An anthropological focus is a characteristic of the research of Michael Shanks, Walter Scheidel and Richard Martin, but in quite different ways.

Michael's works on the theory and history of design (his work, for example, on ancient Corinthian ceramics), but he also sees archaeology as a relationship between past and present - one that necessitates reflection upon contemporary interests in, for example, the ancient Greek and Roman past.

Walter's ancient history is broad and comparative, involving research, for example, into demography and disease , setting Greaco-Roman antiquity in anthropological context.

Richard has recently been following up his interest in the performance of ancient Greek epic with ethnographic visits to western Crete where an epic tradition lives on, very conscious of its relationship with the history of epic.