Anthropology is the study of humankind. It is a study of how humans create cultures of all varieties and how humans have evolved into what we are today both physically and culturally. The goal of anthropology is to explore different cultures and understand what is similar and what is different. It is this comparative base of inquiry that is so powerful in helping us understand what it is that humans do and why we do things.
The are four disciplines within the field of Anthropology: Cultural Anthropology, Biological Anthropology (or Physical Anthropology), Linguistics, and Archaeology.
Cultural Anthropology focuses on living cultures, not always "primative", to understand the nature of culture itself. Traditionally it has been looked at as the study of societies in far off and obscure places. Today, it is often "applied" to observe cultural settings in today's world. Problems such as modernization and even the impacts of corporate structure are studied by Cultural Anthropologists.
Biological Anthropology is the study of our long term evolution as humans set within a biological world. It is the search for understanding how and why we have evolved in the way we have. This involves the search for fossils of our earliest ancestors as well as the genetic search for our connections to each other as living people. A further aspect of this is to understand our relatedness to closely living relatives from the primate world since humans are classified as primates. Therefore, we find Anthropologists involved in the study of chimpanzes or gorillas. This is the study of Primatology but falls within the range of this larger discipline.
Language is a part of human culture and Linguistics as a discipline within Anthropology where the focus is on understand how we use language and how that language reflects our views of the world. We use language to communicate with each other and teach ourselves about the world inwhich we live. Language is a direct reflection of how we build a view of the world around us. Hopi Culture from Arizona has no word for time. Hopi do have a sense of time but it is very different from that of the western world where time is linear. For Hopi, time is cycles such as days, seasons, or years. If you do not have snow in your world, do you need a word for it? So understanding how people use language can help us to understand cultures. As well, Linguists can study languages to see how they are similar or different hoping to build understanding of how language has evolved. This is what is thought of as Historical Linguistics.
Archaeology is a part of Anthropology as well. The focus in archaeology is on how people adapted to their environments and how cultures changed, and why they changed. The exploration is based on how we, as humans, create material means by which to adapt. So through an investigation of our material culture we can unlock understanding about how peopled lived and why did things in certain ways. Archaeology provides a perspective on the nature of culture change because archaeologists have the luxury of exploring cultures over time. We can explore why the Mayan culture, for example, collapsed following the Classic period. We can explore how the site of Stonehenge evolved from something that was far different than the final product we see today as a monument in southern Britain.
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Why is Archaeology Anthropology? Explore the site of Stonehenge as it develops over time and identify how what is discussed is shaped by the goal to understand humankind.
http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/dept/d10/asb/anthro2003/archy/process/index.html
Overview of the History of Archaeology in relation to how it has fit within Anthropology.
Historically, archaeologists were interested more in the artifacts and places they were discovering. If we go back to the 1800s, it is clear that people were making discoveries that became puzzles. They asked questions such as who made the artifacts or who lived in these places? They focused more on collecting and classifying things at that point. They tried to trace things back from historic reference points, but they were dealing with finds that dated much earlier than historic records. As archaeologists worked to record the past, they not only classified and typed things but also began to order these finds in some sense of time. However, it was impossible to really date things until after 1950 when radiocarbon dating was discovered as a tool to date the past.
Gradually, however, people did finds ways to order the past into periods of time. Heinrich Schliemann excavated at what he thought was the city of Troy from Homer's writings. When he did, he was interested in finding layers of the city and therefore dug an enormous trench through the heart of the area. He identified a series of levels based on this excavation. This was the means by which early archaeologists could unlock time. They had to look for layers superimposed on each other representing different stages of culture or in Schliemann's case, historical events.
In this way, archaeologists created chronologies to go along with what were called "archaeological cultures". These cultures were based on similarities of traits that were part of typologies. So the Hohokam
culture could be identified by types of pottery, such as the jar on the right, that had certain design elements and other artifacts that were distinctive to a geographic area. Not only could archaeologists begin to talk in terms of cultures but based on what was learned from exploring things such as stratigraphy, this jar could be assigned to the Colonial Period for the Hohokam culture. There was really no way to know when the Colonial Period actually existed and for how long. People made assumptions about time.
Cultures were identified by a variety of observations that were made about artifacts, features, and sites. A great deal of interest was focused on classifying earthen mounds in the eastern United States for example.
This way of viewing archaeology was to change with the perspectives of several key individuals. Perhaps one of the most noteworthy was Gordon Wiley who conducted a large scale survey in the Viru Valley of Peru. Wiley began to focus on such things as the hierarchical relationships of certain sites to each other. He began to explore the organization of the culture of the Viru Valley. Another person who was to have a profound impact on archaeology was an anthropologist by the name of Julian Steward. Steward was working the Great Basin area with a group of living people known as the Shoshone. Steward explored not only how these people lived and adapted to the environment of the Great Basin, but he also explored archaeological sites in terms of how they too reflected this adaptation.
So the early history of archaeology was about culture and that evolved over time into a exploration of past life ways. The work of Wiley and Steward was to be followed by archaeologists such as David Clarke, Lewis Binford, Colin Renfrew, and others who would focus on such as issues as how people adapted to their environment, how interaction and exchange impacted cultures, or how cultures changed over time and what drove that change. So historically, archaeology defined itself as a part of Anthropology and archaeologists tended to shape a view that would define modern Archaeology as we see it today.