The Most Influential People Across History
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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Anthropology,
#2651
Fred Nadel
1903 - 1956 (53 years)
Siegfried Frederick Nadel was a British anthropologist, specialising in African ethnology. Early life and education Siegfried Ferdinand Stephan Nadel was born on 24 April 1903 in Lemberg , Galicia, part of the Habsburg monarchy. Both parents were born in Lemberg. His family, his father Moritz was a senior railway lawyer, moved to Vienna in 1912. After attending State Real Gymnasium , 1913–1921, he enrolled at the Musik-academie in the University of Vienna; his early ambition was to be a conductor and composer. He was an extraordinarily talented polymath. Music led him to the psychology of music and general psychology was at that time affiliated with philosophy.
Go to Profile#2652
Aylward M. Blackman
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Aylward Manley Blackman, FBA was a British Egyptologist, who excavated various sites in Egypt and Nubia, notably Buhen and Meir. Having taught at Worcester College, Oxford, he was Brunner Professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool from 1934 to 1948. He was additionally a special lecturer at the University of Manchester, and was involved in or led a number of excavations with the Egypt Exploration Society.
Go to Profile#2653
Rodney Young
1907 - 1974 (67 years)
Rodney Stuart Young was an American Near Eastern archaeologist. He is known for his excavation of the city of Gordium, capital of the ancient Phrygians and associated with the legendary king, Midas.
Go to Profile#2654
Philip Loring
Philip Allen Loring is a human ecologist and author. Loring is currently the Arrell Chair in Food, Policy, and Society at the Arrell Food Institute at University of Guelph. He is known for his work on Arctic food security, natural resource conflict, and regenerative food systems. Loring authored Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology , and is the host of multiple academic podcasts.
Go to Profile#2655
Robert Wauchope
1909 - 1979 (70 years)
Robert Wauchope was a well-respected American archaeologist and anthropologist, whose academic research specialized in the prehistory and archaeology of Latin America, Mesoamerica, and the Southwestern United States.
Go to Profile#2656
Aurel Stein
1862 - 1943 (81 years)
Sir Marc Aurel Stein, was a Hungarian-born British archaeologist, primarily known for his explorations and archaeological discoveries in Central Asia. He was also a professor at Indian universities.
Go to Profile#2657
Themistocles Zammit
1864 - 1935 (71 years)
Sir Themistocles "Temi" Zammit was a Maltese archaeologist and historian, professor of chemistry, medical doctor, researcher and writer. He served as Rector of the Royal University of Malta and first Director of the National Museum of Archaeology in his native city, Valletta.
Go to Profile#2658
A. J. Arkell
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Anthony John Arkell MBE MC FSA , known as A. J. Arkell, was a British archaeologist and colonial administrator noted for his work in the Sudan and Egypt. Biography Anthony John Arkell was born at Hinxhill Rectory, Hinxhill, Kent, England. He was the son of Reverend John Norris and Jessie Arkell . He won a scholarship to Bradfield College, where he was head boy. He next won the Jordell Scholarship in Classics to The Queen's College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#2659
Winifred Needler
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Winifred Needler DCL was a German-born Canadian Egyptologist at the Museum of Ontario Archaeology, where she rose to be keeper of the Near Eastern Collections and later curator of the Egyptian Department. She also taught at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#2660
George Wynn Brereton Huntingford
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
George Wynn Brereton Huntingford was an English linguist, anthropologist and historian. He lectured in East African languages and cultures at SOAS, University of London from 1950 until 1966. In 1966, Huntingford went to Canada to organise the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Brunswick at Fredericton, and retired to Málaga the next year, where he lived after his retirement.
Go to Profile#2661
Joseph Fontenrose
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Joseph Eddy Fontenrose was an American classical scholar. He was centrally interested in Greek religion and Greek mythology; he was also an expert on John Steinbeck, commenting on the mythology in Steinbeck's work.
Go to Profile#2662
Vera Mae Green
1928 - 1982 (54 years)
Vera Mae Green was an American anthropologist, educator, and scholar, who made major contributions in the fields of Caribbean studies, interethnic studies, black family studies and the study of poverty and the poor. She was one of the first African-American Caribbeanists and the first to focus on Dutch Caribbean culture. She developed a "methodology for the study of African American Anthropology" that acknowledged the diversity among and within black families, communities and cultures. Her other areas of research included mestizos in Mexico and communities in India and Israel. "[C]ommitted to...
Go to Profile#2663
Hallam L. Movius
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Hallam Leonard Movius was an American archaeologist most famous for his work on the Palaeolithic period. Career He was born in Newton, Massachusetts and attended Harvard College, graduating in 1930. After receiving his PhD from Harvard and serving in the 12th Air Force in North Africa and Italy during World War II, he returned to Harvard and became a professor of archaeology there. Eventually he also became curator of Paleolithic Archaeology at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Go to Profile#2664
David Bidney
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
David Bidney was an American anthropologist and philosopher associated with the Indiana University. In 1950 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in anthropology and cultural studies.
Go to Profile#2665
J. D. Unwin
1895 - 1936 (41 years)
Joseph Daniel Unwin MC was an English ethnologist and social anthropologist at Oxford University and Cambridge University. Contributions to anthropology In Sex and Culture , Unwin studied 80 primitive tribes and six known civilizations through 5,000 years of history. He claimed there was a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe. Aldous Huxley described Sex and Culture as "a work of the highest importance" in his literature.
Go to Profile#2666
Wilhelm Kraiker
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Wilhelm Kraiker was a German classical archaeologist. Life Born in Frankfurt, in 1927 Kraiker received his doctorate at Heidelberg University under Ludwig Curtius. In 1928/29 he received a , afterwards he was assistant at the Heidelberg University as well as at the German Archaeological Institute in Athens and Rome; on 12 July 1937 he habilitated in Heidelberg. From June 1941 to September 1944, Kraiker worked in Athens during the German occupation in World War II for the newly formed Kunstschutz, which was subordinate to the Army High Command Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner, and was in charge from July 1942.
Go to Profile#2667
Dorothea Leighton
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Dorothea Cross Leighton was an American social psychiatrist and a founder of the field of medical anthropology. Leighton held faculty positions at Cornell University and the University of North Carolina and she was the founding president of the Society for Medical Anthropology. She and her husband, Alexander Leighton, wrote The Navajo Door, which has been described as the first written work in applied medical anthropology.
Go to Profile#2668
Hortense Powdermaker
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Hortense Powdermaker was an American anthropologist best known for her ethnographic studies of African Americans in rural America and of Hollywood. Early life and education Born to a Jewish family, Powdermaker spent her childhood in Reading, Pennsylvania, and in Baltimore, Maryland. She studied history and the humanities at Goucher College, graduating in 1921. She worked as a labor organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers but became dissatisfied with the prospects of the U.S. labor movement amid the repression of the Palmer Raids. She left the United States to study at the London Schoo...
Go to Profile#2669
Theophile Meek
1881 - 1966 (85 years)
A scholar at the University of Toronto, Theophile James Meek published widely on archaeology, corresponded with Wm. F. Albright, and was a frequent contributor to the Encyclopædia Britannica on subjects related to the archaeology of both Palestine and Egypt. He may have played a part in working out the chronology of Egypt which soon became the prevailing mainstream chronology among scholars, and which the Encyclopedia Americana still upholds today. More recently, the Britannica has lowered its dates somewhat currently, with Manfred Bietak, an eminent Egyptologist placing them even later.
Go to Profile#2670
Edward H. Spicer
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Edward Holland Spicer was an American anthropologist who combined the four-field approach outlined by Franz Boas and trained in the structural-function approach of Radcliffe-Brown and the University of Chicago. He joined the anthropology faculty at the University of Arizona in 1946 and retired from teaching in 1976. Spicer contributed to all four fields of anthropology through his study of the American Indians, the Southwest, and the clash of cultures defined in his award-winning book, Cycles of Conquest. Spicer combined the elements of historical, structural, and functional analysis to address the question of socio-cultural change.
Go to Profile#2671
Robert Bennett Bean
1874 - 1944 (70 years)
Robert Bennett Bean was an associate professor of anatomy and ethnologist adept to craniometry and the concept of "race", whose scientific work was discredited by his mentor but who nonetheless became a professor at the University of Virginia and remained so until his death.
Go to Profile#2672
George E. Mylonas
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
George Emmanuel Mylonas was a prominent Greek and Aegean archaeologist. Early life While a student in Athens during the Greco–Turkish War of 1919–1922, he joined the Greek Army and was later taken prisoner. While a prisoner of war he lost enough weight that the permanent ID band on his wrist was easily taken on and off and exchanged with other prisoners. His future wife fled Asia Minor with only her tennis racket and spent the war living with family friends in Greece.
Go to Profile#2673
Richard MacGillivray Dawkins
1871 - 1955 (84 years)
Richard MacGillivray Dawkins FBA was a British archaeologist. He was associated with the British School at Athens, of which he was Director between 1906 and 1913. Early life Richard MacGillivray Dawkins was the son of the Royal Navy officer Rear-Admiral Richard Dawkins of Stoke Gabriel and his wife Mary Louisa McGillivray, only surviving daughter of Simon McGillivray. He was educated at Marlborough College and at King's College, London where he trained as an electrical engineer.
Go to Profile#2674
R. J. Hopper
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Robert John Hopper, FSA was an archaeologist and historian of Ancient Greece. He was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Sheffield. He was Dean of the university's Faculty of Arts from 1967 to 1970.
Go to Profile#2675
Rusiate Nayacakalou
1927 - 1972 (45 years)
Rusiate Nayacakalou was a Fijian social anthropologist. His work illustrated the ways in which anthropological reflexivity can inspire moral critique from its subjects when a critical stance toward tradition is mistaken as an attack on indigenous sovereignty.
Go to Profile#2676
Georges Daux
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Georges Daux was a French archaeologist and a leading scholar of Greek inscriptions. Born in Bastia and educated at the École normale supérieure, Daux headed the French School at Athens from 1950 to 1969.
Go to Profile#2677
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.
Go to Profile#2678
Solon Toothaker Kimball
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Solon Toothaker Kimball was a noted educator and anthropologist. Kimball was born and raised in Manhattan, Kansas. He graduated from Kansas State University in 1930, then received a master's degree and Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard in 1933 and 1936.
Go to Profile#2679
William Edward Hanley Stanner
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
William Edward Hanley Stanner CMG , often cited as W.E.H. Stanner, was an Australian anthropologist who worked extensively with Indigenous Australians. Stanner had a varied career that also included journalism in the 1930s, military service in World War II, and political advice on colonial policy in Africa and the South Pacific in the post-war period.
Go to Profile#2680
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.
Go to Profile#2681
Harriet Boyd Hawes
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Harriet Ann Boyd Hawes was a pioneering American archaeologist, nurse, relief worker, and professor. She is best known as the discoverer and first director of Gournia, one of the first archaeological excavations to uncover a Minoan settlement and palace on the Aegean island of Crete. She was also the second person to have the honor of the Agnes Hoppin Memorial Fellowship bestowed upon her, and the very first female archeologist to speak at the Archaeological Institute of America.
Go to Profile#2682
Lloyd Fallers
1925 - 1974 (49 years)
Lloyd Ashton "Tom" Fallers, Jr. was the A. A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the departments of anthropology and sociology at the University of Chicago. Fallers' work in social and cultural anthropology focused on social stratification and the development of new states in East Africa and Turkey.
Go to Profile#2683
John Caskey
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
John Langdon Caskey was an American archaeologist and classical scholar. He directed the American School of Classical Studies in Athens from 1949 to 1959, and was head of the Classics department at the University of Cincinnati from 1959 to 1979. His career focused on excavations at the ancient settlements of Troy, Lerna, and Keos. Until their marriage ended, he worked with his spouse Elizabeth Caskey who went to excavate on her own after they parted.
Go to Profile#2684
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.
Go to Profile#2685
Clellan S. Ford
1909 - 1972 (63 years)
Clellan Stearns Ford was an American anthropologist, best known as Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, and as co-author of the 1951 book Patterns of Sexual Behavior. Biography Clellan Ford was born on July 27, 1909, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was educated at Yale University, where he received the Ph.D. in chemistry in 1931, and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1935. In 1935, Ford spent a year in the Fiji Islands conducting ethnographic field research. The following year, he joined the Institute of Human Relations at Yale, where he co-founded the Cross-Cultural Survey. In 1940, the same ...
Go to Profile#2686
Glynn Isaac
1937 - 1985 (48 years)
Glynn Llywelyn Isaac was a South African archaeologist who specialised in the very early prehistory of Africa, and was one of twin sons born to botanists William Edwyn Isaac and Frances Margaret Leighton. He has been called the most influential Africanist of the last half century, and his papers on human movement and behavior are still cited in studies a quarter of a century later.
Go to Profile#2687
Carlo Anti
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Carlo Anti was an archaeologist and an officer in the army in the First World War and until 1922. Archaeologist Born in Villafranca di Verona, Anti studied at Verona and Bologna, where he graduated with Gherardo Ghirardini. Thereafter he transferred to Rome to study at the Italian Archaeological School and then to be an inspector at the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography. During his years studying in Rome he married his wife, Clelia Vinciguerra, also a cum at the school. Among his teachers at this time, he remembered Emanuel Löwy, a great Austrian archaeologist active in R...
Go to Profile#2688
T. Eric Peet
1882 - 1934 (52 years)
Thomas Eric Peet was an English Egyptologist. Biography Thomas Eric Peet was the son of Thomas and Salome Peet. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby and at Queen's College, Oxford. From 1909 onwards he conducted excavations in Egypt for the Egypt Exploration Fund. From 1913 to 1928, he was lecturer in Egyptology at Manchester University, though he also saw service in World War I as a lieutenant in the King's Regiment . From 1920 to 1933, he was Brunner Professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. In 1933 he was appointed Reader in Egyptology at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#2689
R. D. Banerji
1885 - 1930 (45 years)
Rakhal Das Banerji, also Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay , was an Indian archaeologist and an officer of the Archeological Survey of India . In 1919, he became the second ASI officer deputed to survey the site of Mohenjo-daro and returned there in the 1922-23 season. He was the first person to propose the remote antiquity of the site—which he did in a letter to Marshall in 1923—and in effect of the Harappan culture. After leaving the ASI, he held the Manindra Chandra Nandy professorship of Ancient Indian History and Culture at the Banaras Hindu University from 1928 until his premature death in 1930...
Go to Profile#2690
Ronald F. Tylecote
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Ronald Frank Tylecote was a British archaeologist and metallurgist, generally recognised as the founder of the sub-discipline of archaeometallurgy. Education and profession The son of doctor Frank Edward Tylecote, he was born in Manchester and educated at Oundle School. He obtained an MA from Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1938, and an MSc from the University of Manchester in 1942, and a PhD on the oxidation of copper from the University of London in 1952.
Go to Profile#2691
Georges Dossin
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Georges Gilles Joseph Dossin was a Belgian archaeologist, Assyriologist and art historian. Biography He studied in Liège and Paris, earning doctorates in classical philology and oriental history and literature . From 1924 to 1945 he taught classes on the art history of Asia Minor at the Institut Royal d'Histoire de l'Art et d'Archeologie de Bruxelles, and in the meantime, taught various courses in the fields of art history and archaeology at the University of Liège ; classes in Akkadian language at the Institut des Hautes Études de Belgique in Brussels , and classes in oriental history and A...
Go to Profile#2692
Alice Braunlich
1888 - 1989 (101 years)
Alice Freda Braunlich was an American classical philologist. Life Braunlich was born to parents of German extraction, Emilie Hedwig Hoering Braunlich and the physician Henry Uchtorf Braunlich, in Davenport, Iowa on February 1, 1888. Her father's income made it possible for Alice to study at the University of Chicago, where she obtained a bachelor's degree in 1908 and a master's degree in 1909. From 1912 to 1914 she worked as an assistant for William Gardner Hale, professor of Latin. In 1913 she received her Ph.D., with a dissertation on indirect questions in the indicative mood.
Go to Profile#2693
Truman Michelson
1879 - 1938 (59 years)
Truman Michelson was a linguist and anthropologist who worked from 1910 until his death for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. He also held a position as ethnologist at George Washington University from 1917 until 1932.
Go to Profile#2694
Peter Lawrence
1921 - 1987 (66 years)
Peter Lawrence was a British-born Australian anthropologist and pioneer in the study of Melanesian religions. Lawrence was born in Lancashire, and read classics at the University of Cambridge. Between 1942 and 1946 he served in the Royal Navy before returning to Cambridge at the end of World War II. He conducted his first fieldwork among the Garia people in southern Madang Province, Papua New Guinea in 1949–1950. Supervised by Meyer Fortes, he received his PhD in 1951 with a thesis entitled "Social structure and the process of social control among the Garia, Madang District, New Guinea".
Go to Profile#2695
A. M. Woodward
1883 - 1973 (90 years)
Arthur Maurice Woodward was a British archaeologist and ancient historian who was director of the British School at Athens from 1923 to 1929. He was later head of the department of ancient history at the University of Sheffield. During the First World War he served with the British Army in the British Salonika Force and was mentioned in despatches.
Go to Profile#2696
A. W. Lawrence
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Arnold Walter Lawrence was a British authority on classical sculpture and architecture. He was Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University in the 1940s, and in the early 1950s in Accra he founded what later became the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board as well as the National Museum of Ghana. He was the youngest brother of T. E. Lawrence and his literary executor.
Go to Profile#2697
Charles Gibson
1920 - 1985 (65 years)
Charles Gibson was an American ethnohistorian who wrote foundational works on the Nahua peoples of colonial Mexico and was elected President of the American Historical Association in 1977. He studied history at Yale University with George Kubler, and he taught for a number of years at University of Iowa before moving to University of Michigan. His dissertation on the Nahua polity of Tlaxcala , a key ally of the Spaniards in the conquest of Mexico, was the first major study of conquest and early colonial era Nahuas from the indigenous perspective. It remains a model for scholars working on Me...
Go to Profile#2698
Michelle Rosaldo
1944 - 1981 (37 years)
Michelle "Shelly" Zimbalist Rosaldo was a social, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist famous for her studies of the Ilongot people in the Philippines and for her pioneering role in women's studies and the anthropology of gender.
Go to Profile#2699
Martín Almagro Basch
1911 - 1984 (73 years)
Martín Almagro Basch was a Spanish archaeologist, historian, and writer. He fought in the Spanish civil war. He was an archaeology specialist, ranging from rock art to classic archaeology. He was a professor of early human history at the University of Madrid and Barcelona, and was Director of the Museo Arqueológico Nacional "MAN" de Madrid between 1968-1981. He directed the first Spanish archeological expedition in Egypt. His contribution in the transfer and rescue of several Egyptians temples was grateful by the Arab Republic with the concession of the Debod temple, actually in Madrid.
Go to Profile#2700
Albert Spaulding
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Albert Clanton Spaulding was an American anthropologist and processual archaeologist who encouraged the application of quantitative statistics in archaeological research and the legitimacy of anthropology as a science. His push for thorough statistical analysis in the field triggered a series of academic debates with archaeologist James Ford in which the nature of archaeological typologies was meticulously investigated—a dynamic discourse now known as the Ford-Spaulding Debate. He was also instrumental in increasing funding for archaeology through the National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile