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,
#3151
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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Roderick Urwick Sayce
1890 - 1970 (80 years)
Roderick Urwick Sayce was a social anthropologist and geographer who was President of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Vice-President of the Powysland Club and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Royal Anthropological Institute and Museums Association.
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Annie Ure
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Annie Dunman Ure was an English archaeologist, who from 1922 to 1976 was the first Curator of the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology. She and her husband Percy Ure conducted important excavations at Ritsona in Boeotia, Greece, making her one of the first female archaeologists to lead an excavation in Greece.
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Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt
1892 - 1965 (73 years)
Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt was a German physical anthropologist who classified humanity into races. His study in the classification of human races made him one of the leading racial theorists of Nazi Germany.
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Kenan Erim
1929 - 1990 (61 years)
Kenan Tevfik Erim was a Turkish archaeologist who excavated from 1961 until his death at the site of Aphrodisias in Turkey. Life Erim's father, Tevfik Erim, was a diplomat who was a member of the Political Section of the Secretariat of the League of Nations in the 1930s and of the Turkish delegation to the United Nations in the 1950s. Kenan Erim was raised and educated in Geneva, Switzerland, and undertook university studies in the United States. He took his first degree in Classical archaeology at New York University in 1953, and his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1958.
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Edward Chiera
1885 - 1933 (48 years)
Edward Chiera was an Italian-American archaeologist, Assyriologist, and scholar of religions and linguistics. Born in Rome, Italy, in 1885, Chiera trained as a theologian at the Crozer Theological Seminary . He completed his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania . He was faculty of the University of Pennsylvania until 1927, at which time he joined the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
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Georges Marçais
1876 - 1962 (86 years)
Georges Marçais was a French orientalist, historian, and scholar of Islamic art and architecture who specialized in the architecture of North Africa. Biography He initially trained as a painter and writer but after visiting his brother, William Marçais , an orientalist who directed a school in Algeria, he turned instead to scholarly studies. After writing his thesis on Berbers in North Africa, he was a professor at the University of Algiers and wrote numerous books and articles.
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A. P. Elkin
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Adolphus Peter Elkin was an Anglican clergyman, an influential Australian anthropologist during the mid twentieth century and a proponent of the assimilation of Indigenous Australians. Early life Elkin was born at West Maitland, New South Wales. His father, Reuben Elkin, was an English Jew and worked as a salesman; his mother, Ellen Wilhelmina Bower, was a seamstress of German ancestry. His parents were divorced in 1901, his mother died the next year and he was then brought up by his maternal grandparents as an Anglican. He went to school at Singleton and at Maitland East Boys' High School.
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Percy Ure
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
Percy Neville Ure M.A. was the University of Reading's first Professor of Classics and the founder of the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology at Reading. His wife and former pupil at Reading, Annie Ure , was the museum's first Curator from 1922 until her death. The Ures were experts on Greek and Egyptian antiquities, and particularly Greek ceramics. With Ronald M. Burrows, they undertook important excavations at Rhitsona in Boeotia, Greece.
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William Homan Thorpe
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
William Homan Thorpe FRS was Professor of Animal Ethology at the University of Cambridge, and a significant British zoologist, ethologist and ornithologist. Together with Nikolaas Tinbergen, Patrick Bateson and Robert Hinde, Thorpe contributed to the growth and acceptance of behavioural biology in Great Britain.
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Hilma Granqvist
1890 - 1972 (82 years)
Hilma Natalia Granqvist was a Swedish-speaking Finnish anthropologist who conducted long field studies of Palestinians. She was a student of Edvard Westermarck. Studies In the 1920s Granqvist arrived at the village of Artas, just outside Bethlehem in the then British Mandate of Palestine as part of her research on the women of the Old Testament. She had gone to Palestine "in order to find the Jewish ancestors of Scripture". What she found instead was a Palestinian people with a distinct culture and way of life. She therefore changed the focus of her research to a full investigation of the customs, habits and ways of thinking of the people of that village.
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Yulian Bromley
1921 - 1990 (69 years)
Yulian Vladimirovich Bromley was a Soviet and Russian anthropologist who gained an international recognition. He became Director of the Institute of Ethnography at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1966 and held the post until 1989.
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Alison Hingston Quiggin
1874 - 1971 (97 years)
Alison Hingston Quiggin was a British anthropologist at the University of Cambridge and the author of the much reprinted A Survey of Primitive Money: The Beginnings of Currency . Education and career Hingston studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1899 to 1902. She went on to become a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Cambridge University.
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Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
1863 - 1944 (81 years)
Katharine Elizabeth Dopp was one of the foremost American educators at the turn of the 20th century, and one of the first to advocate the involvement of business in education. She wrote a series of textbooks on anthropology and economics which were widely used in the public schools of Wisconsin, Illinois and Utah, as well as nationally circulated studies on the same subjects, and children's books.
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Walther Gothan
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Walther Ulrich Eduard Friedrich Gothan was a German paleobotanist, known for his studies of Carboniferous flora. He studied mining and geology at the mining academies in Clausthal and Berlin, and botany and chemistry at the University of Berlin. In 1905 he received his doctorate from the University of Jena with the thesis, Zur Anatomie lebender und fossiler gymnospermen Hölzer.
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George Henry Chase
1874 - 1952 (78 years)
George Henry Chase was an American archaeologist and educator. From 1916 through 1945 he was the first John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology at Harvard University. Biography George Henry Chase was born in Lynn, Massachusetts on June 13, 1874. He graduated from Harvard University in 1896.
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Jaakko Suolahti
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Jaakko Suolahti was a Finnish classical scholar and historian Suolahti was one of the leading classicists during his time and reached international recognition within the areas of political- and social culture in the Roman Republic.
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Dorothy Keur
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Dorothy L. Keur was an American cultural anthropologist specializing in Navajo and Netherlands cultures. She was a professor at Hunter College and was the president of the American Ethnological Society from 1974 to 1979.
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Philip Loring
Philip Allen Loring is a human ecologist and author. Loring is currently the Arrell Chair in Food, Policy, and Society at the Arrell Food Institute at University of Guelph. He is known for his work on Arctic food security, natural resource conflict, and regenerative food systems. Loring authored Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology , and is the host of multiple academic podcasts.
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Themistocles Zammit
1864 - 1935 (71 years)
Sir Themistocles "Temi" Zammit was a Maltese archaeologist and historian, professor of chemistry, medical doctor, researcher and writer. He served as Rector of the Royal University of Malta and first Director of the National Museum of Archaeology in his native city, Valletta.
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Winifred Needler
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Winifred Needler DCL was a German-born Canadian Egyptologist at the Museum of Ontario Archaeology, where she rose to be keeper of the Near Eastern Collections and later curator of the Egyptian Department. She also taught at the University of Toronto.
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Vera Mae Green
1928 - 1982 (54 years)
Vera Mae Green was an American anthropologist, educator, and scholar, who made major contributions in the fields of Caribbean studies, interethnic studies, black family studies and the study of poverty and the poor. She was one of the first African-American Caribbeanists and the first to focus on Dutch Caribbean culture. She developed a "methodology for the study of African American Anthropology" that acknowledged the diversity among and within black families, communities and cultures. Her other areas of research included mestizos in Mexico and communities in India and Israel. "[C]ommitted to...
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J. D. Unwin
1895 - 1936 (41 years)
Joseph Daniel Unwin MC was an English ethnologist and social anthropologist at Oxford University and Cambridge University. Contributions to anthropology In Sex and Culture , Unwin studied 80 primitive tribes and six known civilizations through 5,000 years of history. He claimed there was a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe. Aldous Huxley described Sex and Culture as "a work of the highest importance" in his literature.
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Wilhelm Kraiker
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Wilhelm Kraiker was a German classical archaeologist. Life Born in Frankfurt, in 1927 Kraiker received his doctorate at Heidelberg University under Ludwig Curtius. In 1928/29 he received a , afterwards he was assistant at the Heidelberg University as well as at the German Archaeological Institute in Athens and Rome; on 12 July 1937 he habilitated in Heidelberg. From June 1941 to September 1944, Kraiker worked in Athens during the German occupation in World War II for the newly formed Kunstschutz, which was subordinate to the Army High Command Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner, and was in charge from July 1942.
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Richard MacGillivray Dawkins
1871 - 1955 (84 years)
Richard MacGillivray Dawkins FBA was a British archaeologist. He was associated with the British School at Athens, of which he was Director between 1906 and 1913. Early life Richard MacGillivray Dawkins was the son of the Royal Navy officer Rear-Admiral Richard Dawkins of Stoke Gabriel and his wife Mary Louisa McGillivray, only surviving daughter of Simon McGillivray. He was educated at Marlborough College and at King's College, London where he trained as an electrical engineer.
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Rusiate Nayacakalou
1927 - 1972 (45 years)
Rusiate Nayacakalou was a Fijian social anthropologist. His work illustrated the ways in which anthropological reflexivity can inspire moral critique from its subjects when a critical stance toward tradition is mistaken as an attack on indigenous sovereignty.
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Harriet Boyd Hawes
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Harriet Ann Boyd Hawes was a pioneering American archaeologist, nurse, relief worker, and professor. She is best known as the discoverer and first director of Gournia, one of the first archaeological excavations to uncover a Minoan settlement and palace on the Aegean island of Crete. She was also the second person to have the honor of the Agnes Hoppin Memorial Fellowship bestowed upon her, and the very first female archeologist to speak at the Archaeological Institute of America.
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Carlo Anti
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Carlo Anti was an archaeologist and an officer in the army in the First World War and until 1922. Archaeologist Born in Villafranca di Verona, Anti studied at Verona and Bologna, where he graduated with Gherardo Ghirardini. Thereafter he transferred to Rome to study at the Italian Archaeological School and then to be an inspector at the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography. During his years studying in Rome he married his wife, Clelia Vinciguerra, also a cum at the school. Among his teachers at this time, he remembered Emanuel Löwy, a great Austrian archaeologist active in R...
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R. D. Banerji
1885 - 1930 (45 years)
Rakhal Das Banerji, also Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay , was an Indian archaeologist and an officer of the Archeological Survey of India . In 1919, he became the second ASI officer deputed to survey the site of Mohenjo-daro and returned there in the 1922-23 season. He was the first person to propose the remote antiquity of the site—which he did in a letter to Marshall in 1923—and in effect of the Harappan culture. After leaving the ASI, he held the Manindra Chandra Nandy professorship of Ancient Indian History and Culture at the Banaras Hindu University from 1928 until his premature death in 1930...
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Alice Braunlich
1888 - 1989 (101 years)
Alice Freda Braunlich was an American classical philologist. Life Braunlich was born to parents of German extraction, Emilie Hedwig Hoering Braunlich and the physician Henry Uchtorf Braunlich, in Davenport, Iowa on February 1, 1888. Her father's income made it possible for Alice to study at the University of Chicago, where she obtained a bachelor's degree in 1908 and a master's degree in 1909. From 1912 to 1914 she worked as an assistant for William Gardner Hale, professor of Latin. In 1913 she received her Ph.D., with a dissertation on indirect questions in the indicative mood.
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Martín Almagro Basch
1911 - 1984 (73 years)
Martín Almagro Basch was a Spanish archaeologist, historian, and writer. He fought in the Spanish civil war. He was an archaeology specialist, ranging from rock art to classic archaeology. He was a professor of early human history at the University of Madrid and Barcelona, and was Director of the Museo Arqueológico Nacional "MAN" de Madrid between 1968-1981. He directed the first Spanish archeological expedition in Egypt. His contribution in the transfer and rescue of several Egyptians temples was grateful by the Arab Republic with the concession of the Debod temple, actually in Madrid.
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Luc Lacourcière
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Luc Lacourcière, CC was a Quebec writer and ethnographer, who established himself during his lifetime as a leading figure in folklore studies. Trained by Marius Barbeau, he in turn influenced renowned researchers such as linguist Claude Poirier. In 1944, Lacourcière founded the Archives de folklore , which he directed until 1975. Since 1978, a Luc-Lacourcière medal has been awarded every two years.
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Leonhard Schultze-Jena
1872 - 1955 (83 years)
Leonhard Sigmund Friedrich Kuno Klaus Schultze-Jena was a German explorer, zoologist, and anthropologist known for his explorations of German Southwest Africa and New Guinea, as well as for his studies on Mesoamerican languages. During the Herero and Namaqua genocide, Schultze, a witness, took "body parts from fresh native corpses" which according to him was a "welcome addition". He also noted that he could use prisoners for that purpose.
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Eirik Vandvik
1904 - 1953 (49 years)
Eirik Vandvik was professor in literature at the University of Oslo. Vandvik was one of the major interpreters of the ancient Greek and Latin literature, and saw it as his purpose to make these works available to Norwegian literati.
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Paul Kirchhoff
1900 - 1972 (72 years)
Paul Kirchhoff was a German-Mexican anthropologist, most noted for his seminal work in defining and elaborating the culture area of Mesoamerica, a term he coined. Early life and academic career Paul Kirchhoff was born in the German locality of Hörste, in the region of Westphalia. He commenced his undergraduate studies in Protestant theology and comparative religion at the University of Berlin, moving later to Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg. In the mid-1920s he undertook further studies at the University of Leipzig in ethnology and psychology, where he first developed his abiding interest in the indigenous cultures of the Americas.
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Lorna Marshall
1898 - 2002 (104 years)
Lorna Marshall was an anthropologist who in the 1950s, 60s and 70s lived among and wrote about the previously unstudied !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert. Background Marshall was born in Morenci, Arizona territory. She married Laurence Kennedy Marshall in 1926; they had a daughter Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and a son John Kennedy Marshall . Marshall received a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley in 1921 and an MA from Radcliffe College in 1928, and before 1926 worked as an English instructor at Mount Holyoke. Later she took anthropology courses at Harvard University and had a second career as an ethnographer.
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Georg Forster
1754 - 1794 (40 years)
Johann George Adam Forster, also known as Georg Forster , was a German geographer, naturalist, ethnologist, travel writer, journalist and revolutionary. At an early age, he accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, on several scientific expeditions, including James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific. His report of that journey, A Voyage Round the World, contributed significantly to the ethnology of the people of Polynesia and remains a respected work. As a result of the report, Forster, who was admitted to the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-two, came to be considered one of t...
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