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
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.
Go to Profile#3054
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.
Go to Profile#3055
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.
Go to Profile#3057
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.
Go to Profile#3058
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.
Go to Profile#3059
Marius Barbeau
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Charles Marius Barbeau, , also known as C. Marius Barbeau, or more commonly simply Marius Barbeau, was a Canadian ethnographer and folklorist who is today considered a founder of Canadian anthropology. A Rhodes Scholar, he is best known for an early championing of Québecois folk culture, and for his exhaustive cataloguing of the social organization, narrative and musical traditions, and plastic arts of the Tsimshianic-speaking peoples in British Columbia , and other Northwest Coast peoples. He developed unconventional theories about the peopling of the Americas.
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Sergey Tolstov
1907 - 1976 (69 years)
Sergey Pavlovich Tolstov was a Russian and Soviet archaeologist and ethnographer. Tolstov was the organizer and the first director of the Chorasmian Expedition credited with discovery and investigation of archeological monuments of Khwarezm. He is also the author of the book Old Khwarezm, the seminal work in the field. In 1953, Tolstov was elected the corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
Go to Profile#3061
St. Clair Drake
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
John Gibbs St. Clair Drake was an African-American sociologist and anthropologist whose scholarship and activism led him to document much of the social turmoil of the 1960s, establish some of the first Black Studies programs in American universities, and contribute to the independence movement in Ghana. Drake often wrote about challenges and achievements in race relations as a result of his extensive research.
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José Leite de Vasconcelos
1858 - 1941 (83 years)
José Leite de Vasconcelos Cardoso Pereira de Melo was a Portuguese ethnographer, archaeologist and prolific author who wrote extensively on Portuguese philology and prehistory. He was the founder and the first director of the Portuguese National Museum of Archaeology.
Go to Profile#3063
Oscar Lewis
1914 - 1970 (56 years)
Oscar Lewis, born Lefkowitz was an American anthropologist. He is best known for his vivid depictions of the lives of slum dwellers and his argument that a cross-generational culture of poverty transcends national boundaries. Lewis contended that the cultural similarities occurred because they were "common adaptations to common problems" and that "the culture of poverty is both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor classes to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individualistic, capitalistic society." He won the 1967 U.S. National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Rel...
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Wilhelm Schmidt
1868 - 1954 (86 years)
Wilhelm Schmidt SVD was a German-Austrian Catholic priest, linguist and ethnologist. He presided over the Fourth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences that was held at Vienna in 1952.
Go to Profile#3065
Raymond Williams
1921 - 1988 (67 years)
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contributed to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books were sold in UK editions alone, and there are many translations available. His work laid foundations for the field of cultural studies and cultural materialism.
Go to Profile#3066
Felix von Luschan
1854 - 1924 (70 years)
Felix Ritter von Luschan was a medical doctor, anthropologist, explorer, archaeologist and ethnographer born in the Austrian Empire. Life Luschan was born the son of a lawyer in Hollabrunn, Lower Austria, and attended the Akademisches Gymnasium in Vienna. After leaving school he studied medicine at the University of Vienna and anthropology in Paris, with an emphasis on craniometry. After he gained his doctorate in 1878, he was an army doctor in Austro-Hungarian occupied Bosnia and, together with the British archaeologist Arthur Evans, travelled through Dalmatia, Montenegro and Albania. From 1...
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Alfred Irving Hallowell
1892 - 1974 (82 years)
Alfred Irving "Pete" Hallowell was an award-winning American anthropologist, archaeologist and businessman. Early life and education Hallowell was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania receiving his B.S. degree in 1914. It was assumed he would follow a career in business but Hallowell developed interests in sociology and became first a social worker for the Family Society.
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Bernardino de Sahagún
1499 - 1590 (91 years)
Bernardino de Sahagún, OFM was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participated in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain . Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, he journeyed to New Spain in 1529. He learned Nahuatl and spent more than 50 years in the study of Aztec beliefs, culture and history. Though he was primarily devoted to his missionary task, his extraordinary work documenting indigenous worldview and culture has earned him the title as “the first anthropologist." He also contributed to the description of Nahuatl, the imperial language of the Aztec Empire.
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Arnold van Gennep
1873 - 1957 (84 years)
Arnold van Gennep, in full Charles-Arnold Kurr van Gennep was a Dutch–German-French ethnographer and folklorist. Biography He was born in Ludwigsburg, in the Kingdom of Württemberg . Since his parents were never married, Van Gennep adopted his Dutch mother's name, "van Gennep". When he was six, he and his mother moved to Lyons, France, where she married a French doctor who moved the family to Savoy.
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Juan Comas
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Juan Comas Camps was a Spanish-Mexican anthropologist, notable for his critical work on race, and his participation in drafting the UNESCO statement on race. He fled Spain during the regime of Franco, and spent the rest of his life in Mexico. He was a professor of physical anthropology at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico between 1940 and 1943, and at the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1955 until his death.
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Alexander Lesser
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Alexander Lesser was an American anthropologist. Working in the Boasian tradition of American cultural anthropology, he adopted critical stances of several ideas of his fellow Boasians, and became known as an original and critical thinker, pioneering several ideas that later became widely accepted within anthropology.
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Georges Bataille
1897 - 1962 (65 years)
Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille was a French philosopher and intellectual working in philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and history of art. His writing, which included essays, novels, and poetry, explored such subjects as eroticism, mysticism, surrealism, and transgression. His work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including poststructuralism.
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Edgar Lee Hewett
1865 - 1946 (81 years)
Edgar Lee Hewett was an American archaeologist and anthropologist whose focus was the Native American communities of New Mexico and the southwestern United States. He is best known for his role in gaining passage of the Antiquities Act, a pioneering piece of legislation for the conservation movement; as the founder and first director of the Museum of New Mexico; and as the first president of the New Mexico Normal School, now New Mexico Highlands University.
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Burleigh B. Gardner
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Burleigh Bradford Gardner was an American social anthropologist, and Founding Chairman of Social Research Inc. of Chicago, Illinois, known for its pioneering work in the field of consumer motivation research and quantitative marketing research.
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Alexander Ecker
1816 - 1887 (71 years)
Johann Alexander Ecker was a German anthropologist and anatomist, born in Freiburg im Breisgau. He was the son of Johann Matthias Alexander Ecker , a professor at the University of Freiburg. Biography He studied medicine at the University of Freiburg as a pupil of Karl Heinrich Baumgärtner. He received his medical doctorate at Freiburg in 1837. In 1840 he started work as a prosector at the University of Heidelberg, where during the following year, he became a privat-docent. At Heidelberg, his influences included Friedrich Tiedemann, Friedrich August Benjamin Puchelt, Theodor Ludwig Wilhelm Bischoff and Maximilian Joseph von Chelius.
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Ross T. Christensen
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Ross Taylor Christensen was an American archeologist. Biography Christensen was born in Preston, Idaho to Henry Oswald Christensen and Nettie Lavina Taylor Christensen. His father was a teacher at what is today Brigham Young University-Idaho. From 1939-1942 Christensen served as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Brazil. He later served in the United States military in the European Theatre of World War II. In 1947 he married Ruth Richardson Morris in the Mesa LDS Temple. They had two sons and seven daughters.
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Dong Tichen
1931 - 1966 (35 years)
Dong Tichen or Ti-Chen Tung was a Chinese anthropologist and educator. He was a pioneer in physical anthropology in China. He was educated in Fu Jen Catholic University in the 1940s, then attended Moscow State University in 1957. In the 1960s, He was invited to Fudan University by Wu Dingliang. Dong, Wu, and Liu Xian created the first department of physical anthropology at Fudan University in mainland China.
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Dorothy D. Lee
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Dorothy Demetracopolou Lee was an American anthropologist, author and philosopher of cultural anthropology. Born in Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, she was Greek by birth and was educated, married, and raised her four children in the U.S. Her husband was American philosopher Otis Hamilton Lee . Her children were Anna Maud Lee, Mary H. Lee, Ronald and Sabra.
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Annie Smith Peck
1850 - 1935 (85 years)
Annie Smith Peck was an American mountaineer and adventurer. The northern peak of the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca mountain chain, Huascarán was named Cumbre Aña Peck in Peck's honor. She was an ardent suffragist and noted speaker. She lectured extensively for many years throughout the world, and wrote four books encouraging travel and exploration.
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Oswald Menghin
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Oswald Menghin was an Austrian Prehistorian and University professor. He established an international reputation before the War, while he was professor at the University of Vienna. His work on race and culture was serviceable to the German nationalist movement of the 1930s. At the time of the Anschluss he served as Minister of Education in the cabinet formed by Arthur Seyß-Inquart. He avoided indictment as a war criminal and resumed his career in Argentina after the war.
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Franz Baermann Steiner
1909 - 1952 (43 years)
Franz Baermann Steiner was an ethnologist, polymath, essayist, aphorist, and poet. He was familiar, apart from German, Yiddish, Czech, Greek and Latin, with both classical and modern Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Armenian, Persian, Malay, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, six other Slavic languages, Scandinavian languages and Dutch.
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Panchanan Mitra
1892 - 1936 (44 years)
Dr. Panchanan Mitra was the professor of anthropology in India succeeded by Sarat Chandra Mitra and B.S.Guha. He was among the first Indians to study at Yale University and conducted several anthropological expeditions in India and abroad. He was the head of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Calcutta and is most known for his works Prehistoric India , History of Ameri-can Anthropology and Indo-Poly-nesian Memories . He was awarded the Fellowship of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland and today the Asiatic Society awards an annual 'Panchanan Mi...
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Federico Halbherr
1857 - 1930 (73 years)
Federico Halbherr was an Italian archaeologist and epigrapher, known for his excavations on Crete. In particular, he is known for his excavations of the Minoan palace at Phaistos and the Minoan town of Hagia Triada. A contemporary, friend, and advisor of Arthur Evans, he began excavating at Phaistos before Evans began excavating at Knossos. Some of his work was funded by the Archaeological Institute of America.
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Otto Benndorf
1838 - 1907 (69 years)
Otto Benndorf was a German-Austrian archaeologist who was a native of Greiz, Principality of Reuss-Greiz. He was the father of physicist Hans Benndorf . Life and career He studied under Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker , Otto Jahn and Friedrich Ritschl at the University of Bonn. Later, he worked as an instructor at Schulpforta, where one of his students was Friedrich Nietzsche. From 1864 to 1868 he was a member of a scientific expedition that toured Italy , Sicily, Greece and Asia Minor. In 1868 he obtained his habilitation at the University of Göttingen under the guidance of Friedrich Wieseler .
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Hans Seger
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Hans Seger was a German prehistorian. Life Hans Seger studied Classical Archeology and Art History in Breslau with August Rossbach, Robert Vischer, and August Schmarsow and in Munich with Heinrich von Brunn, Richard Muther, and Berthold Riehl. In December 1892 he succeeded Eugen von Czihaks as director of the Museum schlesischer Alterthümer in Breslau. He habilitated in 1907 and worked as honorary professor at the University of Breslau. His specialization was the prehistory of Silesia. He excavated a Neolithic settlement near Jordansmühl, which gave rise to the term Jordansmühl Culture. His ...
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Petro Yefymenko
1835 - 1908 (73 years)
Petro Yefymenko , was a Ukrainian ethnographer and historian, statistician by profession. Life and work Petro Yefymenko studied at Kharkiv University until his expulsion and Moscow University . As a student, he belonged to secret student societies, including Kharkiv-Kyiv Secret Society .
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Henri Cordier
1849 - 1925 (76 years)
Henri Cordier was a French linguist, historian, ethnographer, author, editor and Orientalist. He was President of the Société de Géographie in Paris. Cordier was a prominent figure in the development of East Asian and Central Asian scholarship in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. Though he had little actual knowledge of the Chinese language, Cordier had a particularly strong impact on the development of Chinese scholarship, and was a mentor of the noted French sinologist Édouard Chavannes.
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T. E. Lawrence
1888 - 1935 (47 years)
Thomas Edward Lawrence was a British archaeologist, army officer, diplomat, and writer who became renowned for his role in the Arab Revolt and the Sinai and Palestine Campaign against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. The breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to describe them vividly in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia, a title used for the 1962 film based on his wartime activities.
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William Jones
1871 - 1909 (38 years)
William Jones was a Native American anthropologist of the Fox nation. Alternate name: Megasiáwa . Born in Indian Territory on March 28, 1871, after studying at Hampton Institute he graduated from Phillips Academy and went on to receive his B.A. from Harvard. When in 1904 he received his PhD from Columbia University as a student of Franz Boas, he became the fourth person to receive a PhD in linguistic anthropology, twelfth person to receive a PhD in anthropology, and first Native American PhD in anthropology.
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John Garstang
1876 - 1956 (80 years)
John Garstang was a British archaeologist of the Ancient Near East, especially Egypt, Sudan, Anatolia and the southern Levant. He was the younger brother of Professor Walter Garstang, FRS, a marine biologist and zoologist. Garstang is considered a pioneer in the development of scientific practices in archaeology as he kept detailed records of his excavations with extensive photographic records, which was a comparatively rare practice in early 20th-century archaeology.
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Adolf Furtwängler
1853 - 1907 (54 years)
Johann Michael Adolf Furtwängler was a German archaeologist, teacher, art historian and museum director. He was the father of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and grandfather of the German archaeologist Andreas Furtwängler.
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E. L. Peters
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Emrys Lloyd Peters was a British social anthropologist. Life Peters grew up in Merthyr Tydfil and studied Geography and History at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, graduating immediately before the Second World War. He served in the Royal Air Force from 1939 to 1945, primarily in photographic reconnaissance in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. In 1945 he enrolled at Downing College, Cambridge, to study under E. E. Evans-Pritchard, following him to Oxford in 1947. Between 1948 and 1950 Peters conducted fieldwork among the Bedouin of Cyrenaica. Later in the 1950s and 1960s he spent further periods of fieldwork in Lebanon and Libya.
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Mikhail Andreyev
1873 - 1948 (75 years)
Mikhail Stepanovich Andreyev was a Russian-Uzbek and Soviet orientalist, cultural researcher of Central Asia, ethnographer, linguist, and archaeologist. He was initially supervised by Vladimir Nalivkin, and was the teacher of Olga Alexandrovna Sukhareva. He was a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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Howard Crosby Butler
1872 - 1922 (50 years)
Howard Crosby Butler was an American archaeologist. Butler graduated from Princeton University, and later pursued special studies at the Columbia School of Architecture and at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome and in Athens. In 1899, 1904, and 1909, he was at the head of archaeological expeditions in Syria. He became professor of the history of architecture at Princeton in 1905. Turkey's unsolicited request that he oversee the excavation of Sardis represented a rare distinction for an American and a Christian. He directed five seasons of archaeological work at Sardis from 1910 to 1914, interrupted by the World War I.
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Nelson Annandale
1876 - 1924 (48 years)
Thomas Nelson Annandale CIE FRSE was a British zoologist, entomologist, anthropologist, and herpetologist. He was the founding director of the Zoological Survey of India. Life The eldest son of Thomas Annandale, the regius professor of clinical surgery at the University of Edinburgh. His maternal grandfather was a publisher, William Nelson. Thomas was educated at Rugby School, Balliol College, Oxford where he studied under Ray Lankester and E. B. Tylor , and at the University of Edinburgh where he studied anthropology, receiving a D.Sc. . As a student he made visits to Iceland and the Faeroe Islands.
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Philip Drucker
1911 - 1982 (71 years)
Philip Drucker was an American anthropologist and archaeologist who specialized in the Native American peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America. He also played an important part in the early excavations under Matthew Stirling of the Smithsonian of the Olmec culture in Mexico, especially the site of La Venta.
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James Henry Breasted
1865 - 1935 (70 years)
James Henry Breasted was an American archaeologist, Egyptologist, and historian. After completing his PhD at the University of Berlin in 1894, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. In 1901 he became director of the Haskell Oriental Museum at the university, where he continued to concentrate on Egypt. In 1905 Breasted was promoted to full professor, and held the first chair in Egyptology and Oriental History in the United States.
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Gilbert Livingston Wilson
1869 - 1930 (61 years)
Gilbert Livingston Wilson was an American ethnographer and a Presbyterian minister. He and his brother recorded the lives of three Hidatsa family members; Buffalo Bird Woman, her brother Henry Wolf Chief, and her son Edward Goodbird. Wilson's extensive and detailed writings remain an important source of information for historians and anthropologists, as well as the Hidatsa people.
Go to Profile#3099
John Marshall
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
Sir John Hubert Marshall was an English archaeologist who was Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1902 to 1928. He oversaw the excavations of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, two of the main cities that comprise the Indus Valley Civilisation.
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Paul Arndt
1865 - 1937 (72 years)
Paul Julius Arndt was a German classical archaeologist born in Dresden. He studied classical art under Johannes Overbeck at the University of Leipzig, and classical archeology with Heinrich Brunn at the University of Munich. In 1887 he graduated with a dissertation on Greek vases, afterwards working as an assistant to Heinrich Brunn in Munich. Following Brunn's death in 1894, Arndt became an assistant to Adolf Furtwängler , and was responsible for edition of "Denkmäler griechischer und römischer Skulptur".
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