Physical anthropology, or biological anthropology, which studies primate behavior, human evolution, osteology, forensics and population genetics;
Cultural anthropology, (called social anthropology in the United Kingdom and now often known as socio-cultural anthropology).

Areas studied by cultural anthropologists include social networks, diffusion, social behavior, kinship patterns, law, politics, ideology, religion, beliefs, patterns in production and consumption, exchange, socialization, gender, and other expressions of culture, with strong emphasis on the importance of fieldwork or participant-observation (i.e living among the social group being studied for an extended period of time);
Linguistic anthropology, which studies variation in language across time and space, the social uses of language, and the relationship between language and culture, and
Archaeology, which studies the material remains of human societies. Archaeology itself is normally treated as a separate (but related) field in the rest of the world, although closely related to the anthropological field of material culture, which deals with physical objects created or used within a living or past group as mediums of understanding its cultural values.
More recently, some anthropology programs began dividing the field into two, one emphasizing the humanities and critical theory, the other emphasizing the natural sciences and empirical observation.

Physical anthropology

Physical anthropology, or biological anthropology, studies the mechanisms of biological evolution, genetic inheritance, human adaptability and variation, primatology, primate morphology, and the fossil record of human evolution. See also: Race.
Physical anthropology developed in the 19th century, prior to the rise of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, also known as the theory of evolution, and Gregor Mendel's theory of genetics. Physical anthropology was so called because all of its data was physical (fossils, especially human bones). With the rise of Darwinian theory and the modern synthesis, anthropologists had access to new forms of data, and many began to call themselves "biological anthropologists."

Some of the early branches of physical anthropology, such as early anthropometry, are now rejected as pseudoscience. Metrics such as the cephalic index were used to derive behavioral characteristics. Two of the earliest founders of scientific physical anthropology were Paul Pierre Broca and Franz Boas.

Cultural anthropology, also called social anthropology or socio-cultural anthropology, forms one of four commonly-recognized fields of anthropology, the holistic study of humanity. It is the branch of anthropology that has developed and promoted "culture" as a meaningful scientific concept; it is also the branch of anthropology that studies cultural variation among humans. The anthropological concept of "culture" reflects in part a reaction against earlier Western discourses based on an opposition between "culture" and "nature", according to which some human beings lived in a "state of nature". Anthropologists argue that culture is "human nature," and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically, and teach such abstractions to others.
Since humans acquire culture through learning, people living in different places or different circumstances may develop different cultures. Anthropologists have also pointed out that through culture people can adapt to their environment in non-genetic ways, so people living in different environments will often have different cultures. Much of anthropological theory has originated in an appreciation of and interest in the tension between the local (particular cultures) and the global (a universal human nature, or the web of connections between people in distinct places/circumstances). Anthropological linguistics is the study of language through human genetics and human development. This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use. Whatever one calls it, this field has had a major impact in the studies of visual perception (especially color) and bioregional democracy, both of which are concerned with distinctions that are made in languages about perceptions of the surroundings.

Conventional linguistic anthropology also has implications for sociology and self-organization of peoples. Study of the Penan people, for instance, reveals that they have six different and distinct words for "we" — which may imply a more detailed understanding of co-operation, consensus and consensus decision-making than English. Anthropological linguistics studies these distinctions, and relates them to life ways and to actual bodily adaptation to the senses, much as it studies distinctions made in languages regarding the colors of the rainbow: seeing the tendency to increase the diversity of terms, as evidence that there are distinctions that bodies in this environment must make, leading to situated knowledge and perhaps a situated ethics, whose final evidence is the differentiated set of terms used to denote "we". Archaeology, archeology, or archeology (from the Greek words αρχαίος = ancient and λόγος = word/speech/discourse) is the study of human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, biofacts, human remains, and landscapes. The goals of archaeology are to document and explain the origins and development of human culture, understand culture history, chronicle cultural evolution, and study human behavior and ecology, for both prehistoric and historic societies. It is considered to be one of the four sub-fields of anthropology.