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,
#2751
Johannes Brøndsted
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Johannes Balthasar Brøndsted was a Danish archaeologist and prehistorian. He was a professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of the National Museum of Denmark. Biography Brøndsted was born at Grundfør in Jutland, Denmark. He was the son of Kristine Margrethe Bruun and Holger Brøndsted . His father was a parish priest. In 1909, he took his matriculation examination at Sorø Academy, after which he briefly studied law and art history at the University of Copenhagen and took his examination in classical philology in 1916. In 1920, he received his doctorate for his work on the ...
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George Wynn Brereton Huntingford
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
George Wynn Brereton Huntingford was an English linguist, anthropologist and historian. He lectured in East African languages and cultures at SOAS, University of London from 1950 until 1966. In 1966, Huntingford went to Canada to organise the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Brunswick at Fredericton, and retired to Málaga the next year, where he lived after his retirement.
Go to Profile#2753
A. J. Arkell
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Anthony John Arkell MBE MC FSA , known as A. J. Arkell, was a British archaeologist and colonial administrator noted for his work in the Sudan and Egypt. Biography Anthony John Arkell was born at Hinxhill Rectory, Hinxhill, Kent, England. He was the son of Reverend John Norris and Jessie Arkell . He won a scholarship to Bradfield College, where he was head boy. He next won the Jordell Scholarship in Classics to The Queen's College, Oxford.
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Gavril Katsarov
1874 - 1958 (84 years)
Gavril Iliev Katsarov was a Bulgarian historian, classical philologist and archeologist. Rector of Sofia University. Director of the National Archaeological Museum and the Bulgarian Archeological Institute.
Go to Profile#2755
Homer Barnett
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Homer Garner Barnett was an American anthropologist and teacher. Education He began his studies at Stanford in civil engineering but soon quit to rethink his major. When he returned to Stanford it was as a liberal arts major with an emphasis on philosophy. He graduated in 1927. He later attended the University of California, Berkeley for his Ph.D., granted in 1938. His specialization was culture change and applied anthropology.
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Ella Kivikoski
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Ella Margareta Kivikoski was the first Finnish female to earn a doctorate in archaeology in Finland. In 1931, she studied at the Baltic Institute in Stockholm and developed a scholarly working relationship with the Estonian archaeologist Harri Moora. She was a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Helsinki from 1948 until 1969, specializing in both Finnish and Nordic archaeology. Her specialty was the Finnish Iron Age.
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Aurel Stein
1862 - 1943 (81 years)
Sir Marc Aurel Stein, was a Hungarian-born British archaeologist, primarily known for his explorations and archaeological discoveries in Central Asia. He was also a professor at Indian universities.
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Jan Czekanowski
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Jan Czekanowski was a Polish anthropologist, statistician, ethnographer, traveller, and linguist. His scientific contributions include introducing his system of racial classification and founding the field of computational linguistics.
Go to Profile#2759
Sverre Marstrander
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Sverre Marstrander was a Norwegian professor in archaeology. Marstrander was born in Oslo, Norway. He earned his Magister degree in classical archaeology at the University of Oslo in 1937. He worked with the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters at Trondheim . Marstrander became a professor in Nordic archaeology at the University of Oslo in 1968. In that same year he was appointed as the manager of the University of Oslo Museum of National Antiquities and was in the position until 1980. His most important studies were in the research of Norwegian Bronze Age rock carvings, which showed in his dr.philos.
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Ramaprasad Chanda
1873 - 1942 (69 years)
Ramaprasad Chanda was an Indian anthropologist, historian and archaeologist from Bengal. A pioneer in his field in South Asia, Chanda's lasting legacy is the Varendra Research Museum, he established in Rajshahi , a leading institute for research on the history of Bengal. He was the first head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Calcutta from 1920- 1921. He was also a professional archaeologist and worked in the Archaeological Survey of India. Chanda was one of the founders the Indian Anthropological Institute and was its president during 1938–1942. He represented India in the first International Congress of Anthropology held in London in 1934.
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Robert Wauchope
1909 - 1979 (70 years)
Robert Wauchope was a well-respected American archaeologist and anthropologist, whose academic research specialized in the prehistory and archaeology of Latin America, Mesoamerica, and the Southwestern United States.
Go to Profile#2762
Aylward M. Blackman
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Aylward Manley Blackman, FBA was a British Egyptologist, who excavated various sites in Egypt and Nubia, notably Buhen and Meir. Having taught at Worcester College, Oxford, he was Brunner Professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool from 1934 to 1948. He was additionally a special lecturer at the University of Manchester, and was involved in or led a number of excavations with the Egypt Exploration Society.
Go to Profile#2763
Fred Nadel
1903 - 1956 (53 years)
Siegfried Frederick Nadel was a British anthropologist, specialising in African ethnology. Early life and education Siegfried Ferdinand Stephan Nadel was born on 24 April 1903 in Lemberg , Galicia, part of the Habsburg monarchy. Both parents were born in Lemberg. His family, his father Moritz was a senior railway lawyer, moved to Vienna in 1912. After attending State Real Gymnasium , 1913–1921, he enrolled at the Musik-academie in the University of Vienna; his early ambition was to be a conductor and composer. He was an extraordinarily talented polymath. Music led him to the psychology of music and general psychology was at that time affiliated with philosophy.
Go to Profile#2764
Alan P. Merriam
1923 - 1980 (57 years)
Alan Parkhurst Merriam was an American ethnomusicologist known for his studies of music in Native America and Africa. In his book The Anthropology of Music , he outlined and develops a theory and method for studying music from an anthropological perspective with anthropological methods. Although he taught at Northwestern University and University of Wisconsin, the majority of his academic career was spent at Indiana University where he was named a professor in 1962 and then chairman of the anthropology department from 1966 to 1969, which became a leading center of ethnomusicology research under his guidance.
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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#2766
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.
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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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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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Clairève Grandjouan
1929 - 1982 (53 years)
Clairève or Claireve Grandjouan was a French-born American archaeologist. She had a B.A. and Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College. After working on excavations in Athens, she became General Secretary of the Archaeological Institute of America and editor of its Bulletin, while teaching at New York University . She then taught at Hunter College from 1968, becoming chairman of classical and Oriental studies in 1968 and full professor in 1981.
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Gero von Merhart
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Gero Merhart von Bernegg was a German archaeologist. Although he worked at the same time when German nationalism and Nazi archaeology was dominant in Germany, he was not a "Nazi archaeologist". He came into conflict with Hans Reinerth.
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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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Shakir Mustafa Salim
1919 - 1985 (66 years)
Shakir Mustafa Salim was an Iraqi social anthropologist who taught in the Department of Sociology at Baghdad University. He compiled A Dictionary of Anthropology: English-Arabic . Marsh Dwellers of the Euphrates Delta Salim is best known for his groundbreaking ethnographic work, Marsh Dwellers of the Euphrates Delta, submitted as his doctoral thesis in University College, London , first published in Arabic in Baghdad in two volumes , and subsequently published in English as number 23 in the series London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology . This was an anthropological repor...
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L. P. Wenham
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Leslie Peter Wenham FSA was a British archaeologist, historian, and professor who excavated in York, on Hadrian's Wall and Malton. He was the first to produce a comprehensive report of a Romano-British Cemetery.
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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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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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Ernst Herzfeld
1879 - 1948 (69 years)
Ernst Emil Herzfeld was a German archaeologist and Iranologist. Life Herzfeld was born in Celle, Province of Hanover. He studied architecture in Munich and Berlin, while also taking classes in Assyriology, ancient history and art history.
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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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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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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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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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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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Alan Wace
1879 - 1957 (78 years)
Alan John Bayard Wace was an English archaeologist, best known for his excavations at the Bronze Age site of Mycenae in Greece. He served as director of the British School at Athens between 1914 and 1923, and excavated widely in Thessaly, in Laconia and in Egypt. He was also an authority on Greek textiles and a prolific collector of Greek embroidery.
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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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George Devereux
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Georges Devereux was a Hungarian-French ethnologist and psychoanalyst, often considered the founder of ethnopsychiatry. He was born into a Jewish family in the Banat, Austria-Hungary . His family moved to France following World War I. He studied the Malayan language in Paris, completing work at the Institut d'Ethnologie. In 1933 he converted to Catholicism and changed his name to Georges Devereux. At that time, he traveled for the first time to the United States to do fieldwork among the Mohave Indians, completing his doctorate in anthropology at University of California at Berkeley in 1936. ...
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Ephraim Avigdor Speiser
1902 - 1965 (63 years)
Ephraim Avigdor Speiser was a Polish-born American Assyriologist and translator of the Torah. He discovered the ancient site of Tepe Gawra in 1927 and supervised its excavation between 1931 and 1938.
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Robert Redfield
1897 - 1958 (61 years)
Robert Redfield was an American anthropologist and ethnolinguist, whose ethnographic work in Tepoztlán, Mexico, is considered a landmark of Latin American ethnography. He was associated with the University of Chicago for his entire career: all of his higher education took place there, and he joined the faculty in 1927 and remained there until his death in 1958, serving as Dean of Social Sciences from 1934 to 1946.
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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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Frederic Wood Jones
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Frederic Wood Jones FRS , usually referred to as Wood Jones, was a British observational naturalist, embryologist, anatomist and anthropologist, who spent considerable time in Australia. Biography Jones was born in London, England, and wrote extensively on early humans, including their arboreal adaptations , and was one of the founding fathers of the field of modern physical anthropology. A friend of Le Gros Clark, Wood Jones was also known for his controversial belief in the view that acquired traits could be inherited, and thus his opposition to Darwinism. He taught anatomy and physical anth...
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M. C. Burkitt
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Miles Crawford Burkitt was a British archaeologist and prehistorian, who is known for his work, mainly on the Stone Age, in Europe, Asia and especially Africa, where he was one of the first pioneers of African archaeology. He was the first Cambridge University lecturer in Prehistoric Archaeology.
Go to Profile#2795
George Murdock
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
George Peter Murdock , also known as G. P. Murdock, was an American anthropologist who was professor at Yale University and University of Pittsburgh. He is remembered for his empirical approach to ethnological studies and his study of family and kinship structures across differing cultures. His 1967 Ethnographic Atlas dataset on more than 1,200 pre-industrial societies is influential and frequently used in social science research. He is also known for his work as an FBI informant on his fellow anthropologists during McCarthyism.
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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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Edmund Leach
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Sir Edmund Ronald Leach FRAI FBA was a British social anthropologist and academic. He served as provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1979. He was also president of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1971 to 1975.
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Ralph Linton
1893 - 1953 (60 years)
Ralph Linton was an American anthropologist of the mid-20th century, particularly remembered for his texts The Study of Man and The Tree of Culture . One of Linton's major contributions to anthropology was defining a distinction between status and role.
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Ruth Benedict
1887 - 1948 (61 years)
Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College, and graduated in 1909. After studying anthropology at the New School of Social Research under Elsie Clews Parsons, she entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1921, where she studied under Franz Boas. She received her Ph.D. and joined the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she shared a romantic relationship, and Marvin Opler were among her students and colleagues.
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