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...
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Felix M. Keesing
1902 - 1961 (59 years)
Felix M. Keesing was a New Zealand-born anthropologist who specialized in the study of the Philippine Islands and the South Pacific. He came to the United States in the 1940s and taught at Stanford University, California, 1942–1961.
Go to Profile#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
Thomas Griffith Taylor
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Thomas Griffith "Grif" Taylor was an English-born geographer, anthropologist and world explorer. He was a survivor of Captain Robert Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica . Taylor was a senior academic geographer at universities in Sydney, Chicago, and Toronto. His writings on geography and race were controversial.
Go to Profile#2857
Carleton S. Coon
1904 - 1981 (77 years)
Carleton Stevens Coon was an American anthropologist. A professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, lecturer and professor at Harvard University, he was president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Coon's theories on race were widely disputed in his lifetime and are considered pseudoscientific in modern anthropology.
Go to Profile#2858
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.
Go to Profile#2859
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.
Go to Profile#2860
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.
Go to Profile#2861
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.
Go to Profile#2862
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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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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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...
Go to Profile#2867
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#2868
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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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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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 .
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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.
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William Edward Hanley Stanner
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
William Edward Hanley Stanner CMG , often cited as W.E.H. Stanner, was an Australian anthropologist who worked extensively with Indigenous Australians. Stanner had a varied career that also included journalism in the 1930s, military service in World War II, and political advice on colonial policy in Africa and the South Pacific in the post-war period.
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Dorothy Garrod
1892 - 1968 (76 years)
Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod, CBE, FBA was an English archaeologist who specialised in the Palaeolithic period. She held the position of Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1939 to 1952, and was the first woman to hold a chair at either Oxford or Cambridge.
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Lloyd Fallers
1925 - 1974 (49 years)
Lloyd Ashton "Tom" Fallers, Jr. was the A. A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the departments of anthropology and sociology at the University of Chicago. Fallers' work in social and cultural anthropology focused on social stratification and the development of new states in East Africa and Turkey.
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John Caskey
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
John Langdon Caskey was an American archaeologist and classical scholar. He directed the American School of Classical Studies in Athens from 1949 to 1959, and was head of the Classics department at the University of Cincinnati from 1959 to 1979. His career focused on excavations at the ancient settlements of Troy, Lerna, and Keos. Until their marriage ended, he worked with his spouse Elizabeth Caskey who went to excavate on her own after they parted.
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Gladys Reichard
1893 - 1955 (62 years)
Gladys Amanda Reichard was an American anthropologist and linguist. She is considered one of the most important women to have studied Native American languages and cultures in the first half of the twentieth century. She is best known for her studies of three different Native American languages: Wiyot, Coeur d'Alene and Navajo. Reichard was concerned with understanding language variation, and with connections between linguistic principles and underpinnings of religion, culture and context.
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Clellan S. Ford
1909 - 1972 (63 years)
Clellan Stearns Ford was an American anthropologist, best known as Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, and as co-author of the 1951 book Patterns of Sexual Behavior. Biography Clellan Ford was born on July 27, 1909, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was educated at Yale University, where he received the Ph.D. in chemistry in 1931, and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1935. In 1935, Ford spent a year in the Fiji Islands conducting ethnographic field research. The following year, he joined the Institute of Human Relations at Yale, where he co-founded the Cross-Cultural Survey. In 1940, the same ...
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Glynn Isaac
1937 - 1985 (48 years)
Glynn Llywelyn Isaac was a South African archaeologist who specialised in the very early prehistory of Africa, and was one of twin sons born to botanists William Edwyn Isaac and Frances Margaret Leighton. He has been called the most influential Africanist of the last half century, and his papers on human movement and behavior are still cited in studies a quarter of a century later.
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T. Eric Peet
1882 - 1934 (52 years)
Thomas Eric Peet was an English Egyptologist. Biography Thomas Eric Peet was the son of Thomas and Salome Peet. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby and at Queen's College, Oxford. From 1909 onwards he conducted excavations in Egypt for the Egypt Exploration Fund. From 1913 to 1928, he was lecturer in Egyptology at Manchester University, though he also saw service in World War I as a lieutenant in the King's Regiment . From 1920 to 1933, he was Brunner Professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. In 1933 he was appointed Reader in Egyptology at the University of Oxford.
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Ronald F. Tylecote
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Ronald Frank Tylecote was a British archaeologist and metallurgist, generally recognised as the founder of the sub-discipline of archaeometallurgy. Education and profession The son of doctor Frank Edward Tylecote, he was born in Manchester and educated at Oundle School. He obtained an MA from Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1938, and an MSc from the University of Manchester in 1942, and a PhD on the oxidation of copper from the University of London in 1952.
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Georges Dossin
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Georges Gilles Joseph Dossin was a Belgian archaeologist, Assyriologist and art historian. Biography He studied in Liège and Paris, earning doctorates in classical philology and oriental history and literature . From 1924 to 1945 he taught classes on the art history of Asia Minor at the Institut Royal d'Histoire de l'Art et d'Archeologie de Bruxelles, and in the meantime, taught various courses in the fields of art history and archaeology at the University of Liège ; classes in Akkadian language at the Institut des Hautes Études de Belgique in Brussels , and classes in oriental history and A...
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Truman Michelson
1879 - 1938 (59 years)
Truman Michelson was a linguist and anthropologist who worked from 1910 until his death for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. He also held a position as ethnologist at George Washington University from 1917 until 1932.
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Peter Lawrence
1921 - 1987 (66 years)
Peter Lawrence was a British-born Australian anthropologist and pioneer in the study of Melanesian religions. Lawrence was born in Lancashire, and read classics at the University of Cambridge. Between 1942 and 1946 he served in the Royal Navy before returning to Cambridge at the end of World War II. He conducted his first fieldwork among the Garia people in southern Madang Province, Papua New Guinea in 1949–1950. Supervised by Meyer Fortes, he received his PhD in 1951 with a thesis entitled "Social structure and the process of social control among the Garia, Madang District, New Guinea".
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A. M. Woodward
1883 - 1973 (90 years)
Arthur Maurice Woodward was a British archaeologist and ancient historian who was director of the British School at Athens from 1923 to 1929. He was later head of the department of ancient history at the University of Sheffield. During the First World War he served with the British Army in the British Salonika Force and was mentioned in despatches.
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A. W. Lawrence
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Arnold Walter Lawrence was a British authority on classical sculpture and architecture. He was Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University in the 1940s, and in the early 1950s in Accra he founded what later became the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board as well as the National Museum of Ghana. He was the youngest brother of T. E. Lawrence and his literary executor.
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Charles Gibson
1920 - 1985 (65 years)
Charles Gibson was an American ethnohistorian who wrote foundational works on the Nahua peoples of colonial Mexico and was elected President of the American Historical Association in 1977. He studied history at Yale University with George Kubler, and he taught for a number of years at University of Iowa before moving to University of Michigan. His dissertation on the Nahua polity of Tlaxcala , a key ally of the Spaniards in the conquest of Mexico, was the first major study of conquest and early colonial era Nahuas from the indigenous perspective. It remains a model for scholars working on Me...
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Michelle Rosaldo
1944 - 1981 (37 years)
Michelle "Shelly" Zimbalist Rosaldo was a social, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist famous for her studies of the Ilongot people in the Philippines and for her pioneering role in women's studies and the anthropology of gender.
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Albert Spaulding
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Albert Clanton Spaulding was an American anthropologist and processual archaeologist who encouraged the application of quantitative statistics in archaeological research and the legitimacy of anthropology as a science. His push for thorough statistical analysis in the field triggered a series of academic debates with archaeologist James Ford in which the nature of archaeological typologies was meticulously investigated—a dynamic discourse now known as the Ford-Spaulding Debate. He was also instrumental in increasing funding for archaeology through the National Science Foundation.
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Hugh O'Neill Hencken
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Hugh O'Neill Hencken was an American archaeologist who specialized in Iron Age Europe. He was curator of European archaeology at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, from 1932 to 1972. Career O'Neill Hencken was born in New York City on January 8, 1902, to an Irish American family. He studied at Princeton University and the University of Cambridge, where he obtained his doctorate in archaeology in 1929. He was appointed the curator of European archaeology at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 1932, serving until his retirement in 1972. During this period he also held posit...
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Sophie Bledsoe Aberle
1896 - 1996 (100 years)
Sophie Bledsoe Aberle was an American anthropologist, physician and nutritionist known for her work with Pueblo people. She was one of two women first appointed to the National Science Board. Early life and education Sophie Bledsoe Herrick was born in 1896 to Albert and Clara S. Herrick in Schenectady, New York. Her paternal grandmother and namesake was the writer Sophia Bledsoe Herrick. Sophie was educated at home and had a brief marriage at age 21 to a man surnamed Aberle, which surname she chose to keep. She began attending University of California in Berkeley but switched to Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1923, a master's degree in 1925, and a Ph.D.
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Edward Dozier
1916 - 1971 (55 years)
Edward Pasqual Dozier was a Pueblo Native American anthropologist and linguist who studied Native Americans and the peoples of northern Luzon in the Philippines. He was the first Native American to earn a PhD in anthropology in the United States.
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Richard Goodchild
1918 - 1968 (50 years)
Richard George Goodchild was a British provincial Roman archaeologist. He was one of the pioneers of archaeology in Libya. Education and career Goodchild's interest in archaeology was raised as a schoolboy at Cranleigh School, an independent boarding school in Surrey. From 1936, he attended the University of Oxford to study history. There he got to know the University of Oxford Archaeological Society who undertook excavations in the area around Oxford. During one of these excavations, Goodchild learned, among others, the archaeologist Olwen Brogan and the later pioneer of aerial archaeology, John Bradford .
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Ernest Becker
1924 - 1974 (50 years)
Ernest Becker was an American cultural anthropologist and author of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death. Biography Early life Ernest Becker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrant parents. Serving in the infantry during World War II, he would help liberate a Nazi concentration camp. After he completed his military service, Becker attended Syracuse University in New York. Upon graduation he joined the U.S. Embassy in Paris as an administrative officer.
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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#2895
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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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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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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John Otis Brew
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
John Otis Brew , was an American archaeologist of the American Southwest and director at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Many of his publications are still used today by archaeologists that conduct their work in the American Southwest. J.O. Brew was a titan in the world of archaeology for his attempts to "preserve our archaeological heritage".
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Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann was a German ethnologist who served as Professor of Ethnology at the University of Mainz and Chair of Ethnology at the University of Heidelberg. Biography Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann was born in Düsseldorf, Germany on 1 October 1904. He gained his abitur in Düsseldorf in 1925. Mühlmann subsequently studied anthropology, ethnology and sociology at the universities of Freiburg, Munich, Hamburg and Berlin. Among his teachers were Eugen Fischer at the University of Freiburg. Eugen Fischer, Edmund Husserl, Fritz Lenz, Siegfried Passarge, and Richard Thurnwald. Mühlmann gained his Ph.D.
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John M. Allegro
1923 - 1988 (65 years)
John Marco Allegro was an English archaeologist and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar. He was a populariser of the Dead Sea Scrolls through his books and radio broadcasts. He was the editor of some of the most famous and controversial scrolls published, the pesharim. A number of Allegro's later books, including The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, brought him both popular fame and notoriety, and also complicated his career.
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