The Department of Anthropology at the University of Vienna has been and remains a four-field department: Human Evolution, Human Ecology, Social Anthropology, and Human Ethology. We teach, train students, and do research across the four subfields and have faculty in each.

Our mission statement

Anthropology is perhaps the classic multidisciplinary field, combining physcial sciences, life sciences, and human sciences in all of its explanations. The excellences of today's academic anthropology owe partly to its absorptions of techniques from neighboring fields, from sociobiology through computer visualisation and biomathematics, more actively than most analogous entities within the natural sciences at Vienna.
Anthropology is embedded in the Faculty Center for Organismic Systems Biology and therefore focusing on ontogeny, phylogeny, behaviour, human ecology and social anthropology.
Though the Institute for Anthropology is a small unit, it is nearly the best in the world in three distinct areas: geometric morphometrics, urban ethology and virtual (computer-mediated) anthropology.
Efforts need to be invested in the development of curriculum in these areas, in outreach to students and postdocs from across the EU and from outside, and in heightened public awareness of the importance of these domains for public understanding of science at time when virtually all rational thought on these topics is being drowned out by the propaganda from the molecular life sciences.
As a small unit, the Department for Anthropology must perform at a level above that of larger units in order to be evaluated favourably. Work throughout 2008 needs to proceed forward on all of the new trusts, both within anthropology and outside it.

The new departure involving pediatric public health and dentistry, for instance, call the attention of an additional ministry to our competences in human anatomical variability and its biometrical analysis; at the same time, the spectacular new projects in human movement  attractiveness studies, which are tailor-made for dissemination  via the mass media, are underwritten by methods at the same high level biometric and biomathematical sophistication.
The excellence of the Department for Anthropology also arises from our fieldworks and excavations in Ethiopia and Peru, for example the discovery of a new hominid femur in Galili, dated over 4 million years.
Anthropology as an intellectual domain will turn outward for its inspirations as often as it turns inward - we can best serve the larger university in its collaborative scientific and humanistic context.