority of these traits show similar frequencies and class frequency distributions for males and females.

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TOOTH SIZE AND POPULATION HISTORY

• Teeth from many human populations, skeletal and living, have been

measured for mesiodistal and bucco-lingual crown diameters.

• These basic tooth crown dimensions are often broken down into two

components for between-group odontometric comparisons.

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• Although absolute tooth dimensions provide useful information on relative population relationships, odontometric comparisons are even more discriminating when tooth shape is also taken into account.

• When the major geographic subdivisions of humankind are analysed on the basis of simple genetic markers, population geneticists find that

• Africans are the most highly differentiated from all other regional populations.

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• Asiatic Indians, Middle Easterners, and Europeans form a coherent genographic grouping.• Mainland Asian and Asian-derived groups in the Americans and the

Pacific cluster together at low to intermediate levels of differentiation. • Australians remain the most enigmatic population from a genetic

standpoint, with hints of distant historical ties to both Southeast Asia and Africa.

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• In general, when both tooth size and shape are taken into account,

odontometric data provide a useful tool for assessing population

relationships.

• Tooth size variation has also been used to assess temporal trends in

recent human evolution.

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DENTAL MORPHOLOGY AND POPULATION HISTORY

• Human populations exhibit a great deal of within and between-group variation in the frequencies of various crown and root traits.• The utility of dental morphology in resolving questions of

population history is well illustrated by a problem that has concerned anthropologists for decades: the question of Native American origins.

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• Turner defined two complexes: Sinodont (North Asian) and Sundadont (Southeast Asian).• First, the suite of variables that characterized the Sinodent complex

of north Asians also characterized all Native American populations. • Although there is dental variation among New World populations, it

appears that all were derived from ancestral populations in North Asia.

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• Second, Polynesians and Micronesians exhibited crown and root trait

frequencies in accord with the Sunadont pattern, so the historical inference is

that these groups were ultimately derived from Southeast Asian populations.

• In addition to assessing broad patterns of historical relationships, dental

morphology has also been used to measure micro-differentiation among local

populations within circumscribed geographic regions.

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THE ENVIRONMENTAL INTERFACE: TEETH AND

BEHAVIOR • Interest here is with alterations of the tooth crown, which indirectly reflect

four classes of human behavior:

i. Dietary

ii. Implemental

iii. Incidental cultural

iv. Intentional cultural

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DIETARY BEHAVIOR

• Since the early 1980s, isotope and trace element analyses of bone collagen and apatite have been widely used to infer general characteristics of the diet of earlier human populations.• Within and between-group variation in attrition may reflect the

nature of food-stuffs being consumed.

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• Early hunter-gatherer and agricultural populations are characterized by rapid rates and pronounced degrees of crown wear, although the relative contributions of attrition and abrasion to this wear was probably highly variable. • Angle of crown wear, rather than absolute degree of wear, may

distinguish groups practicing different subsistence economies

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• In addition to crown wear, certain dental pathologies can be utilized

to make inferences about dietary and other cultural behavior.

• As the constituents of a hunter-gatherer diet did not generally

promote the formation of carious lesions, these groups are

characterized by low caries frequencies.

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• With an increased reliance on plant foods and food preparation techniques, which broke down complex carbohydrates into simpler sugars, caries rates increased. • But, despite the fact that carious lesions increased in earlier

agricultural populations, this increase was modest compared with the extremely high caries rates in modern populations.

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• The analysis of caries rates, crown wear, is most informative when studied in the context of circumscribed geographic populations. • Comparisons between prehistoric and modern populations also

show a dramatic rise in caries rates following the introduction of refined carbohydrates into native diets that had hitherto consisted primarily of animal products (protein and fat).

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IMPLEMENTAL BEHAVIOUR

• The use of teeth as tools is most commonly associated with populations particularly Eskimos, this behaviour is not limited in either time or space.• Humans throughout history have taken advantage of the

strength, form, and ready availability of their teeth to perform a variety of functions from carding wool to holding bobby pins.

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• Teeth do not record all instances of tool use, but they can reflect repetitive behaviours and traumatic episodes. • In addition to patterns of uniform wear generated by attrition

and abrasion, enamel and dentine can also be removed through traumatic fracturing.

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• Although chipping can be caused by such things as grit accidentally introduced into food, it is frequently attributed to using the teeth as tools, especially among Eskimos.

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INCIDENTAL CULTURAL BEHAVIOUR

• Several patterned behaviours, which do not reflect either implemental use or intentional modification, leave an imprint on teeth. • Habitual pipe smokers commonly hold a pipe on either or both

sides of the mouth in the region of the left or right canines. • Another cultural practice that leaves unintended wear is labret

usage.

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• The wear pattern produced by labret use is very distinctive; it is manifest as a polished facet on the labial or buccal surfaces of the anterior or posterior teeth, respectively.• A thorough perusal of the ethnographic literature would

probably reveal many other cultural practices that leave unintentional marks on the teeth.

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INTENTIONAL CULTURAL MODIFICATION

• Unlike other animals, however, which make do with the biological equipment they are provided with, humans can modify the appearance of their mouths in a variety of ways.• In others, groups directly modify the appearance of their teeth,

especially the more visible incisors and canines.• Precious metals can also be inlayed as bands on the labial

surface or around the entire crown.

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• The reasons for dental mutilation may be idiosyncratic or culturally

prescribed.

• An interesting and not yet fully exploited anthropological usage of

dental mutilation would be to assess the diffusion of specific

practices from one region to another.

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DENTAL INDICATORS OF ENVIRONMENTAL STRESS

• Anthropologists have long sought methods to estimate relative levels of environmental stress on earlier human populations.• Growth arrest lines in long bones (i.e., Harris or transverse

lines) provide one measure of this phenomenon.

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• As dental asymmetry appears to have certain limitations as a

broad scale indicator of comparative stress levels, dental

anthropologists have shifted their attention to the analysis of

irregularities in the tooth crown that arise during amelogenesis

(enamel formation) and dentinogenesis (dentine formation).

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• The most readily observed manifestation of such growth irregularities is linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH), which takes the form of horizontal circumferential bands and/or pits on the tooth crown.• Experimental and clinical evidence shows that a wide range of phenomenon

can disrupt amelogenesis and stimulate hypoplastic banding/pitting. • However, the key stimulus in earlier human populations probably involved

some combination of nutritional deficiency and disease morbidity.

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• The numbers of bands and their degree of expression may also provide insights into the differential treatment of male and female children or differences in status within a population.

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REFERENCES • Eriksen TH, Nielsen. FS A History of AntHropology. Pluto press; London. 2nd

ed.

• MyAnthroLab Connections. Anthropology and the study of culture.

• Mayhall JT, Heikkenen T. Dental Anthropology. Oulu University Press.

• Scott RG. Dental Anthropology. In; Encyclopedia of Human Biology.

Academy Press. Washington.

• Turner, C. G., I1 (1986). The first Americans: The dental evidence. Nut.

Geogr. Res. 2, 37-46.

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• Brace CL, Rosenberg, KR, Hunt KD. Gradual change in human tooth size in the late Pleistocene and post- Pleistocene. Evolution 41, 705-720.