Through biological means, or "physical anthropology", we study humans as organisms, specifically by evolution and variation. According to Barbara Miller's book, "Cultural Anthropology in a Globalizing World," anthropology encompasses three subfields; the first being "primatology" which is the study of the nonhuman members of the order of mammals called primates. the second is paleoanthropology which is the study of human evolution through the evaluation of fossil records. and the third subfield is the study of contemporary human biological variation, which explains differences in the biological makeup and behavior of humans (DNA, body size, shape, nutrition, disease). In order to define anthropology, looking at a particular group of people through biological means can help us learn more about them physically.
Archaeology and linguistic anthropology are in essence two separate fields of anthropology. The way I saw or understood the text, however, I think it is possible that humans can communicate with each other through materialistic remains, thus I combined both fields. While archeology is the study of past human cultures by materialistic remains, linguistic anthropology is the study of human communication, including its origins, history, and variations. Two major areas of archeology are prehistoric, which follows the past of humans before written documentation, and historical, which covers the particular human past in societies that have recorded knowledge. There are specific areas when looking closely at linguistic anthropology, as well. Historical linguistics (the change of language over time and how they are related), descriptive linguistics (the structure of language, how each language structurally differ), and sociolinguistics (relationships among social variation, context, and linguistic variation). .
The last point that I came away with from the first chapter of Miller's text is cultural anthropology.
