The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Anthropology,
#2651
Frank Speck
1881 - 1950 (69 years)
Frank Gouldsmith Speck was an American anthropologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples among the Eastern Woodland Native Americans of the United States and First Nations peoples of eastern boreal Canada.
Go to Profile#2652
W. Lloyd Warner
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
William Lloyd Warner was a pioneering anthropologist and sociologist noted for applying the techniques of British functionalism to understanding American culture. Background William Lloyd Warner was born in Redlands, California, into the family of William Taylor and Clara Belle Carter, middle-class farmers. Warner attended San Bernardino High School, after which he joined the army in 1917. He contracted tuberculosis in 1918 and was released from the service. In 1918, he married Billy Overfield, but the marriage lasted only briefly.
Go to Profile#2653
Juan Bautista Ambrosetti
1865 - 1917 (52 years)
Juan Bautista Ambrosetti was an Argentine archaeologist, ethnographer and naturalist who helped pioneer anthropology in his country. Life and work Ambrosetti was born in Gualeguay, Entre Ríos Province, in 1865. He enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires, where he was mentored by the prominent local naturalist, Dr. Florentino Ameghino. At age twenty, he joined an expedition of naturalists into then-remote and largely uncharted Chaco Province, publishing his observations in Buenos Aires by a pseudonym, Tomás Bathata.
Go to Profile#2654
Frederic Ward Putnam
1839 - 1915 (76 years)
Frederic Ward Putnam was an American anthropologist and biologist. Biography Putnam was born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of Ebenezer and Elizabeth Putnam. After leaving college, Ebenezer had for a short time engaged in fitting young men for college, but soon went into business in Cincinnati as a commission merchant, a line in which he was successful. Recalled to Salem by his father's death in 1826, Ebenezer married there and devoted himself to the study and cultivation of plants and fruits, and involved himself in the Democratic Party in his county. Although frequently offer...
Go to Profile#2655
Gustaf Kossinna
1858 - 1931 (73 years)
Gustaf Kossinna was a German philologist and archaeologist who was Professor of German Archaeology at the University of Berlin. Along with Carl Schuchhardt he was the most influential German prehistorian of his day, and was creator of the techniques of settlement archaeology . His nationalistic theories about the origins of the Germanic peoples and Indo-Europeans influenced aspects of National Socialist ideology. Though politically discredited after World War II, Kossinna's methodological approach has greatly influenced archaeology up to the present day.
Go to Profile#2656
Eugène Pittard
1867 - 1962 (95 years)
Eugène Pittard was a Swiss anthropologist notable for his work Les Races et l'Histoire published in 1924. Early life Pittard was born in Plainpalais, Geneva, on June 5, 1867. Even as a child, Pittard showed a predilection for collecting and observing people and artifacts. He had a small collection consisting of fossils, bones and coins, which he hoped to some day submit to Carl Vogt.
Go to Profile#2657
Paul Radin
1883 - 1959 (76 years)
Paul Radin was an American cultural anthropologist and folklorist of the early twentieth century specializing in Native American languages and cultures. The noted legal scholar Max Radin was his older brother.
Go to Profile#2658
Eugène Dubois
1858 - 1940 (82 years)
Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois was a Dutch paleoanthropologist and geologist. He earned worldwide fame for his discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus , or "Java Man". Although hominid fossils had been found and studied before, Dubois was the first anthropologist to embark upon a purposeful search for them.
Go to Profile#2659
James Spradley
1934 - 1982 (48 years)
James P. Spradley was a social scientist and a professor of anthropology at Macalester College. Spradley wrote or edited 20 books on ethnography and qualitative research including The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society , Deaf Like Me , The Ethnographic Interview , and Participant Observation .
Go to Profile#2660
Géza Róheim
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Géza Róheim was a Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist. Considered by some as the most important anthropologist-psychoanalyst, he is often credited with founding the field of psychoanalytic anthropology; was the first psychoanalytically trained anthropologist to do field research; and later developed a general cultural theory.
Go to Profile#2661
Zora Neale Hurston
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote over 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
Go to Profile#2662
Lucy Mair
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Lucy Philip Mair was a British anthropologist. She wrote on the subject of social organization, and contributed to the involvement of anthropological research in governance and politics. Her work on colonial administration was influential.
Go to Profile#2663
Nirmal Kumar Bose
1901 - 1972 (71 years)
Nirmal Kumar Bose was a leading Indian anthropologist, who played a formative role in "building an Indian Tradition in Anthropology". A humanist scholar with a broad range of interests, he was also a leading sociologist, urbanist, Gandhian, and educationist. Also active in the Indian freedom struggle with Mahatma Gandhi, he was imprisoned in 1931 during the Salt Satyagraha.
Go to Profile#2664
Arthur Keith
1866 - 1955 (89 years)
Sir Arthur Keith FRS FRAI was a British anatomist and anthropologist, and a proponent of scientific racism. He was a fellow and later the Hunterian Professor and conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He was a strong proponent of Piltdown Man, but finally conceded it to be a forgery shortly before his death.
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Rudolf Pöch
1870 - 1921 (51 years)
Rudolf Pöch was an Austrian medical doctor, anthropologist, and ethnologist. Pöch is also known as a pioneer in photography, cinematography, and audio engineering. He can be regarded as a founding father of the Institute for Anthropology and Ethnography at the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#2666
Arthur Evans
1851 - 1941 (90 years)
Sir Arthur John Evans was a British archaeologist and pioneer in the study of Aegean civilization in the Bronze Age. He is most famous for unearthing the Minoan palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete. Based on the structures and artifacts found there and throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Evans found that he needed to distinguish the Minoan civilisation from Mycenaean Greece. Evans was also the first to define Cretan scripts Linear A and Linear B, as well as an earlier pictographic writing.
Go to Profile#2667
James Mooney
1861 - 1921 (60 years)
James Mooney was an American ethnographer who lived for several years among the Cherokee. Known as "The Indian Man", he conducted major studies of Southeastern Indians, as well as of tribes on the Great Plains. He did ethnographic studies of the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement among various Native American culture groups, after Sitting Bull's death in 1890. His works on the Cherokee include The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees , and Myths of the Cherokee . All were published by the US Bureau of American Ethnology, within the Smithsonian Institution.
Go to Profile#2668
Charles Gabriel Seligman
1873 - 1940 (67 years)
Charles Gabriel Seligman FRS FRAI was a British physician and ethnologist. His main ethnographic work described the culture of the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and the Shilluk people of the Sudan. He was a professor at London School of Economics and was influential as the teacher of well-known anthropologists such as Bronisław Malinowski, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Meyer Fortes.
Go to Profile#2669
Elsie Clews Parsons
1875 - 1941 (66 years)
Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons was an American anthropologist, sociologist, folklorist, and feminist who studied Native American tribes—such as the Tewa and Hopi—in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. She helped found The New School. She was associate editor for The Journal of American Folklore , president of the American Folklore Society , president of the American Ethnological Society , and was elected the first female president of the American Anthropological Association right before her death.
Go to Profile#2670
William F. Albright
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
William Foxwell Albright was an American archaeologist, biblical scholar, philologist, and expert on ceramics. He is considered "one of the twentieth century's most influential American biblical scholars", having become known to the public in 1948 for his role in the authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. His scholarly reputation arose as a leading theorist and practitioner of biblical archaeology.
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Marius Barbeau
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Charles Marius Barbeau, , also known as C. Marius Barbeau, or more commonly simply Marius Barbeau, was a Canadian ethnographer and folklorist who is today considered a founder of Canadian anthropology. A Rhodes Scholar, he is best known for an early championing of Québecois folk culture, and for his exhaustive cataloguing of the social organization, narrative and musical traditions, and plastic arts of the Tsimshianic-speaking peoples in British Columbia , and other Northwest Coast peoples. He developed unconventional theories about the peopling of the Americas.
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Sergey Tolstov
1907 - 1976 (69 years)
Sergey Pavlovich Tolstov was a Russian and Soviet archaeologist and ethnographer. Tolstov was the organizer and the first director of the Chorasmian Expedition credited with discovery and investigation of archeological monuments of Khwarezm. He is also the author of the book Old Khwarezm, the seminal work in the field. In 1953, Tolstov was elected the corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
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St. Clair Drake
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
John Gibbs St. Clair Drake was an African-American sociologist and anthropologist whose scholarship and activism led him to document much of the social turmoil of the 1960s, establish some of the first Black Studies programs in American universities, and contribute to the independence movement in Ghana. Drake often wrote about challenges and achievements in race relations as a result of his extensive research.
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José Leite de Vasconcelos
1858 - 1941 (83 years)
José Leite de Vasconcelos Cardoso Pereira de Melo was a Portuguese ethnographer, archaeologist and prolific author who wrote extensively on Portuguese philology and prehistory. He was the founder and the first director of the Portuguese National Museum of Archaeology.
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Oscar Lewis
1914 - 1970 (56 years)
Oscar Lewis, born Lefkowitz was an American anthropologist. He is best known for his vivid depictions of the lives of slum dwellers and his argument that a cross-generational culture of poverty transcends national boundaries. Lewis contended that the cultural similarities occurred because they were "common adaptations to common problems" and that "the culture of poverty is both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor classes to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individualistic, capitalistic society." He won the 1967 U.S. National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Rel...
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Wilhelm Schmidt
1868 - 1954 (86 years)
Wilhelm Schmidt SVD was a German-Austrian Catholic priest, linguist and ethnologist. He presided over the Fourth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences that was held at Vienna in 1952.
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Raymond Williams
1921 - 1988 (67 years)
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contributed to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books were sold in UK editions alone, and there are many translations available. His work laid foundations for the field of cultural studies and cultural materialism.
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Felix von Luschan
1854 - 1924 (70 years)
Felix Ritter von Luschan was a medical doctor, anthropologist, explorer, archaeologist and ethnographer born in the Austrian Empire. Life Luschan was born the son of a lawyer in Hollabrunn, Lower Austria, and attended the Akademisches Gymnasium in Vienna. After leaving school he studied medicine at the University of Vienna and anthropology in Paris, with an emphasis on craniometry. After he gained his doctorate in 1878, he was an army doctor in Austro-Hungarian occupied Bosnia and, together with the British archaeologist Arthur Evans, travelled through Dalmatia, Montenegro and Albania. From 1...
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Alfred Irving Hallowell
1892 - 1974 (82 years)
Alfred Irving "Pete" Hallowell was an award-winning American anthropologist, archaeologist and businessman. Early life and education Hallowell was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania receiving his B.S. degree in 1914. It was assumed he would follow a career in business but Hallowell developed interests in sociology and became first a social worker for the Family Society.
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Bernardino de Sahagún
1499 - 1590 (91 years)
Bernardino de Sahagún, OFM was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participated in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain . Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, he journeyed to New Spain in 1529. He learned Nahuatl and spent more than 50 years in the study of Aztec beliefs, culture and history. Though he was primarily devoted to his missionary task, his extraordinary work documenting indigenous worldview and culture has earned him the title as “the first anthropologist." He also contributed to the description of Nahuatl, the imperial language of the Aztec Empire.
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Arnold van Gennep
1873 - 1957 (84 years)
Arnold van Gennep, in full Charles-Arnold Kurr van Gennep was a Dutch–German-French ethnographer and folklorist. Biography He was born in Ludwigsburg, in the Kingdom of Württemberg . Since his parents were never married, Van Gennep adopted his Dutch mother's name, "van Gennep". When he was six, he and his mother moved to Lyons, France, where she married a French doctor who moved the family to Savoy.
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Juan Comas
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Juan Comas Camps was a Spanish-Mexican anthropologist, notable for his critical work on race, and his participation in drafting the UNESCO statement on race. He fled Spain during the regime of Franco, and spent the rest of his life in Mexico. He was a professor of physical anthropology at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico between 1940 and 1943, and at the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1955 until his death.
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Alexander Lesser
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Alexander Lesser was an American anthropologist. Working in the Boasian tradition of American cultural anthropology, he adopted critical stances of several ideas of his fellow Boasians, and became known as an original and critical thinker, pioneering several ideas that later became widely accepted within anthropology.
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Georges Bataille
1897 - 1962 (65 years)
Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille was a French philosopher and intellectual working in philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and history of art. His writing, which included essays, novels, and poetry, explored such subjects as eroticism, mysticism, surrealism, and transgression. His work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including poststructuralism.
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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.
Go to Profile#2698
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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