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,
#3051
Theodor Waitz
1821 - 1864 (43 years)
Theodor Waitz was a German psychologist and anthropologist. His research in psychology brought him into touch with anthropology, and he will be best remembered by his monumental work in six volumes, Die Anthropologie der Naturvölker .
Go to Profile#3052
Hans F. K. Günther
1891 - 1968 (77 years)
Hans Friedrich Karl Günther was a German writer, an advocate of scientific racism and a eugenicist in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He was also known as "Rassengünther" or "Rassenpapst" . He is considered to have been a major influence on Nazi racialist thought.
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Alfred Cort Haddon
1855 - 1940 (85 years)
Alfred Cort Haddon, Sc.D., FRS, FRGS FRAI was an influential British anthropologist and ethnologist. Initially a biologist, who achieved his most notable fieldwork, with W.H.R. Rivers, C.G. Seligman and Sidney Ray on the Torres Strait Islands. He returned to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he had been an undergraduate, and effectively founded the School of Anthropology. Haddon was a major influence on the work of the American ethnologist Caroline Furness Jayne.
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Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
1752 - 1840 (88 years)
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He is considered to be a main founder of zoology and anthropology as comparative, scientific disciplines. He has been called the "founder of racial classifications."
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Adolf Bastian
1826 - 1905 (79 years)
Adolf Philipp Wilhelm Bastian was a 19th-century polymath best remembered for his contributions to the development of ethnography and the development of anthropology as a discipline. Modern psychology owes him a great debt, because of his theory of the Elementargedanke, which led to Carl Jung's development of the theory of archetypes. His ideas had a formative influence on the "father of American anthropology" Franz Boas, and he also influenced the thought of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell.
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Al-Biruni
973 - 1048 (75 years)
Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni , known as al-Biruni, was a Khwarazmian Iranian scholar and polymath during the Islamic Golden Age. He has been called variously the "founder of Indology", "Father of Comparative Religion", "Father of modern geodesy", and the first anthropologist.
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Michel Leiris
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Julien Michel Leiris was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer. Part of the Surrealist group in Paris, Leiris became a key member of the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and head of research in ethnography at the CNRS.
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Alfred Russel Wallace
1823 - 1913 (90 years)
Alfred Russel Wallace was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic. It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting and quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species.
Go to Profile#3059
W. H. R. Rivers
1864 - 1922 (58 years)
William Halse Rivers Rivers was an English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist known for treatment of First World War officers suffering shell shock, so they could be returned to combat. Rivers' most famous patient was the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, with whom he remained close friends until his own sudden death.
Go to Profile#3060
Joseph Deniker
1852 - 1918 (66 years)
Joseph Deniker was a Russian Empire and French naturalist and anthropologist, known primarily for his attempts to develop highly detailed maps of race in Europe. Life Deniker was born in 1852 to French parents in Astrakhan, Russian Empire. He first studied at the university and technical institute of St. Petersburg, where he adopted engineering as a profession, and in this capacity, traveled extensively in the petroleum districts of the Caucasus, in Central Europe, Italy and Dalmatia. Settling in Paris, France in 1876, he studied at the Sorbonne, where he received a doctorate in natural science in 1886.
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Giuseppe Sergi
1841 - 1936 (95 years)
Giuseppe Sergi was an Italian anthropologist of the early twentieth century, best known for his opposition to Nordicism in his books on the racial identity of Mediterranean peoples. He rejected existing racial typologies that identified Mediterranean peoples as "dark whites" because they implied a Nordicist conception of Mediterranean peoples descending from whites who had become racially mixed with non-whites which he claimed was false. His concept of the Mediterranean race, identified Mediterranean peoples as being an autonomous brunet race and he claimed that the Nordic race was descended from the Mediterranean race whose skin had depigmented to a pale complexion after it moved north.
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Robert Ranulph Marett
1866 - 1943 (77 years)
Robert Ranulph Marett was a British ethnologist and a proponent of the British Evolutionary School of cultural anthropology. Founded by Marett's older colleague, Edward Burnett Tylor, it asserted that modern primitive societies provide evidence for phases in the evolution of culture, which it attempted to recapture via comparative and historical methods. Marett focused primarily on the anthropology of religion. Studying the evolutionary origin of religions, he modified Tylor's animistic theory to include the concept of mana. Marett's anthropological teaching and writing career at Oxford University spanned the early 20th century before World War Two.
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Lubor Niederle
1865 - 1944 (79 years)
Lubor Niederle was a Czech archeologist, anthropologist and ethnographer. He is seen as one of the founders of modern archeology in Czech lands. He was born in Klatovy. He studied at the Charles University in Prague from 1883 to 1887. He was initially interested in classical archaeology, then studied anthropology, sociology and ethnology. Later, he studied in Munich under professor Johannes Rank and in Paris under professor Léonce Manouvriere at the École d’anthropologie. Niederle also travelled in several Slavic countries, studying archaeological findings and historical documents.
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Marcel Griaule
1898 - 1956 (58 years)
Marcel Griaule was a French author and anthropologist known for his studies of the Dogon people of West Africa, and for pioneering ethnographic field studies in France. He worked together with Germaine Dieterlen and Jean Rouch on African subjects. His publications number over 170 books and articles for scholarly journals.
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Raymond Dart
1893 - 1988 (95 years)
Raymond Arthur Dart was an Australian anatomist and anthropologist, best known for his involvement in the 1924 discovery of the first fossil ever found of Australopithecus africanus, an extinct hominin closely related to humans, at Taung in the North of South Africa in the Northwest province.
Go to Profile#3066
Augustus Pitt Rivers
1827 - 1900 (73 years)
Lieutenant General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers was an English officer in the British Army, ethnologist, and archaeologist. He was noted for innovations in archaeological methodology, and in the museum display of archaeological and ethnological collections. His international collection of about 22,000 objects was the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford while his collection of English archaeology from the area around Stonehenge forms the basis of the collection at The Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire.
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Leo Frobenius
1873 - 1938 (65 years)
Leo Viktor Frobenius was a German self-taught ethnologist and archaeologist and a major figure in German ethnography. Life He was born in Berlin as the son of a Prussiann officer and died in Biganzolo, Lago Maggiore, Piedmont, Italy. He undertook his first expedition to Africa in 1904 to the Kasai district in Congo, formulating the African Atlantis theory during his travels.
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Frank Speck
1881 - 1950 (69 years)
Frank Gouldsmith Speck was an American anthropologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples among the Eastern Woodland Native Americans of the United States and First Nations peoples of eastern boreal Canada.
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W. Lloyd Warner
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
William Lloyd Warner was a pioneering anthropologist and sociologist noted for applying the techniques of British functionalism to understanding American culture. Background William Lloyd Warner was born in Redlands, California, into the family of William Taylor and Clara Belle Carter, middle-class farmers. Warner attended San Bernardino High School, after which he joined the army in 1917. He contracted tuberculosis in 1918 and was released from the service. In 1918, he married Billy Overfield, but the marriage lasted only briefly.
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Juan Bautista Ambrosetti
1865 - 1917 (52 years)
Juan Bautista Ambrosetti was an Argentine archaeologist, ethnographer and naturalist who helped pioneer anthropology in his country. Life and work Ambrosetti was born in Gualeguay, Entre Ríos Province, in 1865. He enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires, where he was mentored by the prominent local naturalist, Dr. Florentino Ameghino. At age twenty, he joined an expedition of naturalists into then-remote and largely uncharted Chaco Province, publishing his observations in Buenos Aires by a pseudonym, Tomás Bathata.
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Frederic Ward Putnam
1839 - 1915 (76 years)
Frederic Ward Putnam was an American anthropologist and biologist. Biography Putnam was born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of Ebenezer and Elizabeth Putnam. After leaving college, Ebenezer had for a short time engaged in fitting young men for college, but soon went into business in Cincinnati as a commission merchant, a line in which he was successful. Recalled to Salem by his father's death in 1826, Ebenezer married there and devoted himself to the study and cultivation of plants and fruits, and involved himself in the Democratic Party in his county. Although frequently offer...
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Gustaf Kossinna
1858 - 1931 (73 years)
Gustaf Kossinna was a German philologist and archaeologist who was Professor of German Archaeology at the University of Berlin. Along with Carl Schuchhardt he was the most influential German prehistorian of his day, and was creator of the techniques of settlement archaeology . His nationalistic theories about the origins of the Germanic peoples and Indo-Europeans influenced aspects of National Socialist ideology. Though politically discredited after World War II, Kossinna's methodological approach has greatly influenced archaeology up to the present day.
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Eugène Pittard
1867 - 1962 (95 years)
Eugène Pittard was a Swiss anthropologist notable for his work Les Races et l'Histoire published in 1924. Early life Pittard was born in Plainpalais, Geneva, on June 5, 1867. Even as a child, Pittard showed a predilection for collecting and observing people and artifacts. He had a small collection consisting of fossils, bones and coins, which he hoped to some day submit to Carl Vogt.
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Paul Radin
1883 - 1959 (76 years)
Paul Radin was an American cultural anthropologist and folklorist of the early twentieth century specializing in Native American languages and cultures. The noted legal scholar Max Radin was his older brother.
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Eugène Dubois
1858 - 1940 (82 years)
Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois was a Dutch paleoanthropologist and geologist. He earned worldwide fame for his discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus , or "Java Man". Although hominid fossils had been found and studied before, Dubois was the first anthropologist to embark upon a purposeful search for them.
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James Spradley
1934 - 1982 (48 years)
James P. Spradley was a social scientist and a professor of anthropology at Macalester College. Spradley wrote or edited 20 books on ethnography and qualitative research including The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society , Deaf Like Me , The Ethnographic Interview , and Participant Observation .
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Géza Róheim
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Géza Róheim was a Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist. Considered by some as the most important anthropologist-psychoanalyst, he is often credited with founding the field of psychoanalytic anthropology; was the first psychoanalytically trained anthropologist to do field research; and later developed a general cultural theory.
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Zora Neale Hurston
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote over 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
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Lucy Mair
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Lucy Philip Mair was a British anthropologist. She wrote on the subject of social organization, and contributed to the involvement of anthropological research in governance and politics. Her work on colonial administration was influential.
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Nirmal Kumar Bose
1901 - 1972 (71 years)
Nirmal Kumar Bose was a leading Indian anthropologist, who played a formative role in "building an Indian Tradition in Anthropology". A humanist scholar with a broad range of interests, he was also a leading sociologist, urbanist, Gandhian, and educationist. Also active in the Indian freedom struggle with Mahatma Gandhi, he was imprisoned in 1931 during the Salt Satyagraha.
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Arthur Keith
1866 - 1955 (89 years)
Sir Arthur Keith FRS FRAI was a British anatomist and anthropologist, and a proponent of scientific racism. He was a fellow and later the Hunterian Professor and conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He was a strong proponent of Piltdown Man, but finally conceded it to be a forgery shortly before his death.
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Rudolf Pöch
1870 - 1921 (51 years)
Rudolf Pöch was an Austrian medical doctor, anthropologist, and ethnologist. Pöch is also known as a pioneer in photography, cinematography, and audio engineering. He can be regarded as a founding father of the Institute for Anthropology and Ethnography at the University of Vienna.
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Arthur Evans
1851 - 1941 (90 years)
Sir Arthur John Evans was a British archaeologist and pioneer in the study of Aegean civilization in the Bronze Age. He is most famous for unearthing the Minoan palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete. Based on the structures and artifacts found there and throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Evans found that he needed to distinguish the Minoan civilisation from Mycenaean Greece. Evans was also the first to define Cretan scripts Linear A and Linear B, as well as an earlier pictographic writing.
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James Mooney
1861 - 1921 (60 years)
James Mooney was an American ethnographer who lived for several years among the Cherokee. Known as "The Indian Man", he conducted major studies of Southeastern Indians, as well as of tribes on the Great Plains. He did ethnographic studies of the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement among various Native American culture groups, after Sitting Bull's death in 1890. His works on the Cherokee include The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees , and Myths of the Cherokee . All were published by the US Bureau of American Ethnology, within the Smithsonian Institution.
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Charles Gabriel Seligman
1873 - 1940 (67 years)
Charles Gabriel Seligman FRS FRAI was a British physician and ethnologist. His main ethnographic work described the culture of the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and the Shilluk people of the Sudan. He was a professor at London School of Economics and was influential as the teacher of well-known anthropologists such as Bronisław Malinowski, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Meyer Fortes.
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Elsie Clews Parsons
1875 - 1941 (66 years)
Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons was an American anthropologist, sociologist, folklorist, and feminist who studied Native American tribes—such as the Tewa and Hopi—in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. She helped found The New School. She was associate editor for The Journal of American Folklore , president of the American Folklore Society , president of the American Ethnological Society , and was elected the first female president of the American Anthropological Association right before her death.
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William F. Albright
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
William Foxwell Albright was an American archaeologist, biblical scholar, philologist, and expert on ceramics. He is considered "one of the twentieth century's most influential American biblical scholars", having become known to the public in 1948 for his role in the authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. His scholarly reputation arose as a leading theorist and practitioner of biblical archaeology.
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William Moir Calder
1881 - 1960 (79 years)
Sir William Moir Calder, FBA was a Scottish archaeologist, epigraphist, classicist, and academic. He was Hulme Professor of Greek at the University of Manchester from 1913 to 1930, and Professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh from 1930 to 1951.
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Kathleen Gough
1925 - 1990 (65 years)
Eleanor Kathleen Gough Aberle was a British anthropologist and feminist who was known for her work in South Asia and South-East Asia. As a part of her doctorate work, she did field research in Malabar district from 1947 to 1949. She did further research in Tanjore district from 1950 to 1953 and again in 1976, and in Vietnam in 1976 and 1982. In addition, some of her work included campaigning for: nuclear disarmament, the civil rights movement, women's rights, the third world and the end of the Vietnam War. She was known for her Marxist leanings and was on an FBI watchlist.
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Georges Daux
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Georges Daux was a French archaeologist and a leading scholar of Greek inscriptions. Born in Bastia and educated at the École normale supérieure, Daux headed the French School at Athens from 1950 to 1969.
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Ian Richmond
1902 - 1965 (63 years)
Sir Ian Archibald Richmond, was an English archaeologist and academic. He was Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire at the University of Oxford. In addition, he was Director of the British School at Rome from 1930 to 1932, President of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies from 1958 to 1961, and Director of the Society of Antiquaries of London from 1959 to 1964.
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Morton Fried
1923 - 1986 (63 years)
Morton Herbert Fried , was a distinguished professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City from 1950 until his death in 1986. He made considerable contributions to the fields of social and political theory.
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Earnest Hooton
1887 - 1954 (67 years)
Earnest Albert Hooton was an American physical anthropologist known for his work on racial classification and his popular writings such as the book Up From The Ape. Hooton sat on the Committee on the Negro, a group that "focused on the anatomy of blacks and reflected the racism of the time."
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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.
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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#3098
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.
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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.
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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.
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