Practice question · Multiple choice
One researcher records a dying language’s last speakers; another sifts a trash layer for pottery. Why is this one discipline rather than two?
Hints
- Ask what all four subfields are trying to find out.
- The methods have nothing in common, so something else holds them together.
Show the answer
A. Because both reconstruct a way of life from the traces it left
Why
The unity is the question, not the method. A pottery shard and a last speaker are different evidence for the same problem: how a way of living is organised and passed on.
Practise What is Anthropology?
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