Founded in 1911, Connecticut College today is where liberal education is being redefined for the 21st century. Connections is Connecticut College's reinvention of liberal arts education—a new kind of curriculum that lets you integrate your interests into a meaningful educational pathway to carry you through college and into a fulfilling, effective career and life. With a major, interdisciplinary study, a relevant internship, a world language, and an interconnected outlook, you’ll connect your education to the world, and make a world of difference.
Anthropology at Connecticut College
Faculty members of the Department of Anthropology have widely differing research interests in the study of the human condition, but all share a common bond in their commitment to teaching, field-based learning, and contributing new knowledge to their field. Their respective areas of scholarship span the major fields of the discipline, including archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology.
Whether in our own neighborhoods or on the other side of the globe, the forces shaping our societies are in constant flux; the department’s approaches to teaching must respond to those complex changes, going beyond the boundaries of traditional scholarship while remaining committed to the comparative and holistic perspectives that make anthropology unique among the social sciences. Anthropologists in the department have crafted reciprocal collaborations with community partners for the purpose of training students in the many facets of ethnographic research while addressing local challenges.
A rich selection of regular anthropology course offerings are imbued with the research strengths of Connecticut College anthropology faculty, including modern material culture studies, garbology, experimental archaeology, migration, social movements, language revitalization, sustainable food systems, the anthropology of landscapes, and images of race and “otherness” in art. Professors help each student delve deeper into a selected problem or theme by linking to the innovative Connections curriculum.
The Archaeology Labs at Connecticut College are dedicated to supporting collaborative research between students and faculty. Recent projects that culminated in student-faculty conference presentations and peer-reviewed publications include the following: the archaeological study of cigarette discard in New London; the experimental archaeological study of the processes by which thermally altered rock is generated with ancient cooking practices; the methods with which we identify ancient earthen floors in the archaeological record; the archaeological study of contemporary illegal discard; and, the experimental archaeological study of Stó:lō-Coast Salish slate fish knife production.
Experimental Archaeology in Course(s)
ANT 396: Experimental Archaeology
The design and execution of controlled experiments for the purpose of advancing archaeological studies of premodern technologies, production practices, materiality, and site formation processes. Emphasis is placed on experimental design, the generation and testing of hypotheses, selection of experimental procedures, analysis, and the application of findings to extant archaeological research. Archaeological and experimental archaeological curricula emerging from Anthropology emphasizes philosophical (and methodological) stances argued by Schiffer (1994) as well as Marsh and Ferguson (2010) and draws a formal distinction between experimental archaeology and archaeological experimentation / replication.
