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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

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List of the most influential people in Anthropology,

#101

George W. Gill

#12556

Overall Influence

George W. Gill is an American anthropologist, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wyoming who specializes in skeletal biology. Career In the late 1980s, partly in response to demands from American forensic anthropology organizations to scrutinize methods of racial identification in order to ensure accuracy in legal cases, Gill tested, supported, and developed craniofacial anthropometric and other means of estimating the racial origins of skeletal remains. He found that the employment of multiple criteria can yield very high rates of accuracy, and even that individual methods can be a...

#102

Louise Lamphere

Louise Lamphere

#18617

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Areas of Specialization: Feminist Anthropology, Urban Anthropology Louise Lamphere is a feminist anthropologist and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her research interests have included feminist anthropology, gender, de-industrialization, and urban anthropology. She has published extensively on Native American issues, such as kinship and cooperation, and on issues such as working mothers, immigration and women’s lives and remains active in her advocacy on behalf of feminist causes. Lamphere started as an ass...

#103

Bruce Trigger

#8250

Overall Influence

1937 - 2006 (69 years)

Bruce Graham Trigger was a Canadian archaeologist, anthropologist, and ethnohistorian. He was appointed the James McGill Professor at McGill University in 2001. Life Born in Preston, Ontario , Trigger obtained his undergraduate education at the University of Toronto earning a B.A. in anthropology in 1959. Trigger received a doctorate in archaeology from Yale University in 1964. He was taught by George Peter Murdock and Benjamin Irving Rouse. He was co-supervised by William Kelly Simpson and Michael D. Coe. He became friends with K. C. Chang, a Chinese archaeologist, who joined the department during his final year of his PhD.

#104

Robert Jurmain

#16361

Overall Influence

Robert Jurmain is a professor emeritus of anthropology at San Jose State University. Jurmain holds an A.B. in anthropology from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Harvard. He joined the San Jose State faculty in 1975, and taught there until his retirement in 2004.

#105

Mary Leakey

#3449

Overall Influence

1913 - 1996 (83 years)

Mary Douglas Leakey, FBA was a British paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised Proconsul skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, eastern Africa. For much of her career she worked with her husband, Louis Leakey, at Olduvai Gorge, where they uncovered fossils of ancient hominines and the earliest hominins, as well as the stone tools produced by the latter group. Mary Leakey developed a system for classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai. She discovered the Laetol...

#106

Marija Gimbutas

Marija Gimbutas

#990

Overall Influence

1921 - 1994 (73 years)

Marija Gimbutas was a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.

#107

Georges Balandier

Georges Balandier

#5626

Overall Influence

1920 - 2016 (96 years)

Georges Balandier was a French sociologist, anthropologist and ethnologist noted for his research in Sub-Saharan Africa. Balandier was born in Aillevillers-et-Lyaumont. He was a professor at the Sorbonne , and is a member of the Center for African Studies , a research center of the École pratique des hautes études . He held for many years the Editorship of Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie and edited the series Sociologie d'Aujourd'hui at Presses Universitaires de France. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1976. He died on 5 October 2016 at the age of 95.

#108

Sherwood Washburn

Sherwood Washburn

#12772

Overall Influence

1911 - 2000 (89 years)

Sherwood Larned Washburn , nicknamed "Sherry", was an American physical anthropologist, and "a legend in the field." He was pioneer in the field of primatology, opening it to the study of primates in their natural habitats. His research and influence in the comparative analysis of primate behaviors to theories of human origins established a new course of study within the field of human evolution. He changed the field of anthropology with the publication of his paper The New Physical Anthropology, in 1951, in which he argued, convincingly, that human variation was continuous, and could not be b...

#109

Isaac Schapera

#10455

Overall Influence

1905 - 2003 (98 years)

Isaac Schapera FBA FRAI , was a social anthropologist at the London School of Economics specialising in South Africa. He was notable for his contributions of ethnographic and typological studies of the indigenous peoples of Botswana and South Africa. Additionally, he was one of the founders of the group that would develop British social anthropology.

#110

Ruth Landes

#11837

Overall Influence

1908 - 1991 (83 years)

Ruth Landes was an American cultural anthropologist best known for studies on the Brazilian religion of Candomblé and her published study on the topic, City of Women . Landes is recognized by some as a pioneer in the study of race and gender relations.

#111

David Maybury-Lewis

#13656

Overall Influence

1929 - 2007 (78 years)

David Henry Peter Maybury-Lewis was a British anthropologist, ethnologist of lowland South America, activist for indigenous peoples' human rights, and professor emeritus of Harvard University. Born in Hyderabad, Sindh , Maybury-Lewis attended the University of Oxford, at which he earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree. In 1960, he joined the Harvard faculty, and was Edward C. Henderson Professor of Anthropology there from 1966 until he retired in 2004. His extensive ethnographic fieldwork was conducted primarily among indigenous peoples in central Brazil, which culminated in his ethnography among the Xavante, as well as post-modernist renditions.

#112

Colin Turnbull

#8541

Overall Influence

1924 - 1994 (70 years)

Colin Macmillan Turnbull was a British-American anthropologist who came to public attention with the popular books The Forest People and The Mountain People , and one of the first anthropologists to work in the field of ethnomusicology.

#113

Margaret Lock

#15251

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Margaret Lock is a distinguished Canadian medical anthropologist, known for her publications in connection with an anthropology of the body and embodiment, comparative epistemologies of medical knowledge and practice, and the global impact of emerging biomedical technologies.

#114

F. G. Bailey

#22866

Overall Influence

1924 - 2020 (96 years)

Frederick George Bailey , who published professionally as F. G. Bailey, was a British social anthropologist who spent the second half of his career in the United States at the University of California, San Diego . He received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Manchester University, working under Max Gluckman, and is closely associated with the Manchester School of social anthropology. A prolific writer of some sixteen books in anthropology, he is probably best known for his studies of local and organizational politics. He conducted fieldwork in Bisipāra, Orissa, India, and has also writte...

#115

Alfred Gell

#11235

Overall Influence

1945 - 1997 (52 years)

Alfred Antony Francis Gell, was a British social anthropologist whose most influential work concerned art, language, symbolism and ritual. He was trained by Edmund Leach and Raymond Firth and did his fieldwork in Melanesia and tribal India. Gell taught at the London School of Economics, among other places. He was also a Fellow of the British Academy. He died of cancer in 1997, at the age of 51.

#116

Richard Schechner

#4986

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Richard Schechner is University Professor Emeritus at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and editor of TDR: The Drama Review. Biography Richard Schechner received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1956, a Master's degree from the University of Iowa two years later, and a PhD from Tulane University in 1962. He edited The Drama Review, formerly the Tulane Drama Review, from 1962 to 1969; and again from 1986 to the present.

#117

Evon Z. Vogt

#14136

Overall Influence

1918 - 2004 (86 years)

Evon Zartman Vogt, Jr. was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his work among the Tzotzil Mayas of Chiapas, Mexico. Vogt was the author of numerous articles and 19 books. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , a member of the National Academy of Sciences , a member of the American Philosophical Society , and a recipient of the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor awarded to foreigners by the Mexican government.

#118

Terrence Deacon

Terrence Deacon

#2930

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Terrence William Deacon is an American neuroanthropologist . He taught at Harvard for eight years, relocated to Boston University in 1992, and is currently Professor of Anthropology and member of the Cognitive Science Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

#119

Richard Bauman

#11499

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Richard Bauman is a folklorist and anthropologist, now retired from Indiana University Bloomington. He is Distinguished Professor emeritus of Folklore, of Anthropology, and of Communication and Culture. Before coming to IU in 1985, he was the Director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas and a faculty member in the UT Department of Anthropology. Just before retiring from Indiana, he was chair of the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, as well as an important member of the Department of Anthropology and the Department of...

#120

Mary-Ann Ochota

#16008

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Mary-Ann Ochota is a British broadcaster and anthropologist specialising in anthropology, archaeology, social history and adventure factual television. Biography Ochota was born and grew up in Wincham, Northwich, Cheshire, to an Indian mother and a Polish father. She studied at the sixth-form college of Sir John Deane's College.

#121

Byron Good

#13136

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Byron Joseph Good is an American medical anthropologist primarily studying mental illness. He is currently on the faculty of Harvard University, where he is Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology.

#122

Adam Kuper

#13519

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Adam Jonathan Kuper is a South African anthropologist most closely linked to the school of social anthropology. In his works, he often treats the notion of "culture" skeptically, focusing as much on how it is used as on what it means.

#123

Herbert S. Lewis

#13250

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Herbert S. Lewis is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught from 1963 to 1998. He has conducted extensive field research in Ethiopia and Israel and worked with Oneida Indian Nation of Wisconsin. Aside from publications based on ethnographic field research he has written theoretical works about political leadership and systems, ethnicity, cultural evolution. Since the late 1990s he has published extensively about the history of anthropology, much of it offering new insights into the work and thought of Franz Boas.

#124

Weston La Barre

#9495

Overall Influence

1911 - 1996 (85 years)

Raoul Weston La Barre was an American anthropologist, best known for his work in ethnobotany, particularly with regard to Native-American religion, and for his application of psychiatric and psychoanalytic theories to ethnography.

#125

Francis L. K. Hsu

#12047

Overall Influence

1909 - 1999 (90 years)

Francis L. K. Hsu was a China-born American anthropologist, one of the founders of psychological anthropology. He was president of the American Anthropological Association from 1977 to 1978. Career Hsu was born on October 28, 1909, in Zhuanghe, Liaoning, China. He entered Tianjin Nankai High School in 1923, graduated from the Department of Sociology at the University of Shanghai in 1933, entered the Graduate School of Fu Jen Catholic University in the same year, and later engaged in social work at Peking Union Medical College Hospital.

#126

David Harvey

#270

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

David W. Harvey is a British Marxist economic geographer, podcaster, and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.

#127

Janet Carsten

#10869

Overall Influence

Janet Carsten is an anthropologist and professor currently employed at the University of Edinburgh. Carsten studies social and cultural anthropology. She is the daughter of the British historian Francis Ludwig Carsten.

#128

James Chatters

#15279

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

James C. Chatters is an American archaeologist and paleontologist. , he is the owner of forensics consulting firm, Applied Paleoscience; and serves as a research associate in the Office of Graduate Studies, Research, and Continuing Education at Central Washington University; Deputy Coroner of Benton County, Washington; and a consulting scientist on staff with Foster Wheeler Environmental Corporation of Bothell, Washington. In 1996, Chatters was the first scientist to excavate and study the prehistoric skeletal remains, known as Kennewick Man, which were discovered on the banks of the Columbi...

#129

Ruth Shady

#11967

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Ruth Martha Shady Solís is a Peruvian anthropologist and archaeologist. She is the founder and director of the archaeological project at Caral. Career Throughout her career, she has directed many different projects of archeological investigation on the coast, the highlands and the rain forests of Peru, placing emphasis on the study of the development of the complex socio-political organizations. She was director of the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Antropología del Perú , and director of the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology of National University of San Marcos. She has worked at the Ca...

#130

Colin Renfrew

#4900

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Andrew Colin Renfrew, Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, is a British archaeologist, paleolinguist and Conservative peer noted for his work on radiocarbon dating, the prehistory of languages, archaeogenetics, neuroarchaeology, and the prevention of looting at archaeological sites.

#131

Dan Sperber

#1863

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; relevance theory; the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is Professor in the Depar...

#132

Douglas R. White

Douglas R. White

#9793

Overall Influence

1942 - 2021 (79 years)

Douglas R. White was an American complexity researcher, social anthropologist, sociologist, and social network researcher at the University of California, Irvine. Biography Douglas White was born in Minneapolis in 1942. He attended the University of Michigan, Columbia University, and the University of Minnesota, where he received a B.A. in 1964, an M.A. in 1967, and a Ph.D. degree in 1969, all under advisor E. Adamson Hoebel and the Travelling Scholars Program.

#133

Milford H. Wolpoff

#13708

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Milford Howell Wolpoff is a paleoanthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and its museum of Anthropology. He is the leading proponent of the multiregional evolution hypothesis that explains the evolution of Homo sapiens as a consequence of evolutionary processes and gene flow across continents within a single species. Wolpoff authored the widely used textbook Paleoanthropology , and co-authored Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction, which reviews the scientific evidence and conflicting theories about the interpretation of human evolution, and biologica...

#134

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

#11604

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro is a Brazilian anthropologist and a professor at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He has published many books and articles which are considered important in anthropology and in Americanist ethnology, among them: Cannibal Metaphysics, From the enemy's point of view: humanity and divinity in an Amazonian society, Amazônia: etnologia e história indígena , and A inconstância da alma selvagem e outros ensaios de antropologia .

#135

Bradd Shore

#6177

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Bradd Shore is an American cultural anthropologist who is best known as a leading authority on Samoan culture and a foundational theorist of the cultural models school of cognitive and psychological anthropology. He is the Goodrich C. White Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Emory University and is a former Department Chair. He is the former Director of the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life and is also a past President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology .

#136

Israel Finkelstein

Israel Finkelstein

#3092

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Israel Finkelstein is an Israeli archaeologist, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the head of the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa. Finkelstein is active in the archaeology of the Levant and is an applicant of archaeological data in reconstructing biblical history. He is also known for applying the exact and life sciences in archaeological and historical reconstruction. Finkelstein is the current excavator of Megiddo, a key site for the study of the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Levant.

#137

William G. Dever

#4002

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

William Gwinn Dever is an American archaeologist, scholar, historian, semiticist, and theologian. He is an active scholar of the Old Testament, and historian, specialized in the history of the Ancient Near East and the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah in biblical times. He was Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1975 to 2002. He is a Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania.

#138

Michael Wesch

#16039

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Michael Lee Wesch is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Kansas State University. Wesch's work also includes media ecology and the emerging field of digital ethnography, where he studies the effect of new media on human interaction.

#139

E. Adamson Hoebel

#14682

Overall Influence

1906 - 1993 (87 years)

E. Adamson Hoebel was Regents Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Having studied under Franz Boas, he held a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. There he also attended the seminars of Karl N. Llewellyn, who taught at the Columbia Law School from 1925 to 1951. Llewellyn was the most important figure associated with the American Legal Realism of the 1920s and 1930s, which held that the law was indeterminate on the basis of statutes and precedents alone and required study of the how disputes are resolved in practice. The "sociological" wing of legal rea...

#140

Unni Wikan

#22649

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Unni Wikan is professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway. She has served as visiting professor at the University of Chicago , Harvard University , Goethe University, Frankfurt , London School of Economics , École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris . She has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard University , guest lecturer at Harvard , guest lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel and visiting assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University .

#141

Jane E. Buikstra

#21230

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Jane Ellen Buikstra, a bioarchaeologist and anthropologist, earned her B.A. in anthropology from DePauw University and her M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Chicago. She is a professor and director of the Center for Bioarchaeological Research within the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, president of the Center for American Archaeology and the first editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Palaeopathology. Her research has reflected her interdisciplinary expertise, in fields as diverse as bioarchaeology, forensic anthropology and paleodemography, among others.

#142

David Price

#13356

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Areas of Specialization: Cultural Anthropology David Price is a professor of anthropology at Saint Martin’s University. He was born in 1960 and earned his B.A. from The Evergreen State College, an AM from University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from University of Florida. Early in his career he studied in Egypt, Yemen, and Palestine, conducting research on the evolution of irrigation systems from modern to ancient times, before moving on to his current field. An expert in cultural anthropology and intellectual history, Price has written numerous books about the interactions between government/military/intelligence agencies and anthropologists.

#143

Christopher Boehm

#21672

Overall Influence

1931 - 2021 (90 years)

Christopher Boehm was an American cultural anthropologist with a subspecialty in primatology, who researched conflict resolution, altruism, the evolution of morality, and feuding and warfare. He was also the Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at University of Southern California, a multi-media interactive database focusing on the social and moral behavior of world hunter gatherers. Boehm died on November 23, 2021, at the age of 90.

#144

Peter Bellwood

#15807

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Peter Stafford Bellwood is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra. He is well known for his Out of Taiwan model regarding the spread of Austronesian languages.

#145

Laura Bohannan

#15402

Overall Influence

1922 - 2002 (80 years)

Laura Bohannan , pen name Elenore Smith Bowen, was an American cultural anthropologist best known for her 1966 article, "Shakespeare in the Bush." Bohannan also wrote two books during the 1960s, Tiv Economy, with her husband, and Return to Laughter, a novel. These works were based on her travels and work in Africa between 1949 and 1953.

#146

Phillip Tobias

#8062

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Phillip Vallentine Tobias was a South African palaeoanthropologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He was best known for his work at South Africa's hominid fossil sites. He was also an activist for the eradication of apartheid and gave numerous anti-apartheid speeches at protest rallies and also to academic audiences.

#147

Irven DeVore

#11985

Overall Influence

1934 - 2014 (80 years)

Irven DeVore was an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, and Curator of Primatology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He headed Harvard's Department of Anthropology from 1987 to 1992. He taught generations of students at Harvard both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He mentored many young scientists who went on to prominence in anthropology and behavioral biology, including Richard Lee, Robert Trivers, Sarah Hrdy, Peter Ellison, Barbara Smuts, Henry Harpending, Marjorie Shostak, Robert Bailey, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Wrangham and T...

#148

Marc Swartz

#16399

Overall Influence

1931 - 2011 (80 years)

Marc Jerome Swartz was an American political and cultural anthropologist specializing in eastern Africa. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Swartz trained in anthropology in the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Harvard, receiving his PhD in 1958.

#149

Andrey Korotayev

Andrey Korotayev

#1439

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

#150

Alison Galloway

#22449

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Alison Galloway is a forensic anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is best known for her work in identifying the physical remains of Laci Peterson in the Scott Peterson Trial. She co-edited a book called The Evolving Female: A Life History Perspective with Mary Morbeck and Adrienne Zihlmann. She is also editor of "Broken Bones: Anthropological Analysis of Blunt Force Trauma" and co-editor of the second edition of that volume. She is also co-author of "Practicing Forensic Anthropology: an eResource" with Susan Kuzminsky.

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