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,
#2801
Ludwig Woltmann
1871 - 1907 (36 years)
Ludwig Woltmann was a German anthropologist, zoologist and neo-Kantian. He studied medicine and philosophy, and obtained doctorates in the two fields from the University of Freiburg in 1896. Ludwig Woltmann falls in the spiritual and ideological history of the 20th century with the racial theorists Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, in particular in terms of his racial theoretical thought. In his book Die Germanen und die Renaissance in Italien , he argued that the emergence of the Renaissance in Italy was led not by the descendants of the Romans, but by the Germanic tribes who had subdued Italy during the Middle Ages.
Go to Profile#2802
Vasile Pârvan
1882 - 1927 (45 years)
Vasile Pârvan was a Romanian historian and archaeologist. Biography Pârvan was born in Perchiu, Huruiești commune, Bacău County. He came from a modest family, being the first child of the teacher Andrei Pârvan and of Aristița Chiriac . He received the first name Vasile, as well as his uncle, Vasile Conta .
Go to Profile#2803
Norman Tindale
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Norman Barnett Tindale AO was an Australian anthropologist, archaeologist, entomologist and ethnologist. Life Tindale was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1900. His family moved to Tokyo and lived there from 1907 to 1915, where his father worked as an accountant at the Salvation Army mission in Japan. Norman attended the American School in Japan, where his closest friend was Gordon Bowles, a Quaker who, like him, later became an anthropologist.
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Otto Stoll
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Otto Stoll was a Swiss linguist and ethnologist. Otto Stoll was a professor of ethnology and geography at the University of Zurich who specialized in research of Mayan languages. From 1878 to 1883 he conducted scientific studies in Guatemala. He was the author of several treatises on Guatemala, including important works in the fields on ethnography and ethno-linguistics. Stoll also published on neotropical Acari with a major work being the volume in the Biologia Centrali-Americana between Dec. 1886 and Jan. 1893.
Go to Profile#2805
Jules Henry
1904 - 1969 (65 years)
Jules Henry was an American anthropologist. After studies at the City College of New York, Henry earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 1935. His classmates included Irving Goldman, Ruth Landes and Edward Kennard. His instructors at Columbia included Franz Boas and Margaret Mead.
Go to Profile#2806
Melville Jacobs
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Melville Jacobs was an American anthropologist known for his extensive fieldwork on cultures of the Pacific Northwest. He was born in New York City. After studying with Franz Boas he became a member of the faculty of the University of Washington in 1928 and remained until his death in 1971. Especially during the earlier part of his career, from 1928 until 1936, he collected large amounts of linguistic data and text from a wide range of languages including Sahaptin, Molale, Kalapuya, Clackamas, Tillamook, Alsea, Upper Umpqua, Galice and Chinook Jargon.
Go to Profile#2807
Arthur Randolph Kelly
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Arthur Randolph Kelly was an American professional archaeologist. He made numerous contributions to archeology in Georgia, which began with directing excavations at the Macon Plateau Site in 1933, part of the federal archeology program that provided jobs while undertaking studies of important sites. During his career, he also worked at the Etowah Mound and Village site, Lamar Mounds, the Lake Douglas Mound, the Oliver and Walter F. George River Basin surveys, the Estatoe Mound, the Chauga Mound, and the Bell Field Mound, among others in Georgia.
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Charles Letourneau
1831 - 1902 (71 years)
Charles Jean Marie Letourneau was a 19th-century French anthropologist. Biography In 1865 he joined the Society of Anthropology of Paris of which he was general secretary from 1887 until his death. He thus succeeded Paul Broca who served in this position until 1880.
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Roland Burrage Dixon
1875 - 1934 (59 years)
Roland Burrage Dixon was an American anthropologist. Early life and education Born at Worcester, Mass, in 1897 he graduated from Harvard University, where he remained as an assistant in anthropology, taking the degree of Ph. D. in 1900 and then serving as instructor and after 1906 as an assistant professor, rising to professor in 1915. Dixon spent his entire career at Harvard.
Go to Profile#2810
Paolo Mantegazza
1831 - 1910 (79 years)
Paolo Mantegazza was an Italian neurologist, physiologist, and anthropologist, noted for his experimental investigation of coca leaves into its effects on the human psyche. He was also an author of fiction.
Go to Profile#2811
Leonard Woolley
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Sir Charles Leonard Woolley was a British archaeologist best known for his excavations at Ur in Mesopotamia. He is recognized as one of the first "modern" archaeologists who excavated in a methodical way, keeping careful records, and using them to reconstruct ancient life and history. Woolley was knighted in 1935 for his contributions to the discipline of archaeology. He married the British archaeologist Katharine Woolley.
Go to Profile#2812
Matthias Castrén
1813 - 1852 (39 years)
Matthias Alexander Castrén was a Finnish Swedish ethnologist and philologist who was a pioneer in the study of the Uralic languages. He was an educator, author and linguist at the University of Helsinki. Castrén is best known for his research in the linguistics and ethnography of the Finnic, Ugric and Samoyedic peoples.
Go to Profile#2813
Artemiy Artsikhovsky
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Artemiy Vladimirovich Artsikhovsky was a Russian Soviet archaeologist and historian, professor , head of the department of archaeology of the Moscow State University, the discoverer of birch bark manuscripts in Novgorod. Corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, recipient of the USSR State Prize .
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Walter Baldwin Spencer
1860 - 1929 (69 years)
Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer , commonly referred to as Baldwin Spencer, was a British-Australian evolutionary biologist, anthropologist and ethnologist. He is known for his fieldwork with Aboriginal peoples in Central Australia, contributions to the study of ethnography, and academic collaborations with Frank Gillen. Spencer introduced the study of zoology at the University of Melbourne and held the title of Emeritus Professor until his death in 1929. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1900 and knighted in 1916.
Go to Profile#2815
Edward S. Morse
1838 - 1925 (87 years)
Edward Sylvester Morse was an American zoologist, archaeologist, and orientalist. He is considered the "Father of Japanese archaeology." Early life Morse was born in Portland, Maine to Jonathan Kimball Morse and Jane Seymour Morse. His father was a Congregationalist deacon who held strict Calvinist beliefs. His mother, who did not share her husband's religious beliefs, encouraged her son's interest in the sciences. An unruly student, Morse was expelled from all but one of the schools he attended in his youth — the Portland village school, the academy at Conway, New Hampshire, in 1851, and Bridgton Academy in 1854 .
Go to Profile#2816
Salvador Debenedetti
1884 - 1930 (46 years)
Salvador Santiago Lorenzo Debenedetti was an Argentine archaeologist, anthropologist and educator. He was involved in the restoration of Pucará de Tilcara, an ancient fortification in what today is Jujuy Province. He was also the originator of Student's Day in Argentina, an informal holiday celebrated on September 21.
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Wilhelm Klein
1850 - 1924 (74 years)
Wilhelm Klein was a Hungarian-Austrian archeologist. He was born in Karansebesch, Szörény County, Principality of Transylvania , Austrian Empire He first studied Jewish theology and then philosophy at Vienna and Prague. The Austrian government subsequently sent him to Italy and Greece, where he engaged in archeological investigations, studying especially antique pottery. Klein was a professor of archeology at the German University of Prague, and a member of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung Deutscher Wissenschaft, Kunst, und Literatur in Böhmen, as well as of the German Archeological Institute.
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Robert Hartmann
1831 - 1893 (62 years)
Karl Eduard Robert Hartmann was a German naturalist, anatomist and ethnographer. Career A native of Blankenburg am Harz, Hartmann studied medicine and sciences in Berlin, and in 1865 was an instructor of comparative zoology and physiology at the agricultural academy in Proskau. In 1873 he became a professor of anatomy at the University of Berlin. During his career, he performed ethnographical and geographical research in Africa, and conducted studies on the anatomy of marine species while working in Sweden and Italy.
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Daryll Forde
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Cyril Daryll Forde FRAI was a British anthropologist and Africanist. Education and early career Forde was born in Tottenham on 16 March 1902, the son of John Percival Daniel Forde, a reverend and schoolmaster, and Caroline Pearce Pittman. He attended the local county school in Tottenham, then went on to read geography at University College London .
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Peter Throckmorton
1928 - 1990 (62 years)
Edgerton Alvord Throckmorton , known as Peter Throckmorton, was an American photojournalist and a pioneer underwater archaeologist. Throckmorton was a founding member of the Sea Research Society and served on its Board of Advisors until his death in 1990. He was also a trustee for NUMA and was an instructor at Nova Southeastern University.
Go to Profile#2821
Martin Gusinde
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Martín Gusinde was an Austrian priest and ethnologist famous for his work in anthropology, particularly on the native groups of Tierra del Fuego. He was one of the most notable anthropologists in Chile in the first half of the 20th century, together with Max Uhle and Aureliano Oyarzún Navarro.
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Harold K. Schneider
1925 - 1987 (62 years)
Harold K. "Hal" Schneider was an American seminal figure in economic anthropology. Born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, he attended elementary and secondary school in St. Paul, Minnesota, and did his undergraduate work at Macalester College and Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, receiving a bachelor's degree in sociology, with a minor in biology, from Macalester in 1949. He then went to Northwestern University, where he was a student of Melville Herskovits, basing his dissertation on field research among the Pokot of Kenya.
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Cezaria Jędrzejewiczowa
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Cezaria Jędrzejewiczowa, or Cezaria Anna Baudouin de Courtenay Ehrenkreutz-Jędrzejewiczowa, was a Polish scientist, art historian, and anthropologist. She was one of the pioneers of ethnology in Poland and one of the first scientists to adopt phenomenology in studies of folk culture.
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Sol Worth
1922 - 1977 (55 years)
Sol Worth was a painter, photography and visual communication scholar. Biography Worth's parents, Ida and Jacob Wishnepolsky, were Russian immigrants who worked in the garment industry and were active members of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. His first language was Yiddish, and he spoke virtually no English until he began school at age 5. Worth attended the founding class of the High School of Music and Art in New York City as an art student from 1936 until 1940; in 1937 one of his paintings was chosen to be part of a student exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Upon gr...
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William John McGee
1853 - 1912 (59 years)
William John McGee, LL.D. was an American inventor, geologist, anthropologist, and ethnologist, born in Farley, Iowa. Biography While largely self-taught, McGee attended a rural one-room schoolhouse north of Farley during the four winter months from about 1858 to 1867. He devoted his early years to reading law and to surveying. He invented and patented several improvements on agricultural implements.
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Camilla Wedgwood
1901 - 1955 (54 years)
Camilla Hildegarde Wedgwood was a British anthropologist and academic administrator. She is best known for her research in the Pacific and her pioneering role as one of the British Commonwealth's first female anthropologists.
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Masao Oka
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
was a Japanese ethnologist and Japanologist. Biography He was born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture. He was a graduate of the University of Tokyo and Tohoku University. He served on the faculty of Meiji University, Kanagawa Dental University, Wayo Women's University, Tokyo Metropolitan University and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
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Johann Peter Kirsch
1861 - 1941 (80 years)
Johann Peter Kirsch was a Luxembourgish ecclesiastical historian and biblical archaeologist. Life Johann Peter Kirsch was born in Dippach, Luxembourg, the son of Andreas and Katherine Didier Kirsch. At the age of ten, he went to live with his maternal uncle, Johann Jakob Didier, a priest at Fels. He began his high school education at the Atheneum, and then went to the seminary. He was ordained a priest on 23 August 1884. That autumn he was sent to Rome to attend the Collegio Teutonico. From 1884 to 1890 he studied archeology, paleography and diplomacy at the Collegio Apollinare and at other papal universities in Rome.
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Eduard Seler
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Eduard Georg Seler was a prominent German anthropologist, ethnohistorian, linguist, epigrapher, academic and Americanist scholar, who made extensive contributions in these fields towards the study of pre-Columbian era cultures in the Americas.
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Flinders Petrie
1853 - 1942 (89 years)
Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie , commonly known as simply Sir Flinders Petrie, was a British Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology and the preservation of artefacts. He held the first chair of Egyptology in the United Kingdom, and excavated many of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt in conjunction with his wife, Hilda Urlin. Some consider his most famous discovery to be that of the Merneptah Stele, an opinion with which Petrie himself concurred. Undoubtedly at least as important is his 1905 discovery and correct identification of the character ...
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Giorgi Chitaia
1890 - 1986 (96 years)
Giorgi Chitaia — Georgian ethnographer, worked at the University of Tbilisi. During his fieldwork he travelled throughout the country documenting regional cultures. Giorgi Chitaia was married to another well-known ethnographer Vera Baradavelidze . Chitaia played a vital role in preserving cultural heritage in Georgia during the Soviet occupation and rule. In 1922 he got the position to lead the newly created section of ethnography at Georgian National Museum. He held this position until his death in 1986.
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Rudolf Virchow
1821 - 1902 (81 years)
Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow was a German physician, anthropologist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist, writer, editor, and politician. He is known as "the father of modern pathology" and as the founder of social medicine, and to his colleagues, the "Pope of medicine".
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Otto Schoetensack
1850 - 1912 (62 years)
Otto Karl Friedrich Schoetensack was a German industrialist and later professor of anthropology, having retired from the chemical firm which he had founded. During a 1908 archeological dig, he oversaw the worker Daniel Hartmann who found the lower jaw of a hominid, the oldest human fossil then known, which Schoetensack later described formally as Homo heidelbergensis.
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Howard Carter
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Howard Carter was a British archaeologist and Egyptologist who discovered the intact tomb of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Tutankhamun in November 1922, the best-preserved pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings.
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Knud Rasmussen
1879 - 1933 (54 years)
Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen was a Greenlandic-Danish polar explorer and anthropologist. He has been called the "father of Eskimology" and was the first European to cross the Northwest Passage via dog sled. He remains well known in Greenland, Denmark and among Canadian Inuit.
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Senarath Paranavithana
1896 - 1972 (76 years)
Senarath Paranavitana, was a Sri Lankan archeologist and epigraphist, who pioneered much of post-colonial archaeology in Sri Lanka. He served as the Commissioner of Archeology from 1940 to 1956 and there after as Professor of Archeology at the University of Ceylon from 1957 to 1961.
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William Johnson Sollas
1849 - 1936 (87 years)
Prof William Johnson Sollas PGS FRS FRSE LLD was a British geologist and anthropologist. After studying at the City of London School, the Royal College of Chemistry and the Royal School of Mines he matriculated to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded First Class Honours in geology. After some time spent as a University Extension lecturer he became lecturer in Geology and Zoology at University College, Bristol in 1879, where he stayed until he was offered the post of Professor of Geology at Trinity College Dublin. In 1897 he was offered the post of Professor of Geology at the Un...
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Victor Guérin
1821 - 1891 (70 years)
Victor Guérin was a French intellectual, explorer and amateur archaeologist. He published books describing the geography, archeology and history of the areas he explored, which included Greece, Asia Minor, North Africa, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.
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Dmitry Anuchin
1843 - 1923 (80 years)
Dmitry Nikolayevich Anuchin was a Russian Empire anthropologist, ethnographist, archaeologist, and geographer. He was a member of the Russian Geographical Society and convened the ethnographic sub-section of the 12th Congress of Russian Natural Scientists and Physicians held in Moscow in 1909. Here he pushed for the professionalisation of ethnography as compared to missionaries and amateurs. However he opposed Lev Sternberg's call for the establishment of an imperial bureau of ethnography, fearing that the discipline would become too tied up with the Tsarist bureaucracy.
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Hans Reinerth
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Hans Reinerth was a German archaeologist. He was a pioneer of Palynology and modern settlement archaeology, but is controversial because of his role before and during the period of National Socialism.
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Frans Blom
1893 - 1963 (70 years)
Frans Blom was a Danish explorer and archaeologist. He was most associated with his research of the Maya civilization of Mexico and Central America. Biography Frans Ferdinand Blom was born in Copenhagen, Denmark to a middle-class family of antique merchants. He passed a matriculation exam at Rungsted and received a trade education in Germany and Belgium. He started travelling, eventually reaching Mexico in 1919, where he found work in the oil industry conducting map and geologically survey the states of Veracruz, Tabasco, and Chiapas. Travelling to remote locations in the Mexican jungle, he became interested in the Maya ruins which he encountered where he was working.
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Theodor Mommsen
1817 - 1903 (86 years)
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen was a German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician and archaeologist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest classicists of the 19th century. His work regarding Roman history is still of fundamental importance for contemporary research. He received the 1902 Nobel Prize in Literature for being "the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work, A History of Rome", after having been nominated by 18 members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He was also a prominent German politician, as a member of the Prussian and German parliaments.
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Caroline Bond Day
1889 - 1948 (59 years)
Caroline Stewart Bond Day was an American physical anthropologist, author, and educator. She was one of the first African-Americans to receive a degree in anthropology. Day is recognized as a pioneer physical anthropologist whose study helped future black researchers and is used to challenge scientific racism about miscegenation.
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Gutorm Gjessing
1906 - 1979 (73 years)
Gutorm Gjessing was a Norwegian archaeologist and ethnographer. He was director of the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Oslo and as major contributor to Circumpolar studies. Biography Gjessing was born at Ålesund in Møre og Romsdal, Norway. He was the son of parish priest Marcus Jacob Gjessing and Julie Kathrine Monrad .
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Johannes Ranke
1836 - 1916 (80 years)
Johannes Ranke was a German physiologist and anthropologist. He was the son of theologian Friedrich Heinrich Ranke , the brother of pediatrician Heinrich von Ranke and father to pulmonologist Karl Ernst Ranke .
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Ludwig Feuerbach
1804 - 1872 (68 years)
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was a German anthropologist and philosopher, best known for his book The Essence of Christianity, which provided a critique of Christianity that strongly influenced generations of later thinkers, including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
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Alfred William Howitt
1830 - 1908 (78 years)
Alfred William Howitt , , also known by author abbreviation A.W. Howitt, was an Australian anthropologist, explorer and naturalist. He was known for leading the Victorian Relief Expedition, which set out to establish the fate of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition.
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Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae
1821 - 1885 (64 years)
Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae was a Danish archaeologist, historian and politician, who was the second director of the National Museum of Denmark . He played a key role in the foundation of scientific archaeology. Worsaae was the first to excavate and use stratigraphy to prove C. J. Thomsen's sequence of the Three-age system: Stone, Bronze, Iron. He was also a pioneer in the development of paleobotany through his excavation work in the peat bogs of Jutland. Worsaae served as Kultus Minister of Denmark for Christen Andreas Fonnesbech from 1874 to 1875.
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Mikhail Masson
1897 - 1986 (89 years)
Mikhail Yevgenyevich Masson was a Soviet archaeologist. He was the founder of the archaeology school in Central Asia and a professor, doctor of historical and archaeological sciences and member of the Turkmen Academy of Sciences.
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Hugo Bernatzik
1897 - 1953 (56 years)
Hugo Adolf Bernatzik was an Austrian anthropologist and photographer. Bernatzik was the founder of the concept of alternative anthropology. Biography Hugo Adolf Bernatzik was a son of the Professor of Public Law at the University of Vienna and member of the House of Peers, Edmund Bernatzik . After school in 1915, he volunteered to join the Austro–Hungarian Army and was deployed among other places in Albania. In 1920, he abandoned his medical studies for financial reasons and became a businessman. After the early death of his first wife Margarete Ast , he embarked on extensive travels and expe...
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