Social Science

Sir William Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) was a British archaeologist best known for his contributions to the study of ancient Egypt (known as Egyptology). He was the modern discoverer of the Merneptah Stele monument at Thebes and an important pioneer in…
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John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852) was an American explorer, government official and amateur archaeologist. His work in Central America is widely credited as being crucial to the rediscovery of Mayan civilization. According to researcher Joshua J. Mark, Stephens was born in…
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Major-General Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810-1895) was a British military officer, politician and scholar. He is best remembered for his groundbreaking work translating cuneiform tablets left by the ancient Assyrians. Once archaeologists were able to read ancient scripts like this,…
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When Jonah Lehrer’s third book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” imploded and took its author down with it, it had already sold hundreds of thousands of copies during the first half of 2012. The book has some merits despite Lehrer’s admitted partial fabrication…
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The anthropology of religion is the empirical study of religious institutions in relation to other social institutions, comparing religious beliefs and practices across culture. The point of view is one of cultural relativity, not evaluating one kind of religion as…
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The Anthropological Perspective: What Makes It Unique? The concept of culture is anthropology’s key concept. Besides the culture concept, however, anthropology also has various other distinctive ways of thinking about the world or about human cultures and societies. Of course…
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Triangulation in sociological research is the use of 3 or more contrasting methods in a study to produce 3 different sets or even types of data. Its purpose is to reduce the weight given to any individual set of results….
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Tell Abu Hureyra is the remains of a village, found on the south bank of the Euphrates River, in Syria. It was excavated by a British team in 1972 and 1973. The village was subsequently flooded under Lake Assad, a…
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Understanding Structuralism in Psychology  Structuralism was the first “school” of psychology devoted to applying the scientific method to psychology. Edward Titchener and Wilhelm Wundt were the pioneers of this approach though Wundt is considered to be the father of Structuralism….
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Anthropology is, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, “the scientific study of the origin, the behavior, and the physical, social, and cultural development of humans”. The word Anthropology derives from the Greek “anthropos”, meaning “human”. It falls under the broad…
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