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,
#2851
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...
Go to Profile#2852
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#2853
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.
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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#2855
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#2856
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#2857
Margaret Mead
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia. Mead served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.
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V. Gordon Childe
1892 - 1957 (65 years)
Vere Gordon Childe was an Australian archaeologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. He spent most of his life in the United Kingdom, working as an academic for the University of Edinburgh and then the Institute of Archaeology, London. He wrote twenty-six books during his career. Initially an early proponent of culture-historical archaeology, he later became the first exponent of Marxist archaeology in the Western world.
Go to Profile#2859
Melville J. Herskovits
1895 - 1963 (68 years)
Melville Jean Herskovits was an American anthropologist who helped to first establish African and African Diaspora studies in American academia. He is known for exploring the cultural continuity from African cultures as expressed in African-American communities. He worked with his wife Frances Herskovits, also an anthropologist, in the field in South America, the Caribbean and Africa. They jointly wrote several books and monographs.
Go to Profile#2860
E. E. Evans-Pritchard
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard FBA FRAI was an English anthropologist who was instrumental in the development of social anthropology. He was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1946 to 1970.
Go to Profile#2861
Herbert Youtie
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Herbert Chaim Youtie was an American papyrologist. "Youtie raised papyrological research and publication to a new exemplary standard. At the time of his death he was internationally recognized not only as the world's most distinguished interpreter of documentary papyri, the person to whom would-be editors of texts turned first when difficult problems arose, but also as a sage, who combined a mastery of Greek and an unrivalled feel for all aspects of daily life in Greco-Roman Egypt with a philosophical cast of mind and profound human understanding."
Go to Profile#2862
Clyde Kluckhohn
1905 - 1960 (55 years)
Clyde Kluckhohn , was an American anthropologist and social theorist, best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the Navajo and his contributions to the development of theory of culture within American anthropology. During his lifetime, Kluckhohn was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the United States National Academy of Sciences , and the American Philosophical Society .
Go to Profile#2863
Max Gluckman
1911 - 1975 (64 years)
Herman Max Gluckman was a South African and British social anthropologist. He is best known as the founder of the Manchester School of anthropology. Biography and major works Gluckman was born in Johannesburg in 1911. Like many of the other anthropologists he later worked with, he was Jewish. He was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he obtained a BA in 1930. Although he intended to study law, he became interested in anthropology and studied under Winifred Hoernle. He earned the equivalent of an MA at Witwatersrand in 1934 and then received a Rhodes Scholarship to attend E...
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Robert Lowie
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
Robert Harry Lowie was an Austrian-born American anthropologist. An expert on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, he was instrumental in the development of modern anthropology and has been described as "one of the key figures in the history of anthropology".
Go to Profile#2865
Victor Turner
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Victor Witter Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as symbolic and interpretive anthropology.
Go to Profile#2866
Louis Leakey
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was a Kenyan-British palaeoanthropologist and archaeologist whose work was important in demonstrating that humans evolved in Africa, particularly through discoveries made at Olduvai Gorge with his wife, fellow palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Having established a programme of palaeoanthropological inquiry in eastern Africa, he also motivated many future generations to continue this scholarly work. Several members of the Leakey family became prominent scholars themselves.
Go to Profile#2867
Wilson Dallam Wallis
1886 - 1970 (84 years)
Wilson Dallam Wallis was an American anthropologist. He is remembered for his studies of "primitive" science and religions. Wallis was born in Forest Hill, Maryland. He completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy and law at Dickinson College, and in 1907 went up to Wadham College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, studying Edward Burnett Tylor. He received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1915.
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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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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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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.
Go to Profile#2871
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.
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Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
1881 - 1955 (74 years)
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, FBA was an English social anthropologist who helped further develop the theory of structural functionalism. Biography Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was born Alfred Reginald Brown in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, England, the second son of Alfred Brown , a manufacturer's clerk, and his wife Hannah . He later changed his last name, by deed poll, to Radcliffe-Brown, Radcliffe being his mother's maiden name. He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge , graduating with first-class honours in the moral sciences tripos. At Trinity College, he was elected Anthony Wilkin student in 1906 and 1909.
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Alfred Bellinger
1893 - 1978 (85 years)
Alfred Raymond Bellinger was an American archaeologist and numismatist. He taught at Yale University and took part in the Dura-Europos excavations and published the book: Dura final report, VI, The coins.
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B. Holly Smith
B. Holly Smith is an American biological anthropologist. She is currently a research professor in the Center for Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at The George Washington University. She is also a visiting research professor at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. The majority of her work is concentrated in evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, life history, and dental anthropology.
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David Moore Robinson
1880 - 1958 (78 years)
David Moore Robinson was an American Classical archaeologist credited with the discovery of the ancient city of Olynthus. While he was a prolific writer and advisor, he also has gained notoriety due to his plagiarism of his students, the most notable being Mary Ross Ellingson.
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Mildred Trotter
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Mildred Trotter was an American pioneer as a forensic historian and forensic anthropologist. Biography Trotter was born in Monaca, Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. in zoology and physiology from Mount Holyoke College in 1920. She was hired by the Washington University in St. Louis as a researcher in the School of Medicine and Department of Anatomy. Her work contributed to her degree. She received a Master's in 1921, and a Ph.D. in anatomy in 1924, whereupon she became an instructor of anatomy. She accepted a National Research Council Fellowship in Physical Anthropology for the 1925–26 academic year, and studied at Oxford University in England, with Arthur Thomson.
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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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Yohanan Aharoni
1919 - 1976 (57 years)
Yohanan Aharoni was an Israeli archaeologist and historical geographer, chairman of the Department of Near East Studies and chairman of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel-Aviv University. Life Born to the Aronheim family, in Germany on 7 June 1919, Aharoni immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1933. He studied at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa, and later at the Mikve Yisrael agricultural school. He married Miriam Gross and became a member of kibbutz Alonim.
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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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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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Clyde E. Keeler
1900 - 1994 (94 years)
Clyde Edgar Keeler was a medical geneticist who is noted for his work on laboratory mice and the genetics of vision. His work was instrumental in the understanding of retinitis pigmentosa. He also seems to have published the first scientific paper on non-rod non-cone visual sensation.
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Henri Breuil
1877 - 1961 (84 years)
Henri Édouard Prosper Breuil , often referred to as Abbé Breuil , was a French Catholic priest, archaeologist, anthropologist, ethnologist and geologist. He is noted for his studies of cave art in the Somme and Dordogne valleys as well as in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, China with Teilhard de Chardin, Ethiopia, British Somali Coast Protectorate, and especially Southern Africa.
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George Bolling
1871 - 1963 (92 years)
George Melville Bolling was an American linguist. Bolling was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Loyola College. In 1895 he became professor of Greek, and associate professor of comparative philology and Sanskrit at Catholic University. In 1897 he received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Ellis Minns
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Sir Ellis Hovell Minns, FBA was a British academic and archaeologist whose studies focused on Eastern Europe. Educated at Charterhouse, he went to Pembroke College, Cambridge studying the Classical tripos including Slavonic and Russian. He lived briefly in Paris before moving to St Petersburg in 1898 to work in the library of the Imperial Archaeological Commission. Returning to Cambridge in 1901 he began lecturing in Classics.
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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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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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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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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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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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Victor Ehrenberg
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Victor Ehrenberg was a German Jewish historian. Life Ehrenberg was born in Altona, Hamburg to a noted German Jewish family. He was the younger brother of Hans Ehrenberg and the nephew of the jurist Victor Ehrenberg, and a nephew of economist Richard Ehrenberg.
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Câmara Cascudo
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
Luís da Câmara Cascudo was a Brazilian anthropologist, folklorist, journalist, historian, lawyer, and lexicographer. He was born in Natal, Northeast Brazil. He lived his entire life in Natal and dedicated himself to the study of Brazilian culture and he was a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. He was also interested in music and was a co-founder of the Natal Instituto de Música in 1933. The institute of anthropology there now bears his name.
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