Learn Archaeology & Anthropology with any AI

Two disciplines, one subject: humanity.

• Archaeology — prehistoric, classical and historical, reading the past from its objects.
• Scientific methods — radiocarbon dating, isotopes and ancient DNA, rewriting what we thought we knew.
• Social & cultural anthropology — the diversity of living human cultures.
• Biological anthropology — human evolution and our place among the primates.
• Ethnographic methods — understanding a culture by living inside it.

Real people, real breakthroughs.

• Charles Darwin — placed humans within the evolutionary story.
• The Leakey family — decades of discoveries of early human ancestors in East Africa.
• The ancient-DNA revolution — recovering genomes from bone, transforming prehistory.
• Franz Boas — the "father of American anthropology" and of cultural relativism.
• Bronisław Malinowski — made long-term immersive fieldwork the method.
• Clifford Geertz — "thick description," reading culture as a web of meaning.

Real, uncomfortable debates.

• Cultural relativism vs universal values. Can we understand other cultures without judging them — and should we never judge?
• Reading fragments. How much interpretation the evidence can really bear.
• The ethics of human remains. Excavating and displaying the dead, and who consents.
• Who owns the past? Repatriation of artefacts and remains to their communities.
• Nature vs culture. How much of human behaviour is universal, and how much made.

A route in — everything runs from the panel above.

1. Run Orientation on human origins, or on ethnographic method.
2. Use Great Debates on cultural relativism.
3. Connect to History and Biology, which meet in this node.
4. Read Geertz or Boas alongside a good survey of human evolution.

The discipline's gift is perspective: your own culture is one way of being human, not the only one.