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List of the most influential female people in Anthropology,

#1051

Hilda Petrie

1871 - 1956 (85 years)

Hilda Mary Isabel, Lady Petrie , was an Irish-born British Egyptologist and wife of Sir Flinders Petrie, the father of scientific archaeology. Having studied geology, she was hired by Flinders Petrie at age 25 as an artist, which led to their marriage and a working partnership that endured for their lifetimes.

#1052

Ida Halpern

1910 - 1987 (77 years)

Ida Halpern was a Canadian ethnomusicologist. Halpern was born in Vienna, Austria. She arrived in Canada in order to flee Nazism in her native country, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1944. She worked among Native Americans of coastal British Columbia during the mid-20th century, collecting, recording, and transcribing their music and documenting its use in their cultures. Many of these recordings were released as LPss, with extensive liner notes and transcriptions. More recently, her collection has also been released digitally.

#1053

Bronwyn Fredericks

Bronwyn Fredericks is an Indigenous Australian academic and administrator. Her scholarship extends across education, health, community development, policy, and Indigenist research methods, including a focus on work relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people using participatory and community led approaches. Her contributions have been recognised through the NAIDOC Education Award in 2022 and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Award in 2019. She is currently the Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Queensland.

#1054

Elli Köngäs-Maranda

1932 - 1982 (50 years)

Elli-Kaija Köngäs-Maranda was an internationally renowned anthropologist and feminist folklorist. She studied Finnish language and folklore at the University of Helsinki, where she received her B.A. in 1954 and her M.A. in 1955. She continued her studies in the United States of America and did her doctoral dissertation in 1963 at Indiana University. She was a lecturer at Columbia University and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University. Köngäs-Maranda was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. The Society's Women's section inaugurated 1983 two prizes in her memory.

#1055

Jole Bovio Marconi

1897 - 1986 (89 years)

Jole Bovio Marconi was an Italian archaeologist who graduated with a degree in the topography of ancient Rome from the Sapienza University of Rome and specialized at the Italian School of Archaeology at Athens. She married her colleague Pirro Marconi, whom she met in her studies in Athens.

#1056

Elizabeth Pierce Blegen

Elizabeth Pierce Blegen

1888 - 1966 (78 years)

Elizabeth Denny Pierce Blegen was an American archaeologist, educator and writer. She excavated at sites in Greece and Cyprus, contributed reports on archaeological discoveries in Greece to the American Journal of Archaeology from 1925 to 1952, and was involved in several organisations promoting women's professional advancement in Greece and the United States.

#1057

Jodi Byrd

Jodi Byrd holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. (2002) in English literature from the University of Iowa. Her dissertation was Colonialism’s Cacophony: Natives and Arrivants at the Limits of Postcolonial Theory. Before moving to Cornell University, she taught at the University of Illinois Chicago, and before that she was an assistant professor of indigenous politics in the department of political science of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She was formerly associated with the American Indian Studies Program at Illinois. She was president of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures for 2011–2012.

#1058

Alice Kober

1906 - 1950 (44 years)

Alice Elizabeth Kober was an American classicist best known for her work on the decipherment of Linear B. Educated at Hunter College and Columbia University, Kober taught classics at Brooklyn College from 1930 until her death. In the 1940s, she published three major papers on the script, demonstrating evidence of inflection; her discovery allowed for the deduction of phonetic relationships between different signs without assigning them phonetic values, and would be a key step in the eventual decipherment of the script.

#1059

Luisa Banti

1894 - 1978 (84 years)

Luisa Banti was an Italian archaeologist, art historian, and educator specializing in the Etruscan and Minoan civilizations. Her best known work is Il mondo degli Etruschi . First published in 1960 and translated into several languages, it influenced scholarly opinion for many years and became a classic text.

#1060

Johanna van Lohuizen-de Leeuw

1919 - 1983 (64 years)

Johanna Engelberta van Lohuizen-de Leeuw was a Dutch archaeologist and art historian, specializing in South and South-east Asia. Fluent in Sanskrit, she contributed important research to the study of antiquities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka, as well as in Thailand and Indonesia. Along with Raymond and Bridget Allchin, Jan van Lohuizen, and Harold Bailey, she founded the Ancient and Indian Iran Trust in Cambridge in 1978 to support historical and archaeological research in those regions, which later became a center of academic research in the field. She made notable contributions to the history of Kusana art.

#1061

Esther Boise Van Deman

1862 - 1937 (75 years)

Esther Boise Van Deman was a leading archaeologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She developed techniques that allowed her to estimate the building dates of ancient buildings in Rome. Life Esther Boise Van Deman was born in South Salem, Ohio, to Joseph Van Deman and his second wife, Martha Millspaugh. She was the youngest of six children, including two boys by her father's first marriage.

#1062

Annie Ure

1893 - 1976 (83 years)

Annie Dunman Ure was an English archaeologist, who from 1922 to 1976 was the first Curator of the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology. She and her husband Percy Ure conducted important excavations at Ritsona in Boeotia, Greece, making her one of the first female archaeologists to lead an excavation in Greece.

#1063

Emily James Smith Putnam

1865 - 1944 (79 years)

Emily James Smith Putnam was an American classical scholar, author and educator. Biography She was the daughter of Justice James C. Smith. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1889 and studied at Girton College, Cambridge University, in 1889–90.

#1064

Ruth Bunzel

1898 - 1990 (92 years)

Ruth Leah Bunzel was an American anthropologist, known for studying creativity and art among the Zuni people , researching the Mayas in Guatemala, and conducting a comparative study of alcoholism in Guatemala and Mexico. Bunzel was the first American anthropologist to conduct substantial research in Guatemala. Her doctoral dissertation, The Pueblo Potter was a study of the creative process of art in anthropology and Bunzel was one of the first anthropologists to study the creative process.

#1065

Gladys Reichard

Gladys Reichard

1893 - 1955 (62 years)

Gladys Amanda Reichard was an American anthropologist and linguist. She is considered one of the most important women to have studied Native American languages and cultures in the first half of the twentieth century. She is best known for her studies of three different Native American languages: Wiyot, Coeur d'Alene and Navajo. Reichard was concerned with understanding language variation, and with connections between linguistic principles and underpinnings of religion, culture and context.

#1066

Dorothy Garrod

1892 - 1968 (76 years)

Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod, CBE, FBA was an English archaeologist who specialised in the Palaeolithic period. She held the position of Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1939 to 1952, and was the first woman to hold a chair at either Oxford or Cambridge.

#1067

Ruth Benedict

1887 - 1948 (61 years)

Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College, and graduated in 1909. After studying anthropology at the New School of Social Research under Elsie Clews Parsons, she entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1921, where she studied under Franz Boas. She received her Ph.D. and joined the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she shared a romantic relationship, and Marvin Opler were among her students and colleagues.

#1068

B. Holly Smith

B. Holly Smith is an American biological anthropologist. She is currently a research professor in the Center for Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at The George Washington University. She is also a visiting research professor at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. The majority of her work is concentrated in evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, life history, and dental anthropology.

#1069

Mildred Trotter

Mildred Trotter

1899 - 1991 (92 years)

Mildred Trotter was an American pioneer as a forensic historian and forensic anthropologist. Biography Trotter was born in Monaca, Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. in zoology and physiology from Mount Holyoke College in 1920. She was hired by the Washington University in St. Louis as a researcher in the School of Medicine and Department of Anatomy. Her work contributed to her degree. She received a Master's in 1921, and a Ph.D. in anatomy in 1924, whereupon she became an instructor of anatomy. She accepted a National Research Council Fellowship in Physical Anthropology for the 1925–26 academic year, and studied at Oxford University in England, with Arthur Thomson.

#1070

Kathleen Kenyon

Kathleen Kenyon

1906 - 1978 (72 years)

Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon, was a British archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She led excavations of Tell es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho, from 1952 to 1958, and has been called one of the most influential archaeologists of the 20th century. She was Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, from 1962 to 1973, having undertaken her own studies at Somerville College, Oxford.

#1071

Phyllis Kaberry

Phyllis Kaberry

1910 - 1977 (67 years)

Phyllis Mary Kaberry was a social anthropologist who dedicated her work to the study of women in various societies. Particularly with her work in both Australia and Africa, she paved the way for a feminist approach in anthropological studies. Her research on the sacred life and significant role of the Aboriginal women of Australia proved to be a controversial topic, as anthropology during her years of early fieldwork was male-dominated, filled with the misconceptions that men were the superior in any aspect of life. Contributing proof of women's significance to societal development and org...

#1072

Kathleen Gough

1925 - 1990 (65 years)

Eleanor Kathleen Gough Aberle was a British anthropologist and feminist who was known for her work in South Asia and South-East Asia. As a part of her doctorate work, she did field research in Malabar district from 1947 to 1949. She did further research in Tanjore district from 1950 to 1953 and again in 1976, and in Vietnam in 1976 and 1982. In addition, some of her work included campaigning for: nuclear disarmament, the civil rights movement, women's rights, the third world and the end of the Vietnam War. She was known for her Marxist leanings and was on an FBI watchlist.

#1073

May Mandelbaum Edel

1909 - 1964 (55 years)

May Mandelbaum Edel was an American anthropologist known for her fieldwork among the Okanagan in Washington, the Tillamook in Oregon, and the Kiga in Uganda. Edel's linguistic research of the Tillamook serves as the only published account of the language which provided data for future linguistic publications. Edel was the first American woman anthropologist to live in an African village, and her research in Africa documented the diversity of African cultures.

#1074

Cynthia Irwin-Williams

Cynthia Irwin-Williams

1936 - 1990 (54 years)

Cynthia Irwin-Williams was an archaeologist of the prehistoric American Southwest. She received a B.A. in Anthropology from Radcliffe College in 1957; the next year she received a M.A. in the same field. In 1963 she completed her educational career in Anthropology with a PhD. from Harvard University. Beginning her career in the 1950s, Irwin-Williams was considered a groundbreaker for women in archaeology, like her friend and supporter Hannah Marie Wormington.

#1075

Viola Garfield

1899 - 1983 (84 years)

Viola E. Garfield was an American anthropologist best known for her work on the social organization and plastic arts of the Tsimshian nation in British Columbia and Alaska. Early life Viola Edmundson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. Her family moved a few years later to Coupeville, Washington, on Whidbey Island, where she attended local schools.

#1076

Lila Morris O'Neale

Lila Morris O'Neale

1886 - 1948 (62 years)

Lila Morris O'Neale was an American anthropologist and historian of textiles. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931 for her research on prehistoric textiles in Peru. Early life and education Lila Morris O'Neale was born in Buxton, North Dakota, the daughter of George Lester O'Neale and Carrie Higgins O'Neale. She moved with her family to San Jose, California as a girl. She trained as a teacher, like her mother before her; she attended the state teachers college in San Jose, and earned an A. B. at Stanford University ; she completed a bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1916.

#1077

Secondina Cesano

1879 - 1973 (94 years)

Secondina Lorenza Eugenia Cesano was an Italian numismatist and professor of numismatics at the Sapienza University of Rome. Biography Cesano originally studied at the Sapienza University of Rome. In 1902 she won a competition and gained a role at the National Roman Museum. In 1907 she gained habilitation in numismatics at Sapienza. She also worked on numismatics in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples and the National Museum of Ravenna. In 1912, at the foundation of the Istituto italiano di numismatica, Cesano was appointed to the board of directors, later becoming its extraordinary co...

#1078

Irene Emery

1900 - 1981 (81 years)

Irene Emery was an American art historian, scholar, curator, textile anthropologist, sculptor, and modern dancer. She was known for her pioneering research in systematically describing global textiles, and was a leading authority on ancient fabrics and textiles, and for her published book The Primary Structures of Fabrics: An Illustrated Classification .

#1079

Edith Hall Dohan

1877 - 1943 (66 years)

Edith Hayward Hall Dohan was an American archaeologist who earned Bryn Mawr College's first classical archaeology Ph.D. Hall was part of an excavation team with Harriet Boyd in her early career that most notably brought the first Mycenaean and pre-Mycenaean collection to be displayed in America. Hall later wrote The Decorative Art of Crete in the Bronze Age, which was published in 1906 that breaks down the evolution of the art and pottery in Crete from the Bronze Age.

#1080

Diane Barwick

1938 - 1986 (48 years)

Diane Elizabeth McEachern Barwick was a Canadian-born anthropologist, historian, and Aboriginal-rights activist. She was also a renowned researcher and teacher in the field of Australian Aboriginal culture and society.

#1081

Eva Verbitsky Hunt

1934 - 1980 (46 years)

Muriel Eva Verbitsky de Hunt was an Argentine cultural anthropologist, academic and writer who moved to the United States in the late 1950s. She is remembered for her contributions to symbolic anthropology and ethnohistory. Together with her husband Robert Hunt, she performed innovative regional work in Oaxaca, Mexico, in the 1960s.

#1082

Ella Kivikoski

1901 - 1990 (89 years)

Ella Margareta Kivikoski was the first Finnish female to earn a doctorate in archaeology in Finland. In 1931, she studied at the Baltic Institute in Stockholm and developed a scholarly working relationship with the Estonian archaeologist Harri Moora. She was a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Helsinki from 1948 until 1969, specializing in both Finnish and Nordic archaeology. Her specialty was the Finnish Iron Age.

#1083

Clairève Grandjouan

1929 - 1982 (53 years)

Clairève or Claireve Grandjouan was a French-born American archaeologist. She had a B.A. and Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College. After working on excavations in Athens, she became General Secretary of the Archaeological Institute of America and editor of its Bulletin, while teaching at New York University . She then taught at Hunter College from 1968, becoming chairman of classical and Oriental studies in 1968 and full professor in 1981.

#1084

Dorothy Lamb

1887 - 1967 (80 years)

Lady Brooke Nicholson, , better known by her maiden name Dorothy Lamb, was a British archaeologist and writer known for her catalogue of terracotta in the Acropolis Museum, Athens and her work in Mediterranean field archaeology.

#1085

Isabelle Raubitschek

1914 - 1988 (74 years)

Isabelle Kelly Raubitschek was an American art historian, archaeologist, and professor of art at Stanford University. Biography Raubitschek was born in Boston, and was the oldest of three children. She began to study foreign languages as a child, eventually becoming fluent in Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Latin, Italian, French and German. She met and studied with the art historian, Margarete Bieber, when she attended Barnard College in 1935. While at Barnard, she received the Lucille Pulitzer scholarship, which provided finances for four full years of study. She continued her graduate education at Columbia University and in 1936 went to the Institute of Art and Archaeology at Sorbonne.

#1086

Wilhelmina van Ingen Elarth

1905 - 1969 (64 years)

Wilhelmina van Ingen Elarth was an archaeologist and art history and classical studies professor. She studied at Vassar and received her doctorate at Radcliffe. In addition to her research contributions to the classics, she also bridged her interest to contemporary art and architecture. Her grandfather was Henry van Ingen.

#1087

Lorna Marshall

1898 - 2002 (104 years)

Lorna Marshall was an anthropologist who in the 1950s, 60s and 70s lived among and wrote about the previously unstudied !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert. Background Marshall was born in Morenci, Arizona territory. She married Laurence Kennedy Marshall in 1926; they had a daughter Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and a son John Kennedy Marshall . Marshall received a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley in 1921 and an MA from Radcliffe College in 1928, and before 1926 worked as an English instructor at Mount Holyoke. Later she took anthropology courses at Harvard University and had a second career as an ethnographer.

#1088

Margaret Read

1889 - 1991 (102 years)

Margaret Helen Read, CBE was a British social anthropologist and academic, who specialised in colonial education. She was one of the first researchers to apply social anthropology and ethnography principles to the education and health problems of people living in the British colonies.

#1089

Gene Weltfish

1902 - 1980 (78 years)

Gene Weltfish was an American anthropologist and historian working at Columbia University from 1928 to 1953. She had studied with Franz Boas and was a specialist in the culture and history of the Pawnee people of the Midwest Plains. Her 1965 ethnography, The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture, is considered the authoritative work on Pawnee culture to this day.

#1090

Monica Wilson

1908 - 1982 (74 years)

Monica Wilson, née Hunter was a South African anthropologist, who was professor of social anthropology at the University of Cape Town. Life Monica Hunter was born to missionary parents in Lovedale in the Cape Colony, speaking Xhosa from childhood. She studied history at Girton College, Cambridge, before gaining a Cambridge doctorate in anthropology in 1934. Her thesis, the fieldwork for which was undertaken with the Pondo in the Eastern Cape between 1931 and 1933, was presented in the monograph Reaction to Conquest.

#1091

Esther Schiff Goldfrank

1896 - 1997 (101 years)

Esther Schiff Goldfrank was an American anthropologist of the famous German-American Schiff family. She had studied with Franz Boas and specialized in the Pueblo Indians. She worked closely with Elsie Clews Parsons and also with Ruth Benedict on the Blackfoot. She published on Pueblo religion, Cochiti sociology and Isleta drawings. Goldfrank received her bachelor's degree from Barnard College in 1918 and graduated from Columbia University in 1937.

#1092

Charlotte Gower Chapman

Charlotte Gower Chapman

1902 - 1982 (80 years)

Charlotte Gower Chapman, born Charlotte Day Gower, was an ethnologist and an author. In 1928, she received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Later on while working at Lingnan University in China during World War II she was taken prisoner by the Japanese when the US entered the war, but was released by 1942. After, she joined the United States Marine Corps and worked in the Office of Strategic Services until 1947 when she became an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency until her retirement in 1964.

#1093

Cezaria Jędrzejewiczowa

Cezaria Jędrzejewiczowa

1885 - 1967 (82 years)

Cezaria Jędrzejewiczowa, or Cezaria Anna Baudouin de Courtenay Ehrenkreutz-Jędrzejewiczowa, was a Polish scientist, art historian, and anthropologist. She was one of the pioneers of ethnology in Poland and one of the first scientists to adopt phenomenology in studies of folk culture.

#1094

Camilla Wedgwood

1901 - 1955 (54 years)

Camilla Hildegarde Wedgwood was a British anthropologist and academic administrator. She is best known for her research in the Pacific and her pioneering role as one of the British Commonwealth's first female anthropologists.

#1095

Caroline Bond Day

Caroline Bond Day

1889 - 1948 (59 years)

Caroline Stewart Bond Day was an American physical anthropologist, author, and educator. She was one of the first African-Americans to receive a degree in anthropology. Day is recognized as a pioneer physical anthropologist whose study helped future black researchers and is used to challenge scientific racism about miscegenation.

#1096

Margaret Murray

Margaret Murray

1863 - 1963 (100 years)

Margaret Alice Murray was a British-Indian Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and folklorist who was born in India. The first woman to be appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom, she worked at University College London from 1898 to 1935. She served as president of the Folklore Society from 1953 to 1955, and published widely over the course of her career.

#1097

Gertrude Bell

1868 - 1926 (58 years)

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist. She spent much of her life exploring and mapping the Middle East, and became highly influential to British imperial policy-making as an Arabist due to her knowledge and contacts built up through extensive travels. During her lifetime, she was highly esteemed and trusted by British officials such as High Commissioner for Mesopotamia Percy Cox, giving her great influence. She participated in both the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the 1921 Cairo Conference, which help...

#1098

Isabel Kelly

1906 - 1982 (76 years)

Isabel Truesdell Kelly was an American anthropologist known for her work with the members of the Coast Miwok tribe, members of the Chemehuevi people in the 1920s and 1930s, and her work later in life as an archaeologist working in Sinaloa, Mexico. She was trained by anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber at the University of California, Berkeley.

#1099

Gitel Steed

1914 - 1977 (63 years)

Gitel Poznanski Steed was an American cultural anthropologist known for her research in India 1950–52 involving ethnological work in three villages to study the complex detail of their social structure. She supplemented her research with thousands of ethnological photographs of the individuals and groups studied, the quality of which was recognised by Edward Steichen. She experienced chronic illnesses after her return from the field, but nevertheless completed publications and many lectures but did not survive to finish a book The Human Career in Village India which was to integrate and uni...

#1100

Bertha Parker Pallan

Bertha Parker Pallan

1907 - 1978 (71 years)

Bertha Pallan Thurston Cody was an American archaeologist, working as an assistant in archaeology at the Southwest Museum. She was also married to actor Iron Eyes Cody. She is thought to be the first Native American female archaeologist, of Abenaki and Seneca descent.

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