The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Anthropology,
#2901
Donald Lathrap
1927 - 1990 (63 years)
Donald Ward Lathrap was an American archaeologist who specialized in the study of neolithic American culture. He was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at the time of his death.
Go to Profile#2902
André Leroi-Gourhan
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
André Leroi-Gourhan was a French archaeologist, paleontologist, paleoanthropologist, and anthropologist with an interest in technology and aesthetics and a penchant for philosophical reflection. Biography Leroi-Gourhan completed his doctorate on the archaeology of the North Pacific under the supervision of Marcel Mauss. Beginning in 1933 he held various positions at museums around the world, including the British Museum and the Musée de l'Homme, as well as in Japan. Between 1940 and 1944 he worked at the Musée Guimet. In 1944 he was sent to the Château de Valençay to take care of works evacuated from the Louvre, including the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
Go to Profile#2903
Mortimer Wheeler
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler CH CIE MC TD was a British archaeologist and officer in the British Army. Over the course of his career, he served as Director of both the National Museum of Wales and London Museum, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, and the founder and Honorary Director of the Institute of Archaeology in London, in addition to writing twenty-four books on archaeological subjects.
Go to Profile#2904
Richard Thurnwald
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
Richard Thurnwald was an Austrian anthropologist and sociologist, known for his comparative studies of social institutions. Biography He studied law, economics and oriental languages in Berlin, earning a law degree in 1891. He then took a government post, and while being stationed in Bosnia , he conducted research of the local social and economic climate. In 1898 he travelled to Egypt, and following his return to Berlin, he took classes in Egyptology and Assyriology . In Berlin, he found employment as an assistant curator at the Museum für Völkerkunde.
Go to Profile#2905
Monica Wilson
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
Monica Wilson, née Hunter was a South African anthropologist, who was professor of social anthropology at the University of Cape Town. Life Monica Hunter was born to missionary parents in Lovedale in the Cape Colony, speaking Xhosa from childhood. She studied history at Girton College, Cambridge, before gaining a Cambridge doctorate in anthropology in 1934. Her thesis, the fieldwork for which was undertaken with the Pondo in the Eastern Cape between 1931 and 1933, was presented in the monograph Reaction to Conquest.
Go to Profile#2906
Henri Frankfort
1897 - 1954 (57 years)
Henri "Hans" Frankfort was a Dutch Egyptologist, archaeologist and orientalist. Early life and education Born in Amsterdam, into a "liberal Jewish" family, Frankfort studied history at the University of Amsterdam and then moved to London, where in 1924, he took an MA under Sir Flinders Petrie at the University College. In 1927 he gained a Ph.D. from the University of Leiden.
Go to Profile#2907
Alexander Francis Chamberlain
1865 - 1914 (49 years)
Alexander Francis Chamberlain was a Canadian anthropologist, born in England. Under the direction of Franz Boas he received the first Ph.D. granted in anthropology in the United States from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. After graduating, he taught at Clark, eventually becoming full professor in 1911. Under the auspices of the British Association, his area of specialty was the Kootenay Indians.
Go to Profile#2908
Harry L. Shapiro
1902 - 1990 (88 years)
Harry Lionel Shapiro was an American anthropologist and eugenicist. Biography Shapiro was born into a Jewish family and was educated in Boston, Massachusetts. While he was a senior at Harvard he was awarded a graduate fellowship from Yale in 1923 to pursue a genetic study of the descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty. Shapiro was a student of Earnest Hooton at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#2909
Robert F. Murphy
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Robert Francis Murphy was an American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City, from the early 1960s to 1990. His field work included studies of the Munduruku people of the Amazon and the Tuareg people of the Sahara.
Go to Profile#2910
Bertil Lundman
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Bertil J. Lundman was a Swedish anthropologist. Early life Lundman was born on September 28, 1899, in Malmö. Career Lundman was an anthropologist. In the 1930s, he wrote an article in Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde, a German journal of racial studies. Later, he served on the executive committee of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics.
Go to Profile#2911
Sergei Rudenko
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Serhiy Ivanovich Rudenko was a prominent Ukrainian Soviet anthropologist and archaeologist who discovered and excavated the most celebrated of Scythian burials, Pazyryk in Siberia. Rudenko was a follower of Paul Broca's "French School" of anthropology. He participated in the Russian Geographical Society's Map Commission established in 1910. In that year he participated in an expedition to the Ob River basin in Western Siberia, where he studied the Khanty people.
Go to Profile#2912
Berthold Laufer
1874 - 1934 (60 years)
Berthold Laufer was a German anthropologist and historical geographer with an expertise in East Asian languages. The American Museum of Natural History calls him, "one of the most distinguished sinologists of his generation."
Go to Profile#2913
Hermann Klaatsch
1863 - 1916 (53 years)
Hermann Klaatsch was a German physician, anatomist, physical anthropologist, evolutionist, and professor at the University of Heidelberg from 1890, and at the University of Breslau until 1916. Klaatsch studied evolutionary theory, being mentioned in some fingerprint books for his early studies on friction skin development. He researched the volar pads associated with the epidermal patterns, grouping the volar pads of humans and primates together. Subsequent to Arthur Kollmann, Klaatsch also gave names to the various volar pads in 1888.
Go to Profile#2914
Koganei Yoshikiyo
1859 - 1944 (85 years)
Koganei Yoshikiyo was a Japanese anatomist and anthropologist of the Meiji period. Biography A child of an Echigo Nagaoka clansman, he graduated from East School, the precursor of the Tokyo Imperial University medical school, in 1880. He then went to Germany where he learned anatomy and histology. He returned to Japan in 1885, and in the following year he was appointed a professor at Tokyo Imperial University Medical School, becoming the first Japanese lecturer on anatomy in the school.
Go to Profile#2915
Esther Schiff Goldfrank
1896 - 1997 (101 years)
Esther Schiff Goldfrank was an American anthropologist of the famous German-American Schiff family. She had studied with Franz Boas and specialized in the Pueblo Indians. She worked closely with Elsie Clews Parsons and also with Ruth Benedict on the Blackfoot. She published on Pueblo religion, Cochiti sociology and Isleta drawings. Goldfrank received her bachelor's degree from Barnard College in 1918 and graduated from Columbia University in 1937.
Go to Profile#2916
Nicholas Roerich
1874 - 1947 (73 years)
Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh , better known as Nicholas Roerich , was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher, and public figure. In his youth he was influenced by Russian Symbolism, a movement in Russian society centered on the spiritual. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression.
Go to Profile#2917
Charlotte Gower Chapman
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Charlotte Gower Chapman, born Charlotte Day Gower, was an ethnologist and an author. In 1928, she received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Later on while working at Lingnan University in China during World War II she was taken prisoner by the Japanese when the US entered the war, but was released by 1942. After, she joined the United States Marine Corps and worked in the Office of Strategic Services until 1947 when she became an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency until her retirement in 1964.
Go to Profile#2918
Paul Kosok
1869 - 1959 (90 years)
Paul August Kosok , was an American professor of history and government, who is credited as the first serious researcher of the Nazca Lines in Peru. His work on the lines started in 1939, when he was doing field study related to the irrigation systems of ancient cultures. By the 1950s, he had completed extensive mapping of more than 300 ancient canals in Peru, in collaboration with archeologist Richard P. Schaedel. Kosok demonstrated the culture's sophisticated management of water to support their settlements.
Go to Profile#2919
David Zolotarev
1885 - 1935 (50 years)
David Alekseevich Zolotarev was a Russian anthropologist and ethnographer who studied the tribal populations of the Yaroslavl region of northern Russia. In his capacity as professor of anthropology at the University of Leningrad and as a representative of the Russian Geographical Society’s Ethnographic Division, Zolotarev led numerous anthropological expeditions, and would later report the findings in published research papers and at scientific conferences. Following the Russian Revolution, the Soviet government called on Zolotarev and other anthropologists to determine how the isolated ethni...
Go to Profile#2920
Frederick Starr
1858 - 1933 (75 years)
Frederick Starr was an American academic, anthropologist, and "populist educator" born in Auburn, New York. As he was avid collector of charms and votive slips he was called in Japan. He sold much of this collection to art collector and museum specialist Gertrude Bass Warner, and it currently resides at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon and the University of Oregon Knight Library Special Collections & University Archives.
Go to Profile#2921
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#2922
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#2923
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.
Go to Profile#2924
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#2925
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#2926
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#2927
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.
Go to Profile#2928
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.
Go to Profile#2929
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#2930
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#2931
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.
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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#2933
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.
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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 .
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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.
Go to Profile#2937
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.
Go to Profile#2939
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 .
Go to Profile#2940
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#2941
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.
Go to Profile#2942
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.
Go to Profile#2944
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.
Go to Profile#2949
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.
Go to Profile#2950
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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