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.
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List of the most influential people in Anthropology,
#2651
Konrad Jażdżewski
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Konrad Jażdżewski was a Polish professor of archeology, doctor honoris causa at the University of Łódź. He was the first to conduct excavations at Brześć Kujawski. Publications JAZDZEWSKI, KONRAD. Poland. 240 pp. with 77 photos, 27 line drawings, 3 maps, & 3 tables, 8vo, cloth. New York, Praeger, 1965. Ancient People and Places Series.Konrad Jażdżewski, Urgeschichte Mitteleuropas .Archaeological Research on course of the new investments - Interstate Highways A-1 and A-2, by foundation of Konrad Jażdżewski Institute of archeology and Anthropology
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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.
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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.
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Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz
1839 - 1911 (72 years)
Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz was a German archeologist. He has been called the founder of modern iconology . He served as director of the collection of antique sculpture and vases at the Berlin Museum and also as the director of the antiquarium of the Berlin Museum . Kekulé was the nephew of the organic chemist August Kekulé.
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Santo Mazzarino
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Santo Mazzarino was an Italian historian considered to be a leading 20th-century historian of ancient Rome. He was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. Mazzarino was born in Catania. As a scholar and faculty member of the University of Catania and University of Rome La Sapienza, Mazzarino was viewed as one of Italy's leading historians. His influential book La fine del mondo antico examined the death of Rome as a result of decadence. The book was widely read among non-specialists as well and has been translated into several languages. Mazzarino's primary historical contributions covered sub...
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Hans Schleif
1902 - 1945 (43 years)
Hans Philipp Oswald Schleif was a German architect, architectural and classical archaeologist and member of the SS , last occupying the rank of Standartenführer . He was a member of the Nazi Party since 1937, with membership number 5,380,876.
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Emanuel Löwy
1857 - 1938 (81 years)
Emanuel Löwy, or Emanuel Loewy was a classical archaeologist and theorist who employed the methodology of universal psychological sources of form in his work. Löwy was influenced by the concept of "das Gedächtnisbild" by Ernst Brücke. Löwy was also a friend of the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Among his academic specialties was the art of ancient Greek vase painting.
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André Godard
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
André Godard was an archaeologist, architect and historian of French and Middle Eastern Art. He served as the director of the Iranian Archeological Service for many years. Life Godard was born in Chaumont. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris, he studied Middle Eastern archaeology, particularly that of Iran, and later became known for designing the National Museum of Iran, where he was appointed inaugural director in 1936. He was also instrumental in the design of Tehran University campus.
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Jotham Johnson
1905 - 1967 (62 years)
Jotham Johnson was an American classical archaeologist. He was educated at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania where he received his doctorate in 1931. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh and then joined the faculty of New York University. He was the chairman of classics at the time of his death from an apparent heart attack.
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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.
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Otto Reche
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Otto Carl Reche was a German anthropologist and professor from Glatz , Prussian Silesia. He was active in researching whether there was a correlation between blood types and race. During the Second World War he openly advocated the genocide of ethnic Poles. Once a member of the Nazi Party, he remained active in anthropological issues following the downfall of Nazi Germany.
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Adolf Ellegard Jensen
1899 - 1965 (66 years)
Adolf Ellegard Jensen was one of the most important German ethnologists of the first half of the 20th century. Jensen's main research interests were myth, ritual and cult. He furthered the theory of Cultural Morphology founded by Leo Frobenius. Jensen is mostly known for his research on religious sacrifice that led him to the introduction of the concept of Dema Deity. His best-known work is 'Myth and Cult Among Primitive Peoples', published in 1951.
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Erich Swoboda
1896 - 1964 (68 years)
Erich Swoboda was an Austrian historian and ancient Roman archaeologist. In 1946, he became an associate professor at the University of Graz and became the director of the Institute for the History of Antiquity and Antiquity in Vienna. From 1951 to 1953, he served as a dean, and from 1960 to 1961 was the rector of the university. He received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
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Paul Kirchhoff
1900 - 1972 (72 years)
Paul Kirchhoff was a German-Mexican anthropologist, most noted for his seminal work in defining and elaborating the culture area of Mesoamerica, a term he coined. Early life and academic career Paul Kirchhoff was born in the German locality of Hörste, in the region of Westphalia. He commenced his undergraduate studies in Protestant theology and comparative religion at the University of Berlin, moving later to Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg. In the mid-1920s he undertook further studies at the University of Leipzig in ethnology and psychology, where he first developed his abiding interest in the indigenous cultures of the Americas.
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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.
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Georg Forster
1754 - 1794 (40 years)
Johann George Adam Forster, also known as Georg Forster , was a German geographer, naturalist, ethnologist, travel writer, journalist and revolutionary. At an early age, he accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, on several scientific expeditions, including James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific. His report of that journey, A Voyage Round the World, contributed significantly to the ethnology of the people of Polynesia and remains a respected work. As a result of the report, Forster, who was admitted to the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-two, came to be considered one of t...
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Wu Dingliang
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Wu Dingliang , also known as Woo Ting-Liang, was a pioneering Chinese anthropologist and educator. He is considered the founder of Chinese physical anthropology. Biography Wu was educated in Britain during the 1920s and came back to China after he obtained a doctor's degree in anthropology. He continued his work in Academia Sinica as the director and researcher of the Group of Anthropology in the Institute of History and Language. His research concentrated on somatometry, description of biological variation of ethnic minorities in China. He collected morphological measurements and described physical characteristics of living people in different parts of China.
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Fay-Cooper Cole
1881 - 1961 (80 years)
Fay-Cooper Cole was a professor of anthropology and founder of the anthropology department at the University of Chicago; he was a student of Franz Boas. Most famously, he was a witness for the defense for John Scopes at the Scopes Trial. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1903 and became Assistant Curator of Anthropology of at the Field Museum of Natural History the following year. He led the museum's Philippine expeditions, collecting more than 5,000 objects, traveling together with his wife, Mabel Cook Cole, with whom he co-authored The Story of Man. He helped establish the University of Chicago's graduate program in Anthropology and started an archeological survey of Illinois.
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John Lawrence Angel
1915 - 1986 (71 years)
John Lawrence Angel was a British-American biological anthropologist born on 21 March 1915 in London. His writings have had the biggest impact on paleodemography. Education His mother, Elizabeth, was an American classicist, and his father, John, was a British sculptor. The family emigrated to the United States in 1928. Angel completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard College in 1936 where he studied under Clyde Kluckhohn, Carleton S. Coon and Earnest A. Hooton. Hooton had a particular influence on Angel and arranged for him to conduct field work in Greece early in his career as a graduate student.
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Alfonso Caso
1896 - 1970 (74 years)
Alfonso Caso y Andrade was an archaeologist who made important contributions to pre-Columbian studies in his native Mexico. Caso believed that the systematic study of ancient Mexican civilizations was an important way to understand Mexican cultural roots.
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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.
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S. M. Shirokogoroff
1887 - 1939 (52 years)
Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogorov was a Russian anthropologist. A White émigré, he lived in China from 1922 until his death. Early life and education Shirokogoroff was born in Suzdal. He went to France in 1906 to study at the University of Paris and then the École d'anthropologie. He returned to Russia in 1910 to enter the Natural Sciences Department of the Saint Petersburg University, but pursued other interests including archaeology and then anthropology. Under the direction of Vasily Radlov he began studying the ethnography of the Tungusic peoples, participating in expeditions in northeast...
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Nikolai Marr
1864 - 1934 (70 years)
Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr was a Georgian-born historian and linguist who gained a reputation as a scholar of the Caucasus during the 1910s before embarking on his "Japhetic theory" on the origin of language , now considered as pseudo-scientific, and related speculative linguistic hypotheses.
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Torii Ryūzō
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
Ryuzo Torii was a Japanese anthropologist, ethnologist, archaeologist, and folklorist. Torii traveled across East Asia and South America for his research. He is known for his anthropological research in China, Taiwan, Korea, Russia, Europe, and other countries.
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John Myres
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
Sir John Linton Myres OBE FBA FRAI was a British archaeologist and academic, who conducted excavations in Cyprus during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Life Myres was the son of the Rev. William Miles Myres and his wife, Jane Linton, and was educated at Winchester College. He graduated B.A. at New College, Oxford in 1892. During the same year he was a Craven Fellow at the British School at Athens with which he excavated at the Minoan sanctuary of Petsofas. Myres became the first Wykeham Professor of Ancient History, at the University of Oxford, in 1910, having been Gladstone Professor of Greek and Lecturer in Ancient Geography, University of Liverpool from 1907.
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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.
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Donald Lathrap
1927 - 1990 (63 years)
Donald Ward Lathrap was an American archaeologist who specialized in the study of neolithic American culture. He was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at the time of his death.
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André Leroi-Gourhan
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
André Leroi-Gourhan was a French archaeologist, paleontologist, paleoanthropologist, and anthropologist with an interest in technology and aesthetics and a penchant for philosophical reflection. Biography Leroi-Gourhan completed his doctorate on the archaeology of the North Pacific under the supervision of Marcel Mauss. Beginning in 1933 he held various positions at museums around the world, including the British Museum and the Musée de l'Homme, as well as in Japan. Between 1940 and 1944 he worked at the Musée Guimet. In 1944 he was sent to the Château de Valençay to take care of works evacuated from the Louvre, including the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
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Mortimer Wheeler
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler CH CIE MC TD was a British archaeologist and officer in the British Army. Over the course of his career, he served as Director of both the National Museum of Wales and London Museum, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, and the founder and Honorary Director of the Institute of Archaeology in London, in addition to writing twenty-four books on archaeological subjects.
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Richard Thurnwald
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
Richard Thurnwald was an Austrian anthropologist and sociologist, known for his comparative studies of social institutions. Biography He studied law, economics and oriental languages in Berlin, earning a law degree in 1891. He then took a government post, and while being stationed in Bosnia , he conducted research of the local social and economic climate. In 1898 he travelled to Egypt, and following his return to Berlin, he took classes in Egyptology and Assyriology . In Berlin, he found employment as an assistant curator at the Museum für Völkerkunde.
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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.
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Henri Frankfort
1897 - 1954 (57 years)
Henri "Hans" Frankfort was a Dutch Egyptologist, archaeologist and orientalist. Early life and education Born in Amsterdam, into a "liberal Jewish" family, Frankfort studied history at the University of Amsterdam and then moved to London, where in 1924, he took an MA under Sir Flinders Petrie at the University College. In 1927 he gained a Ph.D. from the University of Leiden.
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Alexander Francis Chamberlain
1865 - 1914 (49 years)
Alexander Francis Chamberlain was a Canadian anthropologist, born in England. Under the direction of Franz Boas he received the first Ph.D. granted in anthropology in the United States from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. After graduating, he taught at Clark, eventually becoming full professor in 1911. Under the auspices of the British Association, his area of specialty was the Kootenay Indians.
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Harry L. Shapiro
1902 - 1990 (88 years)
Harry Lionel Shapiro was an American anthropologist and eugenicist. Biography Shapiro was born into a Jewish family and was educated in Boston, Massachusetts. While he was a senior at Harvard he was awarded a graduate fellowship from Yale in 1923 to pursue a genetic study of the descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty. Shapiro was a student of Earnest Hooton at Harvard University.
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Robert F. Murphy
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Robert Francis Murphy was an American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City, from the early 1960s to 1990. His field work included studies of the Munduruku people of the Amazon and the Tuareg people of the Sahara.
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Bertil Lundman
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Bertil J. Lundman was a Swedish anthropologist. Early life Lundman was born on September 28, 1899, in Malmö. Career Lundman was an anthropologist. In the 1930s, he wrote an article in Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde, a German journal of racial studies. Later, he served on the executive committee of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics.
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Sergei Rudenko
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Serhiy Ivanovich Rudenko was a prominent Ukrainian Soviet anthropologist and archaeologist who discovered and excavated the most celebrated of Scythian burials, Pazyryk in Siberia. Rudenko was a follower of Paul Broca's "French School" of anthropology. He participated in the Russian Geographical Society's Map Commission established in 1910. In that year he participated in an expedition to the Ob River basin in Western Siberia, where he studied the Khanty people.
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Berthold Laufer
1874 - 1934 (60 years)
Berthold Laufer was a German anthropologist and historical geographer with an expertise in East Asian languages. The American Museum of Natural History calls him, "one of the most distinguished sinologists of his generation."
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Hermann Klaatsch
1863 - 1916 (53 years)
Hermann Klaatsch was a German physician, anatomist, physical anthropologist, evolutionist, and professor at the University of Heidelberg from 1890, and at the University of Breslau until 1916. Klaatsch studied evolutionary theory, being mentioned in some fingerprint books for his early studies on friction skin development. He researched the volar pads associated with the epidermal patterns, grouping the volar pads of humans and primates together. Subsequent to Arthur Kollmann, Klaatsch also gave names to the various volar pads in 1888.
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Koganei Yoshikiyo
1859 - 1944 (85 years)
Koganei Yoshikiyo was a Japanese anatomist and anthropologist of the Meiji period. Biography A child of an Echigo Nagaoka clansman, he graduated from East School, the precursor of the Tokyo Imperial University medical school, in 1880. He then went to Germany where he learned anatomy and histology. He returned to Japan in 1885, and in the following year he was appointed a professor at Tokyo Imperial University Medical School, becoming the first Japanese lecturer on anatomy in the school.
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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.
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Nicholas Roerich
1874 - 1947 (73 years)
Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh , better known as Nicholas Roerich , was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher, and public figure. In his youth he was influenced by Russian Symbolism, a movement in Russian society centered on the spiritual. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression.
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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.
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Paul Kosok
1869 - 1959 (90 years)
Paul August Kosok , was an American professor of history and government, who is credited as the first serious researcher of the Nazca Lines in Peru. His work on the lines started in 1939, when he was doing field study related to the irrigation systems of ancient cultures. By the 1950s, he had completed extensive mapping of more than 300 ancient canals in Peru, in collaboration with archeologist Richard P. Schaedel. Kosok demonstrated the culture's sophisticated management of water to support their settlements.
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David Zolotarev
1885 - 1935 (50 years)
David Alekseevich Zolotarev was a Russian anthropologist and ethnographer who studied the tribal populations of the Yaroslavl region of northern Russia. In his capacity as professor of anthropology at the University of Leningrad and as a representative of the Russian Geographical Society’s Ethnographic Division, Zolotarev led numerous anthropological expeditions, and would later report the findings in published research papers and at scientific conferences. Following the Russian Revolution, the Soviet government called on Zolotarev and other anthropologists to determine how the isolated ethni...
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Frederick Starr
1858 - 1933 (75 years)
Frederick Starr was an American academic, anthropologist, and "populist educator" born in Auburn, New York. As he was avid collector of charms and votive slips he was called in Japan. He sold much of this collection to art collector and museum specialist Gertrude Bass Warner, and it currently resides at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon and the University of Oregon Knight Library Special Collections & University Archives.
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Ludwig Woltmann
1871 - 1907 (36 years)
Ludwig Woltmann was a German anthropologist, zoologist and neo-Kantian. He studied medicine and philosophy, and obtained doctorates in the two fields from the University of Freiburg in 1896. Ludwig Woltmann falls in the spiritual and ideological history of the 20th century with the racial theorists Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, in particular in terms of his racial theoretical thought. In his book Die Germanen und die Renaissance in Italien , he argued that the emergence of the Renaissance in Italy was led not by the descendants of the Romans, but by the Germanic tribes who had subdued Italy during the Middle Ages.
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Vasile Pârvan
1882 - 1927 (45 years)
Vasile Pârvan was a Romanian historian and archaeologist. Biography Pârvan was born in Perchiu, Huruiești commune, Bacău County. He came from a modest family, being the first child of the teacher Andrei Pârvan and of Aristița Chiriac . He received the first name Vasile, as well as his uncle, Vasile Conta .
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Norman Tindale
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Norman Barnett Tindale AO was an Australian anthropologist, archaeologist, entomologist and ethnologist. Life Tindale was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1900. His family moved to Tokyo and lived there from 1907 to 1915, where his father worked as an accountant at the Salvation Army mission in Japan. Norman attended the American School in Japan, where his closest friend was Gordon Bowles, a Quaker who, like him, later became an anthropologist.
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Otto Stoll
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Otto Stoll was a Swiss linguist and ethnologist. Otto Stoll was a professor of ethnology and geography at the University of Zurich who specialized in research of Mayan languages. From 1878 to 1883 he conducted scientific studies in Guatemala. He was the author of several treatises on Guatemala, including important works in the fields on ethnography and ethno-linguistics. Stoll also published on neotropical Acari with a major work being the volume in the Biologia Centrali-Americana between Dec. 1886 and Jan. 1893.
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