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List of the most influential people in Anthropology,

#2751

Ruth Bunzel

1898 - 1990 (92 years)

Ruth Leah Bunzel was an American anthropologist, known for studying creativity and art among the Zuni people , researching the Mayas in Guatemala, and conducting a comparative study of alcoholism in Guatemala and Mexico. Bunzel was the first American anthropologist to conduct substantial research in Guatemala. Her doctoral dissertation, The Pueblo Potter was a study of the creative process of art in anthropology and Bunzel was one of the first anthropologists to study the creative process.

#2752

Albert B. Reagan

Albert B. Reagan

1871 - 1936 (65 years)

Professor Albert B. Reagan was an American author and historian of Native American history. He was professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University and documented Native American customs and folklore in New Mexico, Arizona, Minnesota, Colorado, Washington, and Utah, for tribes that include the Jemez people, Navajo people, Ojibwe people, Quileute people, and Ute people.

#2753

Philip Wheelwright

1901 - 1970 (69 years)

Philip Ellis Wheelwright was an American philosopher, classical scholar and literary theorist. He was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of a stockbroker, and died in Santa Barbara, California. Wheelwright was educated at Princeton University, with a B.A. in 1921 and a Ph.D. in 1924 with his dissertation "The Concepts of Liberty and Contingency in the Philosophy of Charles Renouvier," the French Kantian philosopher who so influenced William James.

#2754

Leonard Halford Dudley Buxton

1889 - 1939 (50 years)

Leonard Halford Dudley Buxton FSA was a British anthropologist. He was educated at Radley and Exeter College, Oxford, and he was Reader in Physical Anthropology at the University of Oxford between 1928 and 1939. He conducted field work in Sudan, India, Malta, the United States, China and Mesopotamia, and in 1913 he excavated Lapithos in Cyprus under the direction of professor John Myres and Cyprus Museum curator Menelaos Markides. During his extensive travels he documented his work through photography; the pictures are currently in the Pitt Rivers Museum. In the 1930s he carried research in Oxford with anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood.

#2755

Johan Gunnar Andersson

Johan Gunnar Andersson

1874 - 1960 (86 years)

Johan Gunnar Andersson was a Swedish archaeologist, paleontologist and geologist, closely associated with the beginnings of Chinese archaeology in the 1920s. Early life and polar research After studies at Uppsala University, and research in the polar regions, Andersson served as Director of Sweden's National Geological Survey.

#2756

Richard Frank Salisbury

Richard Frank Salisbury

1926 - 1989 (63 years)

Richard Frank Salisbury , also known as Dick Salisbury, was a Canadian anthropologist, specializing in the field of economic anthropology and anthropology of development. His primary fieldwork and subsequent publications dealt with the Tolai and Siane people of Papua New Guinea and the Cree of Northern Quebec.

#2757

Eckhard Unger

1885 - 1966 (81 years)

Eckhard Unger was a German assyriologist. Unger who was the curator of the Istanbul museum described the remains of Balawat Gates that are still in the Istanbul Museum. Unger was fully aware that the major parts of the gates were in London and Paris as he had visited both locations and discussed them with the respective curators. In 1916, as curator of the Archeological Museum of Istanbul, he identified and described a copper-alloy object in the museum collection as an ell or measuring rod from Nippur. Dating to the first half of the third millennium BC or even earlier, possibly the oldest known measuring device, it supposedly defines the Sumerian cubit at about 518.6 millimetres.

#2758

Terence Mitford

1905 - 1978 (73 years)

Terence Bruce Mitford FBA FSA was a Scottish archaeologist and classicist. He spent his whole career at the University of St Andrews, and had a special interest in the history and archaeology of Cyprus and southern Turkey, making many expeditions to these areas. His academic life was interrupted by the Second World War, during which he served with the Special Air Service and Special Boat Service.

#2759

Arthur E. Gordon

1902 - 1989 (87 years)

Arthur Ernest Gordon was an American classical philologist and epigraphist. Life and career Born in Marlborough, Vermont, Gordon studied classical philology at Dartmouth College, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1923. He continued his studies at the American Academy in Rome. In 1925 he became a lecturer in Latin at Dartmouth College and in 1928 at Western Reserve University. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1929, where he worked with Tenney Frank, and afterwards briefly taught Latin and Ancient History at the University of Vermont. Gordon was invited to the University ...

#2760

Ursula McConnel

Ursula McConnel

1888 - 1957 (69 years)

Ursula Hope McConnel was a Queensland anthropologist and ethnographer best remembered for her work with, and the records she made of, the Wik Mungkan people of Cape York Peninsula. First trained at University College London, then supervised by Professor Alfred Radcliffe-Brown in the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney, McConnel was one of the first women to be trained in anthropology and then go out to observe Aboriginal Australians in remote areas, systematically documenting, recording, and describing their culture, mythology, beliefs, and way of life.

#2761

Alexander Goldenweiser

1880 - 1940 (60 years)

Alexander Aleksandrovich Goldenweiser was a Russian-born U.S. anthropologist and sociologist. Biography Alexander Alexandrovich Goldenweiser was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1880. He emigrated to the United States in 1900. He studied anthropology under Franz Boas, and earned his AB degree from Columbia University in 1902, his AM degree in 1904, and his Ph.D. in 1910.

#2762

Paul Jacobsthal

1880 - 1957 (77 years)

Paul Jacobsthal was a scholar of Greek vase painting and Celtic art. He wrote his dissertation at the University of Bonn under the supervision of Georg Loeschcke. In 1912 he published a catalog of the Greek vases in Göttingen, and received a position as a professor at the University of Marburg.

#2763

Alfred E. Johnson

1879 - Present (147 years)

Alfred E. Johnson was an anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Kansas. Early life and education Johnson was born in Kansas. He received his B.A. in anthropology from the University of Kansas and his M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Arizona. His dissertation research focused on Pueblo Indian culture.

#2764

Alfred Tozzer

1877 - 1954 (77 years)

Alfred Marston Tozzer was an American anthropologist, archaeologist, linguist, and educator. His principal area of interest was Mesoamerican, especially Maya, studies. He was the husband of Margaret Castle Tozzer and father of figure skating champion Joan Tozzer.

#2765

William Reginald Halliday

1886 - 1966 (80 years)

Sir William Reginald Halliday was a historian and archaeologist who served as Principal of King's College London from 1928 to 1952. Born in British Honduras in 1886, Halliday was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford graduating with a first in Literae Humaniores. He also spent time studying at the Berlin University and at the British School at Athens. He lectured in Greek History and Archaeology and the University of Glasgow before becoming Rathbone Professor of Ancient History at the University of Liverpool . He was then made Principal of King's College London in 1928, and remained in the post until 1952.

#2766

Pierre Wuilleumier

1904 - 1979 (75 years)

Pierre Wuilleumier was a 20th-century French scholar, normalian, professor of Latin language and literature at the Sorbonne and archaeologist. Biography Pierre Wuilleumier held the chair of National Antiquities in Lyon from 1933. In 1940, he was responsible for the excavations of the ancient Theatre of Fourvière on the hill of Fourvière with Amable Audin. From 1941 to 1954, he directed two constituencies of Historic Antiquities in the Lyon region. He contributed to the magazine Gallia since its creation in 1942, in which he regularly published the results of excavations on the hill of Fourviè...

#2767

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.

#2768

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.

#2769

Cynthia Irwin-Williams

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.

#2770

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.

#2771

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.

#2772

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.

#2773

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.

#2774

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.

#2775

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...

#2776

Lila Morris O'Neale

Lila Morris O'Neale

1886 - 1948 (62 years)

Lila Morris O'Neale was an American anthropologist and historian of textiles. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931 for her research on prehistoric textiles in Peru. Early life and education Lila Morris O'Neale was born in Buxton, North Dakota, the daughter of George Lester O'Neale and Carrie Higgins O'Neale. She moved with her family to San Jose, California as a girl. She trained as a teacher, like her mother before her; she attended the state teachers college in San Jose, and earned an A. B. at Stanford University ; she completed a bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1916.

#2777

Herbert Maryon

1874 - 1965 (91 years)

Herbert James Maryon was an English sculptor, conservator, goldsmith, archaeologist and authority on ancient metalwork. Maryon practiced and taught sculpture until retiring in 1939, then worked as a conservator with the British Museum from 1944 to 1961. He is best known for his work on the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, which led to his appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

#2778

Meyer Fortes

1906 - 1983 (77 years)

Meyer Fortes FBA FRAI was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana. Originally trained in psychology, Fortes employed the notion of the "person" into his structural-functional analyses of kinship, the family, and ancestor worship setting a standard for studies on African social organization. His celebrated book, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion , fused his two interests and set a standard for comparative ethnology. He also wrote extensively on issues of the first born, kingship, and divination.

#2779

Anthony Leeds

1925 - 1989 (64 years)

Anthony Leeds was an anthropologist best known for his work in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and on urban-rural relations in Brazil. Education He received his B.A. in anthropology from Columbia University in 1949. Field work in Bahia, Brazil, led to his dissertation "Economic Cycles in Brazil: The Persistence of a Total-Culture Pattern: Cacao and Other Cases". Students at Columbia at roughly the same time were Marvin Harris, Sally Falk Moore, Robert Murphy, and Andrew P. Vayda. Leeds earned his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1957.

#2780

Peter Lienhardt

1928 - 1986 (58 years)

Peter Arnold Lienhardt was a British social anthropologist. Life Lienhardt was born in Bradford on 12 March 1928 to Godfrey Lienhardt and Jennie Liendhart . He was educated at Batley Grammar School and, like his brother Godfrey Lienhardt, at Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied Arabic and Persian. After military service in the Royal Air Force he undertook post-graduate studies in social anthropology at Lincoln College, Oxford, earning a doctorate in 1957 with a thesis on "The Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia".

#2781

Peter Glob

1911 - 1985 (74 years)

Peter Vilhelm Glob , also known as P. V. Glob, was a Danish archaeologist. Glob was most noted for his investigations of Denmark's bog bodies such as the Tollund Man and Grauballe Man, mummified remains of Iron and Bronze Age people found preserved within peat bogs. His anthropological works include The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved, Denmark: An Archaeological History from the Stone Age to the Vikings, and Mound People: Danish Bronze-Age Man Preserved.

#2782

John Beazley

1885 - 1970 (85 years)

Sir John Davidson Beazley, was a British classical archaeologist and art historian, known for his classification of Attic vases by artistic style. He was professor of classical archaeology and art at the University of Oxford from 1925 to 1956.

#2783

James Philip Mills

1890 - 1960 (70 years)

James Philip Mills CSI, CIE, FRAI was a member of the Indian Civil Service and an ethnographer. Early years James Philip Mills was born on 18 February 1890, younger son of James Edward Mills and his wife Ada Smith. He was educated at Windlesham House School, Winchester College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford .

#2784

William Groves

1898 - 1967 (69 years)

William Charles Groves was an Australian educator and public servant. He served as Director of Education in Nauru and Papua and New Guinea between 1937 and 1958, also serving on the Legislative Council in Papua and New Guinea as part of the role.

#2785

Secondina Cesano

1879 - 1973 (94 years)

Secondina Lorenza Eugenia Cesano was an Italian numismatist and professor of numismatics at the Sapienza University of Rome. Biography Cesano originally studied at the Sapienza University of Rome. In 1902 she won a competition and gained a role at the National Roman Museum. In 1907 she gained habilitation in numismatics at Sapienza. She also worked on numismatics in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples and the National Museum of Ravenna. In 1912, at the foundation of the Istituto italiano di numismatica, Cesano was appointed to the board of directors, later becoming its extraordinary co...

#2786

William Abel Caudill

1920 - 1972 (52 years)

William Abel Caudill was an applied medical anthropologist. His work centered on psychiatry, and the influence of culture on personality. Caudill was especially interested in diagnosis and treatment of mental issues in Japan. Caudill was the first to identify the field of medical anthropology, and was active in organizing it during its formative years.

#2787

Charles H. Fairbanks

1913 - 1984 (71 years)

Charles Herron Fairbanks was an archaeologist/anthropologist. He conducted archaeology at the Ocmulgee National Monument in Macon, Georgia where he developed rigorous, painstaking field methodology. His 1967-1969 excavations on the slave cabins at Kingsley Plantation, Fort George Island, Florida—the southernmost of the Sea Islands—were the first of their kind in the United States. Undertaken to "learn more about slave life," he called his practice "Plantation Archaeology," and for more than a decade the graduate program he led at the University of Florida was the only one in the nation with a...

#2788

Biraja Sankar Guha

1894 - 1961 (67 years)

Biraja Sankar Guha was an Indian physical anthropologist, who classified Indian people into races around the early part of the 20th century and he was also a pioneer to popularize his scientific ideas in the vernacular. He was the first Director of the Anthropological Survey of India .

#2789

J. Louis Giddings

1909 - 1964 (55 years)

James Louis Giddings Jr. was an American archaeologist who made significant contributions to Arctic archaeology. During three decades of his fieldwork in Northwest Alaska he established evidence of human occupation ranging as far back as 4,000 B.C.E.

#2790

Wilhelm Baehrens

Wilhelm Baehrens

1885 - 1929 (44 years)

Wilhelm Adolf Baehrens was a German classical scholar. The son of professor Emil Baehrens , Wilhelm Baehrens was born in Groningen. After visiting the local gymnasium he stepped in his early deceased father's footsteps by studying philology and papyrology at the University of Groningen. He also stayed few semesters at Halle, Göttingen and Berlin. In 1910 Baehrens received his doctor's degree at Groningen with his dissertation Panegyricorum latinorum editionis novae praefatio maior accedit Plinii panegyricus. For two years he acted as assistant schoolmaster at the Groningen gymnasium, until in 1912 he published his Beiträge zur lateinischen Syntax.

#2791

Božo Škerlj

1904 - 1961 (57 years)

Božo Škerlj was a Slovene anthropologist, author of eleven books and over 200 scientific articles published in journals at home and abroad. Škerlj was born in Vienna in 1908. He studied biology and geography at the University of Ljubljana and graduated in 1926. He then specialized in Prague and Brno and later in Germany and Norway. In 1944 he was interred in Dachau concentration camp and after the end of the Second World War became professor at the University in Ljubljana. He died in 1961 in Ljubljana.

#2792

Herman Wirth

1885 - 1981 (96 years)

Herman Wirth was a Dutch-German historian, a Nazi and scholar of ancient religions and symbols. He co-founded the SS-organization Ahnenerbe but was later pushed out by Heinrich Himmler. Biography Born in Utrecht on 6 May 1885, Wirth studied Flemish Dutch philology, literature, history and musicology at Utrecht and Leipzig, receiving his doctorate in 1911 from the University of Basel with a dissertation on the demise of the Dutch folk song. He taught Dutch language at the University of Berlin from 1909 to 1914.

#2793

George Augustus Auden

1872 - 1957 (85 years)

George Augustus Auden was an English physician, professor of public health, school medical officer, and writer on archaeological subjects. Biography Auden was born at Horninglow, Burton-upon-Trent, the sixth son of John Auden, the first vicar of the Church of St John the Divine, and his wife Sarah Eliza, daughter of William Hopkins, of Dunstall, Staffordshire. The Audens were minor gentry with a strong clerical tradition, originally of Rowley Regis, which was then in Staffordshire.

#2794

Irene Emery

1900 - 1981 (81 years)

Irene Emery was an American art historian, scholar, curator, textile anthropologist, sculptor, and modern dancer. She was known for her pioneering research in systematically describing global textiles, and was a leading authority on ancient fabrics and textiles, and for her published book The Primary Structures of Fabrics: An Illustrated Classification .

#2795

Giovanni Becatti

1912 - 1973 (61 years)

Giovanni Becatti was an Italian Classical art historian and archaeologist. Born at Siena, Becatti was educated at the University of Rome under Giulio Giglioli. Becatti was appointed to the Superintendency of Ostia in 1938. He was professor of Archeology and History of Classical Art at the University of Pisa and at the University La Sapienza of Rome .

#2796

Edith Hall Dohan

1877 - 1943 (66 years)

Edith Hayward Hall Dohan was an American archaeologist who earned Bryn Mawr College's first classical archaeology Ph.D. Hall was part of an excavation team with Harriet Boyd in her early career that most notably brought the first Mycenaean and pre-Mycenaean collection to be displayed in America. Hall later wrote The Decorative Art of Crete in the Bronze Age, which was published in 1906 that breaks down the evolution of the art and pottery in Crete from the Bronze Age.

#2797

W. J. Varley

1904 - 1976 (72 years)

William Jones Varley, FSA was a British geographer and archaeologist, particularly known for his excavations of English Iron Age hillforts, including Maiden Castle and Eddisbury hillfort in Cheshire, Old Oswestry hillfort in Shropshire, and Castle Hill in West Yorkshire. He was also a pioneer of geographical research and education in colonial Ghana where he worked from 1947 to 1956, and was involved in historical conservation there.

#2798

Harry Skinner

1886 - 1978 (92 years)

Henry Devenish Skinner , known as Harry Skinner or H.D. Skinner, was a notable New Zealand soldier, ethnologist, university lecturer, museum curator and director, and librarian. Early life and education The son of William Skinner and Margaret Bracken Devenish, Henry Devenish Skinner was born in New Plymouth, New Zealand, on 18 December 1886.

#2799

Diane Barwick

1938 - 1986 (48 years)

Diane Elizabeth McEachern Barwick was a Canadian-born anthropologist, historian, and Aboriginal-rights activist. She was also a renowned researcher and teacher in the field of Australian Aboriginal culture and society.

#2800

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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