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Anthropology
Mission

History

Shortly after the University of South Florida was founded in 1956 (classes wouldn’t start until 1960), the Anthropology Program was established. The first Anthropology instructor was Simon Messing, whose research and teaching commitments varied widely, encompassing cultural and medical anthropology as well as archaeology. Messing took his first USF anthropology class (“Introduction to Anthropology”) to the tip of the Interbay Peninsula in Tampa Bay in 1960 to excavate the Gadsden Point Site, currently underneath MacDill Air Force Base. Messing, Robert Fuson from Geography, and John Adams and Charles W. Arnade from the College of Basic Studies, intermittently served as director of the program until 1967. In that year, the program became a department, with Roger T. Grange, who had joined the program in 1965, serving as Chair.

The department grew rapidly with Grange at the helm, collecting seven new full-time faculty members, including Gilbert Kushner, who was elected department Chair in 1971. Three years later, in 1974, Kushner and fellow faculty, including Michael V. Angrosino, Paul Edson, Edgar G. Frazier, Roger T. Grange, Evelyn Kessler, J. Jerome Smith, Patricia Waterman, Curtis W. Wienker, and J. Raymond Williams, established the M.A. graduate program in Applied Anthropology—the first such program in the U.S. The first graduate of this program was Dora Harrison in 1976, with a thesis entitled, “Aftercare for the Mentally Ill in Pinellas County, Florida.”

Williams and Grange also established the M.A. track in Public Archeology in 1974 as part of the national movement toward professionalization of archaeology and recognition of its role in applied anthropology; this was the first such graduate program in the country. This program graduated two archaeologists in 1976: Marion Almy (“Survey and Assessment of Known Archaeological Sites in Sarasota County, Florida”) and Joan Deming (“An Archaeological Survey of the Beker Phosphate Corporation Property in Manatee County, Florida”). Since then, USF has become the leading institution in the state for producing Florida archaeologists. Today, more than 30 percent of the Florida Archaeological Council, the organization for professional archaeologists in the state, is made up of graduates of the USF Public Archaeology program.

Kushner served as department Chair until 1985. Just before he stepped down, in 1984, he and the Anthropology faculty created and implemented the Ph.D. program in Applied Anthropology—another first for the field of Anthropology. The M.A. and Ph.D. programs provided the template for the great variety of applied training programs that now exist in the U.S.

In 2005, Kushner was the recipient of the Sol Tax Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology. Quoting the award announcement, “Gilbert Kushner is one of a very small number of anthropologists who have been instrumental in providing for the institutionalization of applied anthropology, an arduous and professionally risky task that has over the past three decades provided a solid foundation and institutional base to a subfield that had previously existed more as a passing fancy, subject to shifts in disciplinary attention and vagaries of the marketplace. He has been a major player in the rapid expansion of applied anthropology in our time, and a key contributor to building the structures that ensure its continued prominence within the discipline… Kushner has written extensively on the institutionalization of applied anthropology, and most particularly on the development of applied training programs. His insights on these matters remain among the most often cited in the available literature.”

Since the early 1980s, the Department of Anthropology has had the good fortune of being led by five distinguished applied anthropologists: Michael V. Angrosino (1985-1988), Rodger T. Grange (1988-1991), Susan D. Greenbaum (1991-1997), Linda M. Whiteford (1997-2003), and S. Elizabeth Bird (2003-present). Today, the program has grown to include a Ph.D. track in Archaeology (beginning in 2003) as well as a dual-degree program with the USF College of Public Health (since 2004), where students can earn an M.A. or Ph.D. in Applied Anthropology along with the M.P.H.