In the late 1800s, anthropological scholarship was reserved primarily for East Coast establishments such as the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard’s Peabody Museum. But that would soon change, and the University of Utah would play an important role in the discipline’s expansion into the Intermountain West.

What started out at the U as a small collection of artifacts, then often referred to as curios, grew into a museum while expeditions across the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau became established field schools. As faculty with different interests and expertise came and went, cultural history explanations merged with ecological explanations. Eventually, a disjointed, four-field department transformed again, and the Department of Anthropology became a problem-centered, quantitative program organized around evolution, behavior and socioenvironmental relations.

In 2026, this internationally visible department with its recognizable quantitative theme is celebrating its 100th birthday.

“It’s true that, in many respects, the department has reformed and changed,” said Department Chair Adrian Bell, “but there is a continuity of being fairly grounded in strong empirical work within Utah and with viewpoints that eventually moved outward to other field sites around the world.”

Bell’s through-line shows a regionally focused, fragmented department transforming over more than a century into its role today as an empirically focused institution where research is not limited by the boundaries of the field but rather driven by the questions that need to be asked.

But it all started long before there was an official department, back when the U was still referred to as the University of Deseret.

The early days: regional expeditions and curios

In 1891, Henry Montgomery was appointed as chair of mineralogy, geology, and natural history at the U, leading fieldwork expeditions, teaching and managing the museum collection. He investigated all over Utah, attempting to contextualize many of the curios in the collection—items that had often come into the university’s possession from private collectors or returning missionaries. In 1893, Bryon Cummings was appointed as instructor of Latin and Greek and led fieldwork expeditions into southern Utah and the Four Corners region. Neil M. Judd emerged from Cummings’ programs to later become a Smithsonian Institution curator and one of the most influential archaeologists of the Southwest.

With Cummings as its instructor, the first official archaeology course at the U was offered in 1914, and the Department of Archaeology was finally organized. At that time, anthropology was still not a unified four-field discipline but pieced together from natural history, sociology, classics and a museum.

Even so, this fragmented beginning left a lasting imprint. The department’s later strength of intellectual porousness and cross-campus collaboration can be traced back to its early necessity of drawing from various fields.

Repeated reinvention builds a regional research institution

When the Department of Anthropology was formally organized in 1926 under Andrew A. Kerr, its faculty remained focused primarily on Utah, the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau. Returning to the same landscapes over and over allowed researchers to build on earlier observations. At this time the department itself was still fragile; a single departure could cause the department to contract, merge or nearly disappear entirely.

Then, in 1930, Julian H. Steward was appointed chair. His Great Basin ethnography helped lay the foundation for cultural ecology and theories of band organization, how humans organize in small groups. When Steward left in 1933, direct anthropology teaching and research were suspended while summer field archaeology continued. In 1935, anthropology was again combined with sociology.

Beginning in 1937, Elmer R. Smith conducted regional surveys, tested sites—including the site later known as Danger Cave, an important archaeological site in western Utah with human habitation evidence dating back to the end of the Pleistocene—and sought to establish a cultural sequence for western Utah. While Smith’s expeditions widened the program’s methods, Charles Dibble extended its geographic reach. Beginning in 1949, he and Arthur J.O. Anderson translated the foundational 16th-century Aztec-era manuscript known as the Florentine Codex from Nahuatl into English. The project ultimately took three decades and made Utah an internationally recognized center of Mesoamerican textual scholarship.

After World War II, University President A. Ray Olpin worked to build the U into a modern research university, and anthropology was reestablished as an independent department in 1948. Around that time, Jesse D. Jennings began converting the department’s regional work into an integrated research system, connecting statewide surveys, field schools, graduate training, museum collections, publications, professional networks, external grants and public policy.

With more controlled methods and the emerging tool of radiocarbon dating, Jennings returned to Danger Cave. He connected the resulting archaeological sequence with Steward’s ethnographic account of Great Basin foragers, proposing a long-term pattern of adaptation to arid environments. His Desert Culture concept was unique at the time because it was explanatory rather than chronological. The concept, explaining how ancient mobile hunter-gatherers successfully survived in the dry deserts of western North America, drew criticism but also generated research. A new departmental pattern emerged under which ambitious models would be valued, but they would be expected to encounter data, criticism and revision.

Jennings expanded that model through the Glen Canyon Project, an urgent survey and excavation effort conducted as the Glen Canyon Dam was built and the vast network of sandstone canyons began to flood. The project brought archaeologists together with historians, geologists and botanists to document hundreds of sites in a very short amount of time. Jennings also helped establish what is now the Natural History Museum of Utah and was instrumental in passing the 1973 state antiquities law. The law extended the department’s work into public stewardship and preservation.

By the 1960s, the department expanded into linguistics. Wick R. Miller, Ray Freeze and Mauricio Mixco developed a substantial tradition linking language analysis with oral history, Indigenous-language documentation and community education. The department’s move into the William Stewart Building, now part of the Crocker Science Complex, created more opportunities for informal conversation and collaboration.

At the end of the 60s, the department was broader and less liable to fall apart as individual faculty left, but it still wasn’t unified by a common intellectual theme. That next transformation would occur in the 70s and 80s.

Driven by questions, not disciplinary boundaries 

In the 70s and the 80s, the department moved toward viewing humans as a species that evolved culturally, genetically and biologically. This shift was due in large part to the particular faculty that arrived and a series of cross-campus interactions that broadened the questions they were driven to ask.

Dennis O’Rourke arrived in 1978 and expanded biological anthropology and population genetics. Jim O’Connell ran the field school at Nawthis Village—a prehistoric Fremont culture habitation site—and increasingly turned to ethnoarchaeology, widening the department beyond a Utah-centered culture-history program. Duncan Metcalfe showed up in 1978 and, dissatisfied with then-common anthropological methods of telling plausible stories consistent with earlier stories, fit right in with this increasingly quantitative cohort.

Kristen Hawkes, who later became well known for her work on the grandmother hypothesis, which provides an explanation for why human females live so long past their childbearing years, arrived in Utah in the mid 1970s as a cultural anthropologist and quantitative ethnographer. Her focus up to this point was on observing behavior, time allocation and social relationships, but a chance encounter with life scientist Eric Charnov nudged her toward incorporating evolutionary biology into her work, uniting apparently disparate features of human behavior through explicit theory.

These kinds of cross-campus encounters became more common and demonstrated how the department would no longer be limited by the boundaries of anthropology. Similar to the ways the department was assembled from disparate fields in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, faculty in the 70s and 80s would bring in ideas from across campus and test them with the kinds of field data that only anthropologists were uniquely trained to collect.

“Utah became one of the center points of these evolutionary, empirical approaches to understanding human behavior and culture from then on,” said Bell. A broader debate was happening on a national scale around how to understand human behavior, and Utah emerged as the home of a particular viewpoint that is still respected today.

Universal questions

The department reformed and changed, but it remained focused on questions and grounded in regional work that eventually expanded to field sites around the world. Bell sees this trajectory continuing as the department looks toward the future.

“We are fully committed to this scientific, empirically-based way of understanding the human condition and that of other primates. That is our identity… in the far future, that remains the case, and we will leverage it in order to gain further opportunities in answering the questions we feel are important.”

Bell noted that the department will also continue to play an important role in contributing applied anthropology to its home in Utah and Salt Lake City by actively engaging in projects to help with citizens’ well-being and contribute to Indigenous communities, asking questions that are universally appealing to everyone. “What makes us who we are?” said Bell. “Whether it’s our physiology or whether it’s our cultures or whether it’s: How do we become the way we are? [These are] broad defining questions that drive us in all aspects of our disciplines.”

Adapting to uncertain futures

For more than a century, faculty and students in the Department of Anthropology studied the human condition to explain patterns of behavior and adaptation and cross-cultural patterns so that we can understand where we are going as people. “It turns out that when you study the human condition and all its varieties, there are many solutions out there to social problems that different groups of people have come up with,” Bell said.

Regional classes, for example, show students how different groups adapted to new spaces or disruptions to the environment such as drought. Bell says that this can be applied to stressors we are facing now or in our unknown future too.

“Technology can be a shock. AI can be a shock,” he said. “We can study these [past] systems and see how they’ve adapted in different ways.
And we can realize the range of possibilities, the strategy set or the number of things that you can do.”

On its 100th birthday, the enduring work of the department is to use the past to look forward and ask: How can we adapt what we’ve learned to our own unforeseen challenges?