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,
#2701
Doro Levi
1898 - 1991 (93 years)
Teodoro "Doro" Levi was an Italian archaeologist who practiced in the Mediterranean countries in the 20th century. Specifically, Levi conducted excavations in Italy, Greece, and Turkey. From 1938 to 1945, Levi was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Levi has published a number of technical manuscripts on archaeology such as Festos e la Civiltà Minoica, tavole I published in 1976. Some of Levi's most significant work was a long term excavation at Minoan Phaistos, which site is the second most significant Minoan settlement and which has yielded important fi...
Go to Profile#2702
Clark Hopkins
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Clark Hopkins was an American archaeologist. During the 1930s he led the joint French-American excavations at Dura Europos. In later years he was professor of art and archeology at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#2703
John Sydenham Furnivall
1878 - 1960 (82 years)
John Sydenham Furnivall was a British-born colonial public servant and writer in Burma. He is credited with coining the concept of the plural society and had a noted career as an influential historian of Southeast Asia, particularly of the Dutch East Indies and British Burma. He published several books over a long career, including the influential Colonial Policy and Practice and wrote for more than 20 major journals, although his work is now criticized as being Eurocentric and biased in favor of continued colonialism.
Go to Profile#2704
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#2705
Ian Richmond
1902 - 1965 (63 years)
Sir Ian Archibald Richmond, was an English archaeologist and academic. He was Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire at the University of Oxford. In addition, he was Director of the British School at Rome from 1930 to 1932, President of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies from 1958 to 1961, and Director of the Society of Antiquaries of London from 1959 to 1964.
Go to Profile#2706
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#2707
Morton Fried
1923 - 1986 (63 years)
Morton Herbert Fried , was a distinguished professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City from 1950 until his death in 1986. He made considerable contributions to the fields of social and political theory.
Go to Profile#2708
Earnest Hooton
1887 - 1954 (67 years)
Earnest Albert Hooton was an American physical anthropologist known for his work on racial classification and his popular writings such as the book Up From The Ape. Hooton sat on the Committee on the Negro, a group that "focused on the anatomy of blacks and reflected the racism of the time."
Go to Profile#2709
Ernst Sprockhoff
1892 - 1967 (75 years)
Ernst Sprockhoff was a German prehistorian and inventor of the Sprockhoff numbering system for megalithic monuments in Germany. Life Sprockhoff was born on 6 August 1892 in Berlin. He started as a teacher before the first World War. After the war he completed his abitur during his captivity as a prisoner of war and in 1920 started to study prehistory at Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin. He was graduated in 1924 by Max Ebert at the University of Königsberg. From 1926 to 1928 he was employed at the Provincial Museum of Hanover and from 1928 to 1935 at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz.
Go to Profile#2710
Veronica Strang
Veronica Strang is an author and professor of anthropology affiliated to Oxford University. Her work combines cultural anthropology with environmental studies, and focuses on the relationship between human communities and their environments. Strang's publications include the books 'The Meaning of Water' ; Gardening the World: agency, identity, and the ownership of water' ; 'What Anthropologists Do' , 'Water Nature and Culture' and most recently 'Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis' , which is based on a major comparative study of water deities around the world. Furth...
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Felix M. Keesing
1902 - 1961 (59 years)
Felix M. Keesing was a New Zealand-born anthropologist who specialized in the study of the Philippine Islands and the South Pacific. He came to the United States in the 1940s and taught at Stanford University, California, 1942–1961.
Go to Profile#2712
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.
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Donald Thomson
1901 - 1970 (69 years)
Donald Finlay Fergusson Thomson OBE was an Australian anthropologist and ornithologist. he is known for his studies of and friendship with the Pintupi and Yolngu peoples, and for his intervention in the Caledon Bay crisis.
Go to Profile#2714
Abram Kardiner
1891 - 1981 (90 years)
Abram Kardiner was a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic therapist. An active publisher of academic research, he co-founded the Psychoanalytic and Psychosomatic Clinic for Training and Research in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City . Kardiner was deeply interested in cross-cultural diagnosis and the psychoanalytic study of culture. While teaching at Columbia, he developed a course on the application of psychoanalysis to the study of culture and worked closely with anthropologists throughout his career.
Go to Profile#2715
Marcus Niebuhr Tod
1878 - 1974 (96 years)
Marcus Niebuhr Tod, OBE, FBA was a British historian and epigraphist. He was a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, from 1903 to 1947, and Reader in Greek Epigraphy at the University of Oxford from 1927 to 1947.
Go to Profile#2716
Glyn Daniel
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
Glyn Edmund Daniel was a Welsh scientist and archaeologist who taught at Cambridge University, where he specialised in the European Neolithic period. He was appointed Disney Professor of Archaeology in 1974 and edited the academic journal Antiquity from 1958 to 1985. In addition to early efforts to popularise archaeological study and antiquity on radio and television, he edited several popular studies of the fields. He also published mysteries under the pseudonym Dilwyn Rees.
Go to Profile#2717
Cyril Fox
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Sir Cyril Fred Fox was an English archaeologist and museum director. Fox became keeper of archaeology at the National Museum of Wales, and subsequently served as director from 1926 to 1948. His most notable achievements were collaborative. With his second wife, Aileen Fox, he surveyed and excavated several prehistoric monuments in Wales. With Iorwerth Peate, he established the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans, and with Lord Raglan, he authored a definitive history of vernacular architecture, Monmouthshire Houses.
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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...
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Raoul Naroll
1920 - 1985 (65 years)
Raoul Naroll was a Canadian-born American anthropologist who did much to promote the methodology of cross-cultural studies. Early life and education Naroll was born in Toronto, Ontario but was raised in Los Angeles and attended UCLA at the age of 16, dropping out in his junior year to join the military.
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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...
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Viola Garfield
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Viola E. Garfield was an American anthropologist best known for her work on the social organization and plastic arts of the Tsimshian nation in British Columbia and Alaska. Early life Viola Edmundson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. Her family moved a few years later to Coupeville, Washington, on Whidbey Island, where she attended local schools.
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Berthold Ullman
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Berthold Louis Ullman was an American classicist. Life and career Ullman was born in Chicago to Louis Ullman and Eleanora Fried. He was educated at the University of Chicago . He joined the faculty at Chicago and also taught at the University of Pittsburgh and Iowa State University. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1925 until 1944 before moving to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, becoming Kenan professor of Latin and department chair. Ullman's library collection formed the core of the present classics department library at the University of North Carolina. Ullman was also president of the American Philological Association in 1935.
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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.
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Oscar Broneer
1894 - 1992 (98 years)
Oscar Theodore Broneer was a prominent Swedish American educator and archaeologist known in particular for his work on Ancient Greece. He is most associated with his discovery of the Temple of Isthmia, an important Panhellenic shrine dating from the seventh century B.C.
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Harry Holbert Turney-High
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Harry Holbert Turney-High was an American anthropologist and author who studied primitive war and conflict. He was a professor of anthropology at University of South Carolina and also a colonel in the military police in the United States Army Reserve. He based his theory on the concept of military horizon, which is the point where a society evolves from a primitive form of war towards a more complex one. This evolution depends not only on traditionally studied mechanism, such as climate or access to resources, but mainly on the organizational ability of any given society.
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Phyllis Kaberry
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Phyllis Mary Kaberry was a social anthropologist who dedicated her work to the study of women in various societies. Particularly with her work in both Australia and Africa, she paved the way for a feminist approach in anthropological studies. Her research on the sacred life and significant role of the Aboriginal women of Australia proved to be a controversial topic, as anthropology during her years of early fieldwork was male-dominated, filled with the misconceptions that men were the superior in any aspect of life. Contributing proof of women's significance to societal development and org...
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Franz Cumont
1868 - 1947 (79 years)
Franz-Valéry-Marie Cumont was a Belgian archaeologist and historian, a philologist and student of epigraphy, who brought these often isolated specialties to bear on the syncretic mystery religions of Late Antiquity, notably Mithraism.
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Morris Steggerda
1900 - 1950 (50 years)
Morris Steggerda was an American physical anthropologist. He worked primarily on Central American and Caribbean populations. Life and career Steggerda was born in Holland, Michigan, the son of Sena and John Steggerda. He was of Dutch descent. He received an A.B. from Hope College in 1922, and an A.M. and Ph.D. from the Department of Zoology of the University of Illinois, in 1923 and 1928 respectively. His first academic position was as assistant professor of zoology at Smith College , but most of his career was spent as an investigator with the Carnegie Institution for Science at Cold Spring Harbor, New York .
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Kathleen Kenyon
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon, was a British archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She led excavations of Tell es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho, from 1952 to 1958, and has been called one of the most influential archaeologists of the 20th century. She was Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, from 1962 to 1973, having undertaken her own studies at Somerville College, Oxford.
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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.
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A. Aiyappan
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
Ayinapalli Aiyappan was a museologist who served as Superintendent of the Government Museum, Madras from 1940 to 1960. He was the first Indian to occupy the post. Aiyappan was also an amateur archaeologist who did pioneering excavations on the archaeological site at Arikamedu.
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T. B. L. Webster
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
Thomas Bertram Lonsdale Webster was a British archaeologist and Classicist, known for his studies of Greek comedy. Background He was the son of Sir Thomas Lonsdale Webster. During World War I he attended Charterhouse. As a student at Oxford University, he first studied Greek vases that John Beazley had brought in, but soon switched to Menander and developed a lifelong interest in Greek comedy that resulted in "reconstructions of the plots of lost plays and ... collections of evidence from widely disparate sources bearing on the history of the Greek theater".
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Cynthia Irwin-Williams
1936 - 1990 (54 years)
Cynthia Irwin-Williams was an archaeologist of the prehistoric American Southwest. She received a B.A. in Anthropology from Radcliffe College in 1957; the next year she received a M.A. in the same field. In 1963 she completed her educational career in Anthropology with a PhD. from Harvard University. Beginning her career in the 1950s, Irwin-Williams was considered a groundbreaker for women in archaeology, like her friend and supporter Hannah Marie Wormington.
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Luc Lacourcière
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Luc Lacourcière, CC was a Quebec writer and ethnographer, who established himself during his lifetime as a leading figure in folklore studies. Trained by Marius Barbeau, he in turn influenced renowned researchers such as linguist Claude Poirier. In 1944, Lacourcière founded the Archives de folklore , which he directed until 1975. Since 1978, a Luc-Lacourcière medal has been awarded every two years.
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Leonhard Schultze-Jena
1872 - 1955 (83 years)
Leonhard Sigmund Friedrich Kuno Klaus Schultze-Jena was a German explorer, zoologist, and anthropologist known for his explorations of German Southwest Africa and New Guinea, as well as for his studies on Mesoamerican languages. During the Herero and Namaqua genocide, Schultze, a witness, took "body parts from fresh native corpses" which according to him was a "welcome addition". He also noted that he could use prisoners for that purpose.
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Ronald Berndt
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Ronald Murray Berndt was an Australian social anthropologist who, in 1963, became the inaugural professor of anthropology at the University of Western Australia. He and his wife Catherine Berndt maintained a close professional partnership for five decades, working among Aboriginal Australians at Ooldea , Northern Territory cattle stations , Balgo and natives of New Guinea .
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Marvin Opler
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Marvin Kaufmann Opler was an American anthropologist and social psychiatrist. His brother Morris Edward Opler was also an anthropologist who studied the Southern Athabaskan peoples of North America. Morris and Marvin Opler were the sons of Austrian-born Arthur A. Opler, a merchant, and Fanny Coleman-Hass. Marvin Opler is best known for his work as a principal investigator in the Midtown Community Mental Health Research Study . This landmark study hinted at widespread stresses induced by urban life, as well as contributing to the development of the burgeoning field of social psychiatry in the ...
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Ralph Beals
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Ralph Leon Beals was an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, a former president of the American Anthropological Association, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He worked on community development in Egypt with UNESCO and studied Mexican students in American universities. His brother was journalist Carleton Beals.
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William Bascom
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
William R. Bascom was an award-winning American folklorist, anthropologist, and museum director. He was a specialist in the art and culture of West Africa and the African Diaspora, especially the Yoruba of Nigeria.
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Friedrich Solmsen
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Friedrich W. Solmsen was a philologist and professor of classical studies. He published nearly 150 books, monographs, scholarly articles, and reviews from the 1930s through the 1980s. Solmsen's work is characterized by a prevailing interest in the history of ideas. He was an influential scholar in the areas of Greek tragedy, particularly for his work on Aeschylus, and the philosophy of the physical world and its relation to the soul, especially the systems of Plato and Aristotle.
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Jocelyn Toynbee
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Jocelyn Mary Catherine Toynbee, was an English archaeologist and art historian. "In the mid-twentieth century she was the leading British scholar in Roman artistic studies and one of the recognized authorities in this field in the world." Having taught at St Hugh's College, Oxford, the University of Reading, and Newnham College, Cambridge, she became Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1951 to 1962, the first and so far only female to hold this position.
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Eirik Vandvik
1904 - 1953 (49 years)
Eirik Vandvik was professor in literature at the University of Oslo. Vandvik was one of the major interpreters of the ancient Greek and Latin literature, and saw it as his purpose to make these works available to Norwegian literati.
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Axel Boëthius
1889 - 1969 (80 years)
Axel Boëthius was a scholar and archaeologist of Etruscan culture. Boëthius was primarily a student of Etruscan and Italic architecture. His father was the historian Simon Boëthius. As a student, Boëthius studied at the Uppsala University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1918. He taught at Uppsala during which time he excavated at Mycenae in Greece. In 1925 he was selected as the first director of the Swedish Institute at Rome by the Swedish crown prince Gustav Adolf . He became professor of archaeology at the Göteborg University in 1934, a post he held until 1955. He also served as rector of the university .
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David G. Mandelbaum
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
David Goodman Mandelbaum was an American anthropologist. He majored in anthropology at Northwestern University, studying with Melville J. Herskovits. His major published work dealt with the Plains Cree people of Saskatchewan, Canada and he was well regarded for his study of society in India. He earned his doctorate at Yale University in 1936.
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Furio Jesi
1941 - 1980 (39 years)
Furio Jesi was an Italian historian, writer, archaeologist, and philosopher. Biography The only son of "war hero" Bruno Jesi, Furio Jesi was an independent scholar of myth, Egyptology, history of Mediterranean religions, philology and archeology, most notable for his work on extending the ideas of Károly Kerényi including studies of the science of myth and the difference between classic Myths and "Technified Myths".
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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.
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May Mandelbaum Edel
1909 - 1964 (55 years)
May Mandelbaum Edel was an American anthropologist known for her fieldwork among the Okanagan in Washington, the Tillamook in Oregon, and the Kiga in Uganda. Edel's linguistic research of the Tillamook serves as the only published account of the language which provided data for future linguistic publications. Edel was the first American woman anthropologist to live in an African village, and her research in Africa documented the diversity of African cultures.
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Pei Wenzhong
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Pei Wenzhong , or W. C. Pei, was a Chinese paleontologist, archaeologist and anthropologist born in Fengnan. He is considered a founding figure of Chinese anthropology. Career Pei graduated from Peking University in 1928 and went to work for the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Geological Survey of China joining the excavations of the Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian, where he was named the field director of the excavations the following year. The work at Zhoukoudian was carried out under difficult conditions: for example, the scientists had to ride there on mules, some 40 km southwest of the city of Beijing.
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Mark Zborowski
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Mark Zborowski was an anthropologist and an NKVD agent . He was the NKVD's most valuable mole inside the Trotskyist organization in Paris during the 1930s and in New York during the 1940s. Childhood in Uman Zborowski was one of four children born into a Jewish family in Uman, near Cherkasy, in 1908. According to the story Zborowski told friends, his conservative parents moved to Poland in 1921 to escape the October Revolution in Russia. While he was a student, Zborowski disobeyed his parents and joined the Polish Communist Party. His political activity led to imprisonment and he fled to Berlin where he was unsuccessful in finding employment.
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Eva Verbitsky Hunt
1934 - 1980 (46 years)
Muriel Eva Verbitsky de Hunt was an Argentine cultural anthropologist, academic and writer who moved to the United States in the late 1950s. She is remembered for her contributions to symbolic anthropology and ethnohistory. Together with her husband Robert Hunt, she performed innovative regional work in Oaxaca, Mexico, in the 1960s.
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