ABSTRACT
Closely allied with many sciences since its beginnings, anthropology developed its own identity and publications in the late 19th century. Publications with anthropological themes abounded in general scientific, medical, and natural history journals, among these Science, Nature, and American Naturalist. Anthropologists have served in the office of president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Anthropology continues today as a section of that organization. Archaeology, considered part of anthropology here in the United States, has lengthy and obvious ties to history, but nevertheless has a strong scientific component that has grown over time. Anthropology in the U.S. was shaped intellectually by the fact that much early research was focused on Native Americans: Past populations were linked to living peoples, whose languages needed to be learned so that people could be interviewed and oral texts recorded. So American anthropologists tended to be trained in the four-subfield view of the discipline, in which one learned cultural, linguistic, and physical anthropology, and archaeology, as interlocking facets of an underlying discipline. The founding figures of U.S. academic anthropology (like Franz Boas and Frederic Ward Putnam) and their students (Alfred Kroeber, Alfred Tozzer and many others) made substantial contributions to all subfields. Although in recent years the centrality of the four subfields to anthropology has been challenged, recognizable specialties within anthropology are still published in the journal literature of anthropology.
