Research In Anthropology

For more than 60 years, Anthropology at UBC has maintained a reputation in Canada and worldwide for innovative research and teaching. In particular, we emphasize field-based inquiry, offering all of our undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to directly participate in original ethnographic, archaelogical, media and museum projects under the supervision of faculty members. The Department of Anthropology offers a diversity of courses with concentrations in socio-cultural anthropology (including medical and linguistic); anthropological archaeology; and museum and visual anthropology.

Anthropologists at UBC work in leading edge research in British Columbia, Canada and globally across the broad fields of anthropological archaeology, sociocultural anthropology, and visual and museum anthropology. The Department of Anthropology is partnered with several major research initiatives, including:

• The Museum of Anthropology (MOA).
• The Laboratory of Archaeology (LOA) has just completed a CFI-funded renovation and expansion of its research labs and storage facilities.
• The Ethnographic Film Unit is a video production unit within the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The Film Unit draws upon the combined strengths of anthropologists, filmmakers, students, and community members.

In addition Anthropology hosts a number of Research Projects which draw together reseachers focused on specific projects and themes, often through major research grants:

• The Acoustic Ecology Project is studying how people process auditory information through the integration of general congitive and individual multi-modal (auditory, visual) comprehension.
• Co-evolution of Human Societies and Landscapes in Early China is an archaeological study of landscape during the formation of the Shang civilization (c. 1600-1050 BC).
• The Dundas Island Project is a multi-disciplinary study of the last 11,000 years of history on the northern coast of BC through archaeology, geography, paleo-environmental reconstruction, and indigenous oral records.
• Forests and Oceans for the Future focuses on ecological knowledge and the production of mutli-media and educational resources in collaboration with indigeous communities.
• The Kaska Language Project develops language materials and archives in association with the First Nations Language Program at UBC and Kaska-speaking communities of northern BC.