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List of the most influential people in Anthropology,

#2901

Pierre Wuilleumier

1904 - 1979 (75 years)

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

#2902

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.

#2903

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.

#2904

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.

#2905

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.

#2906

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.

#2907

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.

#2908

Mark Zborowski

1908 - 1990 (82 years)

Mark Zborowski was an anthropologist and an NKVD agent . He was the NKVD's most valuable mole inside the Trotskyist organization in Paris during the 1930s and in New York during the 1940s. Childhood in Uman Zborowski was one of four children born into a Jewish family in Uman, near Cherkasy, in 1908. According to the story Zborowski told friends, his conservative parents moved to Poland in 1921 to escape the October Revolution in Russia. While he was a student, Zborowski disobeyed his parents and joined the Polish Communist Party. His political activity led to imprisonment and he fled to Berlin where he was unsuccessful in finding employment.

#2909

May Mandelbaum Edel

1909 - 1964 (55 years)

May Mandelbaum Edel was an American anthropologist known for her fieldwork among the Okanagan in Washington, the Tillamook in Oregon, and the Kiga in Uganda. Edel's linguistic research of the Tillamook serves as the only published account of the language which provided data for future linguistic publications. Edel was the first American woman anthropologist to live in an African village, and her research in Africa documented the diversity of African cultures.

#2910

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 ...

#2911

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 .

#2912

Phyllis Kaberry

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...

#2913

T. B. L. Webster

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".

#2914

Kathleen Kenyon

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.

#2915

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 .

#2916

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.

#2917

Cynthia Irwin-Williams

Cynthia Irwin-Williams

1936 - 1990 (54 years)

Cynthia Irwin-Williams was an archaeologist of the prehistoric American Southwest. She received a B.A. in Anthropology from Radcliffe College in 1957; the next year she received a M.A. in the same field. In 1963 she completed her educational career in Anthropology with a PhD. from Harvard University. Beginning her career in the 1950s, Irwin-Williams was considered a groundbreaker for women in archaeology, like her friend and supporter Hannah Marie Wormington.

#2918

A. Aiyappan

1905 - 1988 (83 years)

Ayinapalli Aiyappan was a museologist who served as Superintendent of the Government Museum, Madras from 1940 to 1960. He was the first Indian to occupy the post. Aiyappan was also an amateur archaeologist who did pioneering excavations on the archaeological site at Arikamedu.

#2919

Harry Holbert Turney-High

1899 - 1982 (83 years)

Harry Holbert Turney-High was an American anthropologist and author who studied primitive war and conflict. He was a professor of anthropology at University of South Carolina and also a colonel in the military police in the United States Army Reserve. He based his theory on the concept of military horizon, which is the point where a society evolves from a primitive form of war towards a more complex one. This evolution depends not only on traditionally studied mechanism, such as climate or access to resources, but mainly on the organizational ability of any given society.

#2920

Viola Garfield

1899 - 1983 (84 years)

Viola E. Garfield was an American anthropologist best known for her work on the social organization and plastic arts of the Tsimshian nation in British Columbia and Alaska. Early life Viola Edmundson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. Her family moved a few years later to Coupeville, Washington, on Whidbey Island, where she attended local schools.

#2921

Ernst Sprockhoff

1892 - 1967 (75 years)

Ernst Sprockhoff was a German prehistorian and inventor of the Sprockhoff numbering system for megalithic monuments in Germany. Life Sprockhoff was born on 6 August 1892 in Berlin. He started as a teacher before the first World War. After the war he completed his abitur during his captivity as a prisoner of war and in 1920 started to study prehistory at Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin. He was graduated in 1924 by Max Ebert at the University of Königsberg. From 1926 to 1928 he was employed at the Provincial Museum of Hanover and from 1928 to 1935 at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz.

#2922

Clark Hopkins

1895 - 1976 (81 years)

Clark Hopkins was an American archaeologist. During the 1930s he led the joint French-American excavations at Dura Europos. In later years he was professor of art and archeology at the University of Michigan.

#2923

Doro Levi

1898 - 1991 (93 years)

Teodoro "Doro" Levi was an Italian archaeologist who practiced in the Mediterranean countries in the 20th century. Specifically, Levi conducted excavations in Italy, Greece, and Turkey. From 1938 to 1945, Levi was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Levi has published a number of technical manuscripts on archaeology such as Festos e la Civiltà Minoica, tavole I published in 1976. Some of Levi's most significant work was a long term excavation at Minoan Phaistos, which site is the second most significant Minoan settlement and which has yielded important fi...

#2924

Lila Morris O'Neale

Lila Morris O'Neale

1886 - 1948 (62 years)

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

#2925

Herbert Maryon

1874 - 1965 (91 years)

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

#2926

Meyer Fortes

1906 - 1983 (77 years)

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

#2927

Anthony Leeds

1925 - 1989 (64 years)

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

#2928

Peter Lienhardt

1928 - 1986 (58 years)

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

#2929

Peter Glob

1911 - 1985 (74 years)

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

#2930

John Beazley

1885 - 1970 (85 years)

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

#2931

James Philip Mills

1890 - 1960 (70 years)

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

#2932

William Groves

1898 - 1967 (69 years)

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

#2933

Secondina Cesano

1879 - 1973 (94 years)

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

#2934

William Abel Caudill

1920 - 1972 (52 years)

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

#2935

Charles H. Fairbanks

1913 - 1984 (71 years)

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

#2936

Biraja Sankar Guha

1894 - 1961 (67 years)

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

#2937

J. Louis Giddings

1909 - 1964 (55 years)

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

#2938

Wilhelm Baehrens

Wilhelm Baehrens

1885 - 1929 (44 years)

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

#2939

Božo Škerlj

1904 - 1961 (57 years)

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

#2940

Herman Wirth

1885 - 1981 (96 years)

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

#2941

George Augustus Auden

1872 - 1957 (85 years)

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

#2942

Irene Emery

1900 - 1981 (81 years)

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

#2943

Giovanni Becatti

1912 - 1973 (61 years)

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

#2944

Edith Hall Dohan

1877 - 1943 (66 years)

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

#2945

W. J. Varley

1904 - 1976 (72 years)

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

#2946

Harry Skinner

1886 - 1978 (92 years)

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

#2947

Diane Barwick

1938 - 1986 (48 years)

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

#2948

Axel Boëthius

1889 - 1969 (80 years)

Axel Boëthius was a scholar and archaeologist of Etruscan culture. Boëthius was primarily a student of Etruscan and Italic architecture. His father was the historian Simon Boëthius. As a student, Boëthius studied at the Uppsala University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1918. He taught at Uppsala during which time he excavated at Mycenae in Greece. In 1925 he was selected as the first director of the Swedish Institute at Rome by the Swedish crown prince Gustav Adolf . He became professor of archaeology at the Göteborg University in 1934, a post he held until 1955. He also served as rector of the university .

#2949

Furio Jesi

1941 - 1980 (39 years)

Furio Jesi was an Italian historian, writer, archaeologist, and philosopher. Biography The only son of "war hero" Bruno Jesi, Furio Jesi was an independent scholar of myth, Egyptology, history of Mediterranean religions, philology and archeology, most notable for his work on extending the ideas of Károly Kerényi including studies of the science of myth and the difference between classic Myths and "Technified Myths".

#2950

Pei Wenzhong

1904 - 1982 (78 years)

Pei Wenzhong , or W. C. Pei, was a Chinese paleontologist, archaeologist and anthropologist born in Fengnan. He is considered a founding figure of Chinese anthropology. Career Pei graduated from Peking University in 1928 and went to work for the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Geological Survey of China joining the excavations of the Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian, where he was named the field director of the excavations the following year. The work at Zhoukoudian was carried out under difficult conditions: for example, the scientists had to ride there on mules, some 40 km southwest of the city of Beijing.

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