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,
#3101
B. Holly Smith
B. Holly Smith is an American biological anthropologist. She is currently a research professor in the Center for Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at The George Washington University. She is also a visiting research professor at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. The majority of her work is concentrated in evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, life history, and dental anthropology.
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Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
1881 - 1955 (74 years)
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, FBA was an English social anthropologist who helped further develop the theory of structural functionalism. Biography Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was born Alfred Reginald Brown in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, England, the second son of Alfred Brown , a manufacturer's clerk, and his wife Hannah . He later changed his last name, by deed poll, to Radcliffe-Brown, Radcliffe being his mother's maiden name. He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge , graduating with first-class honours in the moral sciences tripos. At Trinity College, he was elected Anthony Wilkin student in 1906 and 1909.
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Wilson Dallam Wallis
1886 - 1970 (84 years)
Wilson Dallam Wallis was an American anthropologist. He is remembered for his studies of "primitive" science and religions. Wallis was born in Forest Hill, Maryland. He completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy and law at Dickinson College, and in 1907 went up to Wadham College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, studying Edward Burnett Tylor. He received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1915.
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Louis Leakey
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was a Kenyan-British palaeoanthropologist and archaeologist whose work was important in demonstrating that humans evolved in Africa, particularly through discoveries made at Olduvai Gorge with his wife, fellow palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Having established a programme of palaeoanthropological inquiry in eastern Africa, he also motivated many future generations to continue this scholarly work. Several members of the Leakey family became prominent scholars themselves.
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Victor Turner
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Victor Witter Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as symbolic and interpretive anthropology.
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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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Robert Lowie
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
Robert Harry Lowie was an Austrian-born American anthropologist. An expert on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, he was instrumental in the development of modern anthropology and has been described as "one of the key figures in the history of anthropology".
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Max Gluckman
1911 - 1975 (64 years)
Herman Max Gluckman was a South African and British social anthropologist. He is best known as the founder of the Manchester School of anthropology. Biography and major works Gluckman was born in Johannesburg in 1911. Like many of the other anthropologists he later worked with, he was Jewish. He was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he obtained a BA in 1930. Although he intended to study law, he became interested in anthropology and studied under Winifred Hoernle. He earned the equivalent of an MA at Witwatersrand in 1934 and then received a Rhodes Scholarship to attend E...
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Clyde Kluckhohn
1905 - 1960 (55 years)
Clyde Kluckhohn , was an American anthropologist and social theorist, best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the Navajo and his contributions to the development of theory of culture within American anthropology. During his lifetime, Kluckhohn was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the United States National Academy of Sciences , and the American Philosophical Society .
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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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Solon Toothaker Kimball
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Solon Toothaker Kimball was a noted educator and anthropologist. Kimball was born and raised in Manhattan, Kansas. He graduated from Kansas State University in 1930, then received a master's degree and Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard in 1933 and 1936.
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William Edward Hanley Stanner
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
William Edward Hanley Stanner CMG , often cited as W.E.H. Stanner, was an Australian anthropologist who worked extensively with Indigenous Australians. Stanner had a varied career that also included journalism in the 1930s, military service in World War II, and political advice on colonial policy in Africa and the South Pacific in the post-war period.
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Dorothy Garrod
1892 - 1968 (76 years)
Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod, CBE, FBA was an English archaeologist who specialised in the Palaeolithic period. She held the position of Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1939 to 1952, and was the first woman to hold a chair at either Oxford or Cambridge.
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Lloyd Fallers
1925 - 1974 (49 years)
Lloyd Ashton "Tom" Fallers, Jr. was the A. A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the departments of anthropology and sociology at the University of Chicago. Fallers' work in social and cultural anthropology focused on social stratification and the development of new states in East Africa and Turkey.
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John Caskey
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
John Langdon Caskey was an American archaeologist and classical scholar. He directed the American School of Classical Studies in Athens from 1949 to 1959, and was head of the Classics department at the University of Cincinnati from 1959 to 1979. His career focused on excavations at the ancient settlements of Troy, Lerna, and Keos. Until their marriage ended, he worked with his spouse Elizabeth Caskey who went to excavate on her own after they parted.
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Gladys Reichard
1893 - 1955 (62 years)
Gladys Amanda Reichard was an American anthropologist and linguist. She is considered one of the most important women to have studied Native American languages and cultures in the first half of the twentieth century. She is best known for her studies of three different Native American languages: Wiyot, Coeur d'Alene and Navajo. Reichard was concerned with understanding language variation, and with connections between linguistic principles and underpinnings of religion, culture and context.
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Clellan S. Ford
1909 - 1972 (63 years)
Clellan Stearns Ford was an American anthropologist, best known as Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, and as co-author of the 1951 book Patterns of Sexual Behavior. Biography Clellan Ford was born on July 27, 1909, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was educated at Yale University, where he received the Ph.D. in chemistry in 1931, and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1935. In 1935, Ford spent a year in the Fiji Islands conducting ethnographic field research. The following year, he joined the Institute of Human Relations at Yale, where he co-founded the Cross-Cultural Survey. In 1940, the same ...
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Glynn Isaac
1937 - 1985 (48 years)
Glynn Llywelyn Isaac was a South African archaeologist who specialised in the very early prehistory of Africa, and was one of twin sons born to botanists William Edwyn Isaac and Frances Margaret Leighton. He has been called the most influential Africanist of the last half century, and his papers on human movement and behavior are still cited in studies a quarter of a century later.
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Sophie Bledsoe Aberle
1896 - 1996 (100 years)
Sophie Bledsoe Aberle was an American anthropologist, physician and nutritionist known for her work with Pueblo people. She was one of two women first appointed to the National Science Board. Early life and education Sophie Bledsoe Herrick was born in 1896 to Albert and Clara S. Herrick in Schenectady, New York. Her paternal grandmother and namesake was the writer Sophia Bledsoe Herrick. Sophie was educated at home and had a brief marriage at age 21 to a man surnamed Aberle, which surname she chose to keep. She began attending University of California in Berkeley but switched to Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1923, a master's degree in 1925, and a Ph.D.
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Edward Dozier
1916 - 1971 (55 years)
Edward Pasqual Dozier was a Pueblo Native American anthropologist and linguist who studied Native Americans and the peoples of northern Luzon in the Philippines. He was the first Native American to earn a PhD in anthropology in the United States.
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Richard Goodchild
1918 - 1968 (50 years)
Richard George Goodchild was a British provincial Roman archaeologist. He was one of the pioneers of archaeology in Libya. Education and career Goodchild's interest in archaeology was raised as a schoolboy at Cranleigh School, an independent boarding school in Surrey. From 1936, he attended the University of Oxford to study history. There he got to know the University of Oxford Archaeological Society who undertook excavations in the area around Oxford. During one of these excavations, Goodchild learned, among others, the archaeologist Olwen Brogan and the later pioneer of aerial archaeology, John Bradford .
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Ernest Becker
1924 - 1974 (50 years)
Ernest Becker was an American cultural anthropologist and author of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death. Biography Early life Ernest Becker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrant parents. Serving in the infantry during World War II, he would help liberate a Nazi concentration camp. After he completed his military service, Becker attended Syracuse University in New York. Upon graduation he joined the U.S. Embassy in Paris as an administrative officer.
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Herbert Youtie
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Herbert Chaim Youtie was an American papyrologist. "Youtie raised papyrological research and publication to a new exemplary standard. At the time of his death he was internationally recognized not only as the world's most distinguished interpreter of documentary papyri, the person to whom would-be editors of texts turned first when difficult problems arose, but also as a sage, who combined a mastery of Greek and an unrivalled feel for all aspects of daily life in Greco-Roman Egypt with a philosophical cast of mind and profound human understanding."
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Alfred Bellinger
1893 - 1978 (85 years)
Alfred Raymond Bellinger was an American archaeologist and numismatist. He taught at Yale University and took part in the Dura-Europos excavations and published the book: Dura final report, VI, The coins.
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Ellis Minns
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Sir Ellis Hovell Minns, FBA was a British academic and archaeologist whose studies focused on Eastern Europe. Educated at Charterhouse, he went to Pembroke College, Cambridge studying the Classical tripos including Slavonic and Russian. He lived briefly in Paris before moving to St Petersburg in 1898 to work in the library of the Imperial Archaeological Commission. Returning to Cambridge in 1901 he began lecturing in Classics.
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Câmara Cascudo
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
Luís da Câmara Cascudo was a Brazilian anthropologist, folklorist, journalist, historian, lawyer, and lexicographer. He was born in Natal, Northeast Brazil. He lived his entire life in Natal and dedicated himself to the study of Brazilian culture and he was a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. He was also interested in music and was a co-founder of the Natal Instituto de Música in 1933. The institute of anthropology there now bears his name.
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John Otis Brew
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
John Otis Brew , was an American archaeologist of the American Southwest and director at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Many of his publications are still used today by archaeologists that conduct their work in the American Southwest. J.O. Brew was a titan in the world of archaeology for his attempts to "preserve our archaeological heritage".
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Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann was a German ethnologist who served as Professor of Ethnology at the University of Mainz and Chair of Ethnology at the University of Heidelberg. Biography Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann was born in Düsseldorf, Germany on 1 October 1904. He gained his abitur in Düsseldorf in 1925. Mühlmann subsequently studied anthropology, ethnology and sociology at the universities of Freiburg, Munich, Hamburg and Berlin. Among his teachers were Eugen Fischer at the University of Freiburg. Eugen Fischer, Edmund Husserl, Fritz Lenz, Siegfried Passarge, and Richard Thurnwald. Mühlmann gained his Ph.D.
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John M. Allegro
1923 - 1988 (65 years)
John Marco Allegro was an English archaeologist and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar. He was a populariser of the Dead Sea Scrolls through his books and radio broadcasts. He was the editor of some of the most famous and controversial scrolls published, the pesharim. A number of Allegro's later books, including The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, brought him both popular fame and notoriety, and also complicated his career.
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Vincent Desborough
1914 - 1978 (64 years)
Vincent Robin d'Arba Desborough, FBA, FSA was an English historian and archaeologist. His is credited with discovering the Greek Dark Ages. Life and career Born on 19 July 1914 at Tunbridge Wells, Desborough's father was Latvian and his mother British. He was schooled in France and Switzerland before attending St Augustine's in Ramsgate and Downside School. He then studied classics at New College, Oxford, from 1932, graduating in the second class in 1936. He completed the BLitt at Oxford under Sir John Myres's supervision. In 1937, he was awarded the Macmillan Studentship by the British Schoo...
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Joseph B. Casagrande
1915 - 1982 (67 years)
Joseph Bartholomew Casagrande was an American anthropologist. Early life and education A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, born on February 14, 1915, Casagrande moved with his parents, Louis Bartholomew Casagrande and Alma Hauskee, to Chicago at a young age. When his parents divorced, Casagrande and his mother moved to West Allis, Wisconsin and later Whitefish Bay. After graduating from Whitefish Bay High School as a multisport student athlete, Casagrande earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1938, and completed a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University in 1951.
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Erich Schmidt
1897 - 1964 (67 years)
Erich Friedrich Schmidt was a German and American-naturalized archaeologist, born in Baden-Baden. He specialized in Ancient Near East Archaeology, and became professor emeritus at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. He was also a pioneer in using aerial photography in archaeological research.
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Bernard Ashmole
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Bernard Ashmole, CBE, MC was a British archaeologist and art historian, who specialized in ancient Greek sculpture. He held a number of professorships during his lifetime; Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of London from 1929 to 1948, Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at University of Oxford from 1956 to 1961, and Greek Art and Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen from 1961 to 1963. He was also Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum from 1939 to 1956.
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Erna Gunther
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Erna Gunther was an American anthropologist who taught for many years at the University of Washington in Seattle. Gunther's work on ethnobotany is still extensively consulted today. Biography Gunther graduated from Barnard College in 1919, as a student of Franz Boas, and received her MA in anthropology from Columbia University in 1920, studying under Boas. After graduating, she moved with her husband, Leslie Spier, to the University of Washington in 1921. After leaving for a short period of time with her husband, she returned in 1929. When her husband left in 1930, she stayed at the universi...
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Olwen Brogan
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Lady Olwen Phillis Frances Brogan was a British archaeologist and expert on Roman Libya. She attended University College London and later taught there. She was the author of two monographs, over thirty articles and was a regular reviewer for Antiquaries Journal, Antiquity and Journal of Roman Studies.
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Barbara Myerhoff
1935 - 1985 (50 years)
Barbara Myerhoff was an American anthropologist, filmmaker, and founder of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Throughout her career as an anthropologist, Barbara Myerhoff contributed to major methodological trends which have since become standards of social cultural anthropology. These methods include reflexivity, narrative story telling, and anthropologists' positioning as social activists, commentaries, and critics whose work extends beyond the academy.
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Einar Gjerstad
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Einar Nilson Gjerstad was a Swedish archaeologist. He was most noted for his research of the ancient Mediterranean, particularly known for his work on Cyprus, as well as his studies of early Rome. Biography Gjerstad studied at Uppsala University, where he earned a bachelor's degree. 1920, fil.mag. 1921, fil.lic. 1923, and received his doctorate in 1926. In 1922 he was an assistant at excavations in Asine under Axel W. Persson , professor of classical archaeology and ancient history at Uppsala University. From 1926 until 1935 he was professor of classical archaeology and ancient history at Up...
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Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin was an award-winning anthropologist, folklorist, and ethnohistorian. Her research and directorship of the Great Lakes-Ohio Valley Research Project at Indiana University has been used to backup Native Americans during court cases with the US government over treaty claims.
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Matthias Johann Eisen
1857 - 1934 (77 years)
Matthias Johann Eisen was an Estonian folklorist and in 1920–1927 served as the Professor of Folk Poetry at University of Tartu. Eisen is most known for his very thorough collection and a systematic typology of Estonian folk tales, totalling over 90,000 pages.
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Jack Herbert Driberg
1888 - 1946 (58 years)
Jack Herbert Driberg was a British anthropologist. He was a part of the Uganda Protectorate and published The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda in 1923. Personal life and education Driberg was born in April 1888. He attended Lancing College. He also attended Hertford College. He died on 5 February 1946.
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Neil Judd
1887 - 1976 (89 years)
Neil Merton Judd was an American archaeologist who studied under both Byron Cummings and Edgar Lee Hewett. He was the long-term curator of archaeology at the United States National Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution. He is noted for his discovery and excavation of ruins left by the Ancestral Pueblo People of the Four Corners area, especially sites located within Chaco Canyon, a region located within the now-arid San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico. He headed the first federally backed archeological expeditions sent to Chaco Canyon, excavating the key ruins of Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo del Arroyo.
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Spyridon Marinatos
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Spyridon Nikolaou Marinatos was a Greek archaeologist who specialised in the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations. He is best known for the excavation of the Minoan site of Akrotiri on Santorini, which he conducted between 1967 and 1974. A recipient of several honours in Greece and abroad, he was considered one of the most important Greek archaeologists of his day.
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Manuel Gómez-Moreno Martínez
1870 - 1970 (100 years)
Manuel Gómez-Moreno Martínez , was a Spanish archaeologist and historian. Biography Martinez was born 21 February 1870 in Granada, Spain. He is the son of noted painter and amateur archaeologist, Manuel Gómez-Moreno González and Dolores Martínez Almirón.
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Kenneth de Burgh Codrington
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Kenneth de Burgh Codrington was a British archaeologist and art historian of India who was Keeper of the Indian Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum and Professor of Indian Archaeology at the University of London .
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Roald H. Fryxell
1934 - 1974 (40 years)
Roald Hilding Fryxell was an American educator, geologist and archaeologist. He was a Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University and pioneer in the interdisciplinary field of geoarchaeology, with a career that involved work on monumental projects in North America and even outer space.
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Luis Pericot Garcia
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Luis Pericot Garcia was a Spanish archaeologist and historian, specializing in prehistory. He was President of the PanAfrican Archaeological Association from 1963 to 1967. He was a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
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Charles Farwell Edson Jr.
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
Charles Farwell Edson Jr. was an American scholar of Ancient History. Edson was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1905 as the son of poet and musician Charles Farwell Edson and social activist and feminist Katherine Philips Edson, and the great nephew of prominent Chicago businessman John V. Farwell and Senator Charles B. Farwell. Edson received the degree of A.B. in Classics from Stanford University in 1929 . He went on to earn his Ph.D. in History at Harvard University in 1939 with a dissertation entitled “Five Studies in Macedonian History" directed by Professor William Scott Ferguson . ...
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Reo Fortune
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Reo Franklin Fortune was a New Zealand-born social anthropologist. Originally trained as a psychologist, Fortune was a student of some of the major theorists of British and American social anthropology including Alfred Cort Haddon, Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. He lived an international life, holding various academic and government positions: in China, at Lingnan University from 1937 to 1939; in Toledo, Ohio, USA from 1940 to 1941; at the University of Toronto, from 1941 to 1943; in Burma, as government anthropologist, from 1946 to 1947; and finally, at Cambridge University...
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Felix A. Chami
1900 - Present (126 years)
Felix A. Chami is an archaeologist from Tanzania. He is a professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, focusing on East African coastal archaeology. Dr. Chami discovered, on the island of Mafia and Juani, artifacts that revealed East Africa as being integral to the Indian Ocean trade. Chami earned a first degree in sociology from the University of Dar es Salaam in 1986, a master's degree in anthropology from Brown University in 1988 and a Ph.D. in archaeology from Uppsala University in 1994.
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John Percival Droop
1882 - 1963 (81 years)
John Percival Droop was a British classical archaeologist of Dutch descent. After attending Marlborough College and Trinity College, Cambridge, Droop became a student of the British School at Athens, where he excavated at Sparta, in Thessaly, on Milos and on Crete. He later became a full member of the BSA.
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