Anthropology: A Research Guide
The purpose of this guide is to serve as a starting point for your research. It outlines strategies for locating books and journal articles in the field of Anthropology. Other resources are listed at the bottom of this page. This guide is intended to be used in conjunction with the website Resources for Anthropology and Archaeology.
Locating Books in ACORN,
the library's catalog of its books, media, and
journal titles
Note: Acorn does not include journal article
titles or authors (see Locating Journal Articles)
If you are beginning a research project, it may be most useful
to begin searching Acorn using a keyword search. Once you have looked at the
full record for a few items that are close to your topic you will have a better
sense of the subject headings that are applied to material on this topic.
For example, if you do a "Words Anywhere" search for Native Americans,
you will see that the subject heading that is used for books on this population
is Indians of North America. You can click on any of the subject headings
in a record and Acorn will automatically run a search on that heading.
Tip: If the subject heading in the selected record
is very specific Anthropology--South America--Encyclopedia and you
are interested in more than just Encyclopedias, you will want to copy the
main phrase Anthropology--South America into a new search.
Narrowing a search: Connect different concepts with the
word AND. Ex. incas AND religion.
Broadening a search: Use the truncation symbol to pick up variants
of those terms. Ex. maya$ will retrieve items with the terms maya, mayan or
mayans).
Connect similar concepts with the word OR. Ex. inca$ AND (mumm$ OR embalming).
Tip: It may be necessary to try several searches,
varying your key terms each time and incorporating words from the subject
heading, in order to produce a list of relevant items.
The books in the Central Library are arranged by Library of Congress Classification call numbers. Most of the call number ranges that are relevant to Anthropology are as follows:
| Third floor: | Fifth floor: |
| CC 1-72 General Archaeology | GF Anthropogeography |
| CC 73-81 Methodology | GN 1-49 Anthropology (general) |
| GN 49-296 Physical Anthropology | |
| Eighth floor: | GN 301-673 Ethnology |
| E 51-78 Indians of North America | GR 1-99 Folklore (general) |
| F 1201-3430.1 Latin & South America | GR 100-113 Folklore, North America |
| GR 114-133 Folklore, Latin & South America | |
| GR 135-263 Folklore, Europe | |
| GR 430-950 Folklore (by specific subjects) |