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,
#3101
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#3103
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.
Go to Profile#3104
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.
Go to Profile#3105
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.
Go to Profile#3106
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.
Go to Profile#3108
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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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