Final answer:
Yes, American anthropology was first developed under Franz Boas at Columbia University. Boas played a significant role in shaping the field of anthropology in the United States and established the first anthropology department at Clark University before working at Columbia University.
Step-by-step explanation:
Yes, American anthropology was first developed under Franz Boas at Columbia University. Boas, a German scientist and anthropologist, played a significant role in shaping the field of anthropology in the United States. He established the first anthropology department at Clark University and later became a professor at Columbia University. Boas advocated for ethnographic research, where scholars directly obtained information from the Indigenous peoples they aimed to study. His standards of field research became the foundation of contemporary anthropology.