Anthropology For Dummies

Cameron M. Smith's fascination with humanity was sparked on a 1984 trip to Mexico's Maya ruins; by 1987, he was a student of both Harvard University's early human archaeology field school at Kenya's Leakey research station and the University of London's Institute of Archaeology. He then went to Durham University in northern England for a Joint Honours BA in Anthropology & Archaeology, followed by an MA in Anthropology at Portland State University (in Portland, Oregon) and a PhD from Canada's Simon Fraser University. Since 2002, Dr. Smith has taught a wide variety of courses as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Portland State University's Department of Anthropology; he has also taught at Washington State University and Linfield College. Dr. Smith's scientific works have been published in journals such as the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and the Journal of Field Archaeology and books published by International Monographs in Prehistory and Oxford's British Archaeology Reports. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation-funded Barrow Arctic Science Consortium. Reaching out from the academic world, Dr. Smith has written popular-science articles for Scientific American MIND, Archaeology, Playboy, Spaceflight, Skeptical Inquirer, South American Explorer, The Next Step, Cultural Survival Quarterly, The Bulletin of Primitive Technology, and other magazines. Anthropology For Dummies is Dr. Smith's second book. His first, written with Charles Sullivan, was The Top Ten Myths About Evolution (Prometheus, 2006). Evan T. Davies received his BA from Cornell University where he began his studies in anthropology. He earned a PhD in cultural anthropology from Rice University, and has conducted fieldwork throughout Europe, the South Pacific, and in many locations throughout sub-Saharan Africa. His doctoral dissertation reported on the land use patterns of the BaAka foragers of the central African rainforests whose subsistence and hunting strategies he studied while living with them through the seasons. He has recently become involved with the protection of archaeological sites in Iraq.