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[starr103]

Sometimes anthropology makes me want to bang my head against a wall. It makes me feel so intelligent and so ignorant all at the same time. Some of the things we are studying (mainly in Cultural) are so... misrepresented, I guess would be the word. One of the articles I am reading basically implies that Europe had no contact with Asia until about

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[starr103]

That is one of the problems with archaeology and I think that is definitely one of the things that sets us apart. I, personally, want to look at archaeological evidence from an almost ethnohistorical point of view. I don't want to just "dig it, clean it, label it, store it, lets go dig some more!" I want to learn about ancient societies and figure out how they would have fit into the world at the time in which they really existed. It's something like cultural anthropology, just with cultures that don't necessarily exist anymore and so we use the material remains to learn about how they live. Basically, I don't just want to dig, I want to do quite a bit of research along with it and try to fit the pieces together.

I think this is a big problem with archaeology, because people don't want to mix it with cultural, and I think it's necessary that we do. It's like what we're talking about in Ethnohistory right now: anthropologists need history and vice versa, but I also think it's very true that archaeologists need anthropology and vice versa. And you get into politics a lot when you go that deep into the construction of the schools of thought, which is kind of ridiculous. I don't see why we can't all work together, but that's just me.

I hope the grad school search goes better :) I'm sure you fit somewhere.