Anthropology intrigued Anderson because it focused on major questions of human existence, such as why people fought wars, practice religion, or organized themselves the way they do in groups and cultures.
The major historical figures of the field of anthropology were not afraid to tackle big questions or to challenge accepted stereotypes about race or culture, and this appealed to Anderson's 1960s-era idealism.
[2] Anderson recognized very early in his career that CRM offered exciting research opportunities; occasionally with massive levels of funding, and that an M.A.
[citation needed] Upon the conclusion of the Zebree project in 1977, Anderson took a job for seven years with a CRM firm in Michigan, Commonwealth Associates, Inc.
That same year he was awarded a dissertation fellowship from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Associated Universities’ Laboratory Graduate Participation Program.
The DOE fellowship gave Anderson an office in the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site facility near Williston, South Carolina, the rural community where his family currently resides.
At the Andersons' restored plantation home in South Carolina, for many years they have held a barbecue for researchers working at the nearby Topper archaeological site, an event that drew leading paleontologists, archeologists and anthropologists from around the country.
[citation needed] Anderson was born in St. Louis, MO in 1949, but he spent his childhood and teenage years in various locations including in the northeast, midwest, and southeast, graduating from high school in Milledgeville, GA in 1967.
Anderson has helped develop models of Early Archaic settlement in the Southeast involving mobility and interaction at the band and macroband scale (with Glen Hanson)).
;[15] Paleoindian colonization scenarios in the Americas, including the idea of 'staging areas' where early populations concentrated and from which they later radiated out over the surrounding region;[16] least cost movement pathways for initial colonizing populations in the Americas (with Chris Gillam);[17] and the causes of late prehistoric chiefly cycling behavior, the emergence and collapse of complex chiefdoms against a regional background of simple chiefdoms,[18] a concept initially noted by Marshall Sahlins[19] and elaborated upon by Henry T. Wright.
Anderson has also examined global climate change including projected sea level rise and its impacts on prehistoric and early historic cultures in the Southeast and beyond;[20][21] and has helped prepare edited volumes synthesizing research on the Paleoindian and Early Archaic,[22] Middle Archaic,[23] and Woodland[24] periods in the southeastern United States.