My name's Gilbert Tostevin, I am an
assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology.
Anthropology is divided into four subfields and they overlap to varying degrees.
Biological anthropology, which is the
study of the  evolutionary history of humans and primates. 
Archaeology which is the
study of
material culture produced, the cultural
behavior in general,
produced by humans in all times and
places.
Cultural Anthropology, which is the study of 
how humans find meaning in the
present-day among different cultural groups. 
We also have linguistic anthropology as the
fourth sub-field in Anthropology
and that's the study of languages and how people communicate, as a cultural phenomenon. 
I'm an archeologist,
so I study humans through the material
culture they made
and left in the geological record. I wanted
to go
into University to get my bachelors and I
wanted to actually produce something new.
Archaeology is a great way doing that. I went on excavations as an undergraduate
and I saw how amazing it could be to
uncover
an artifact that might be two hundred
thousand years old
and the last person to touch this was not
a modern human.
That's why I got into Anthropology.
I am working on excavation and analysis of upper Paleolithic
time period which is the time period around
which Neanderthals disappeared and modern Humans replaced them.
I'm interested in why we survived whereas
they did not.
One of the hypotheses that I think is
more interesting
is the use of the landscape socially.
Neanderthals were known to actually use very
little of their landscape
in terms our relations with other Neanderthal
groups and we know this by looking at
how they moved rock from geological
sources into the sites where they left
their stone tools.
They don't move their stone tools around
very much, modern humans did. 
They would contact people over great
distances as many as 200 kilometers away.
We could rely upon other humans across
the landscape
as sort of social security nets. 
One of the things I do
is teach people how to make stone tools.
Flintknapping, this is called, this is the oldest
technology humans have
ever made and it's also still the
sharpest
technology we can make lasers are not as
sharp a stone tools, neither is steel.
It's an art form, its also something
archaeologist do to
learn how people did in the past.
It is really knocking two rocks together
Even  something from as simple as a stone
tool
will lead you to start talking about
kinship systems and morals.
This is a hand axe. The fact that it is
immoral in a given society to wed
before you make one of these. By looking at how
this might be produced in one context
versus being produced in this other
context I can actually learn
if people were learning from each other
fifty thousand years ago.
Did we learn from them? Did they learn from
us? What was that interaction? You can get
that from something as simple as a stone
tool.
There are two 1000 level
anthropology courses which are perfect
for freshman. The first is
anthropology 1001 human evolution, which
is a course on
biological anthropology and study of how
we came to be the way we
we are today through our biological
evolution. There's also a course called 1003,
understanding cultures and it teaches
the
anthropological understanding of
causal variability
and  why people behave the way they
do in different cultural context around
the globe today.
Well I've taught a seminar, which was  actually a honors
seminar and this year I'm going to be
teaching it as a freshman seminar. A course
on learning Anthropology through Science Fiction. The reason particularly for
teaching Anthropology to freshman
through a class on science fiction
is to show how the questions that
anthropology
asks are in fact very very similar to
the questions that
science fiction asks. I pair anthropology
texts and science fiction texts,
Frank Herbert's Dune to teach cultural
ecology, how humans adapt
environmentally to different locations.
Ursula LeGuin's "Left Hand of Darkness". She incorporates a lot about anthropology into her works
primarily by taking an ethnographic
perspective and this makes a lot of
sense because
her father was Alfred Kroeber, one of the
founding fathers
of Anthropology in North America. I also
use
work of earlier sort of classic
golden age science fiction
HP lovecraft is great for teaching
archaeology, using the horrific sight of
archaeology don't know where you can
find. Robert Heinlein to teach
kinship systems and I use more modern
steampunk
novelists like Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age"
to teach globalization. These are some of
the issues that you see
in science fiction and you see in anthropology, and you see in the present day. 
