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Major Requirements

In addition to adhering to the UC Merced and School of Social Science, Humanities and Arts requirements, students in the Anthropology major must also complete at least 48 units in Anthropology courses, as well as one additional 4-unit quantitative reasoning course and one additional 4-unit upper division interdisciplinary thematic articulation course that may simultaneously fulfill General Education Requirements. Courses in the major emphasis must be taken for a letter grade, and specifically may not be taken on a pass/no pass basis unless the course is only offered on a pass/no pass basis. Required courses are:

Lower Division Major Requirements [16 units]:

  • ANTH 1: Introduction to Socio-cultural Anthropology
  • ANTH 3: Introduction to Anthropological Archaeology
  • ANTH 5: Introduction to Biological Anthropology
  • One lower division quantitative methods course from the following:
    • ECON 10: Statistical Inference
    • MATH 18: Statistics for Scientific Data Analysis
    • POLI 10: Analysis of Political Data
    • PSY 10: Analysis of Psychological Data
    • SOC 10: Statistics for Sociology

Upper Division Major Requirements [40 units]:

  • ANTH 100: History of Anthropological Thought and Practice
  • One upper division field methods course selected from the following1:
    • ANTH 170: Ethnographic Methods
    • ANTH 176: Archaeological Field Methods
  • One upper division laboratory or archival methods course selected from the following:
    • ANTH 172: Ethnohistory
    • ANTH 174: Lithic Analysis
    • ANTH 178: Human Osteology
    • ANTH 179: Bioarchaeology
  • One upper division anthropology course from each of the following three fields:
    • Socio-cultural anthropology (ANTH 110 through ANTH 129)
    • Anthropological archaeology (ANTH 130 through ANTH 149)
    • Biological anthropology (ANTH 150 through ANTH 169)
  • At least three additional upper division courses in Anthropology
  • At least one upper division interdisciplinary thematic articulation course outside of Anthropology2

1 Note: The upper division field methods requirement may also be satisfied by taking an archaeological Field School from an approved institution.  Consult a SSHA advisor

2 Consult a SSHA advisor or the Anthropology website for approved courses.