Although Tony Hillerman’s A Thief of Time is a work of fiction, it could serve just as well as a primer on anthropology because in the course of the action of the novel the characters address all four of the subfields of anthropology, including linguistics (which is the study both of language development and of the ways in which language and culture interact with each other); physical anthropology (which is the study of human and our close primate relatives and how we have developed over time – via evolutionary pressures – into the species that we are today); archaeology (which is the practice of searching for the material remains of the past through excavation and related techniques) and cultural anthropology (which covers the core concepts of the discipline, looking at how all humans belong to certain groups within which individuals share habits, beliefs, customs, language and material culture).
