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,
#3201
Alexander Khakhanov
1864 - 1912 (48 years)
Aleksandr Solomonovich Khakhanov born Aleksandre Khakhanashvili was a Georgian-Russian historian, archaeologist, and one of the most acclaimed scholars of Georgian literature. He was born in Gori, Georgia, then part of Imperial Russia, and studied at Tbilisi . Having graduated from Moscow University in 1888, he delivered lectures on Georgian language and literature at Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages since 1889 and at Moscow University since 1900. He authored numerous works on Georgian history and literature, including the resonant Очерки по истории грузинской словесности , published in Russian from 1895 to 1907.
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Dimitri Baramki
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Dimitri Constantine Baramki, often styled D. C. Baramki , was a Palestinian archaeologist who served as chief archaeologist at the Department of Antiquities of the Government of Mandatory Palestine from 1938 to 1948. From 1952 until his retirement, he was the curator of the Archaeological Museum at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, where he served as a professor of archaeology.
Go to Profile#3203
Thomas Dempster
1579 - 1625 (46 years)
Thomas Dempster was a Scottish scholar and historian. Born into the aristocracy in Aberdeenshire, which comprises regions of both the Scottish highlands and the Scottish lowlands, he was sent abroad as a youth for his education. The Dempsters were Catholic in an increasingly Protestant country and had a reputation for being quarrelsome. Thomas' brother James, outlawed for an attack on his father, spent some years as a pirate in the northern islands, escaped by volunteering for military service in the Low Countries and was drawn and quartered there for insubordination. Thomas' father lost the ...
Go to Profile#3204
Joseph George Cumming
1812 - 1868 (56 years)
Joseph George Cumming, MA Cantab., was an English geologist and archaeologist. His major works concerned the geology and history of the Isle of Man. Biography Born at Matlock in Derbyshire where his mother and father ran the Old Bath Hotel at Matlock Bath. Cumming was educated at Oakham School, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, taking the degree of MA, and entering holy orders in 1835. Joseph's elder cousin, James was Professor of Chemistry in Cambridge from 1815.
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Francis H. Snow
1840 - 1908 (68 years)
Francis Huntington Snow was an American naturalist and educator. He spent more than forty years at the University of Kansas, first as a professor of natural history and then as chancellor. He was interested in several fields of science including botany, ornithology and geology but his primary focus was entomology. He was well-known as a field naturalist, based on 26 years of field collecting trips that he organized and led throughout Kansas, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. During these excursions, he and his students collected a quarter-million insect specimens representing some 21,...
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Charles Pickering Bowditch
1842 - 1921 (79 years)
Charles Pickering Bowditch was an American financier, archaeologist, cryptographer and linguistics scholar who specialized in Mayan epigraphy. Bowditch was born in Boston into the Massachusetts Bowditch family of mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch, his grandfather, and physiologist Henry Pickering Bowditch, his brother, son of Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch and Lucy Orme Nichols. He received his undergraduate degree in 1863 and his master's in 1866, both from Harvard University. During the American Civil War he served as an officer in the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a colored regiment,...
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Charles Lenormant
1802 - 1859 (57 years)
Charles Lenormant was a French archaeologist. Biography After pursuing his studies at the Lycée Charlemagne and the Lycée Napoléon, he took up law, but a visit to Italy and Sicily made him an enthusiastic archaeologist. In 1825 he was named sub-inspector of fine arts and a few months later married Amelia Syvoct, niece and adopted daughter of the celebrated Mme Récamier. He visited Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and accompanied Jean-François Champollion to Egypt in July 1828, where he devoted himself to the study of architectural works.
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Friedrich Blass
1843 - 1907 (64 years)
Friedrich Blass was a German classical scholar. Biography After studying at Göttingen and Bonn from 1860 to 1863, Blass lectured at several gymnasia and at the University of Königsberg. In 1876 he was appointed extraordinary professor of classical philology at Kiel, and ordinary professor in 1881. In 1892 he accepted a professorship at Halle, where he later died.
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Caspar Reuvens
1793 - 1835 (42 years)
Caspar Jacob Christiaan Reuvens was a Dutch historian and archaeologist. He was the founding director of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, the world's first ever professor of archaeology , and conducted the first excavations at the Roman provincial site Forum Hadriani in the Netherlands.
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Ross Gilmore Marvin
1880 - 1908 (28 years)
Ross Gilmore Marvin was an American explorer who took part in Robert Peary's 1905–1906 and 1908–1909 expeditions to the Arctic. It was initially believed that Marvin drowned during the second expedition, but an Inuit member of the expedition later stated he shot and killed Marvin.
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John Haskell Hewitt
1835 - 1920 (85 years)
John Haskell Hewitt was an American classical scholar and educator, notable for serving as acting president of Williams College from 1901 to 1902. Born in Preston, Connecticut, to Charles Hewitt and Eunice , Hewitt entered Yale University in 1855, initially intending to study law. While at Yale he befriended Franklin Carter, a relationship that would prove beneficial in later years. After graduating with an A.B. in 1859, Hewitt then earned an advanced degree from the Yale Divinity School in 1863. He served as a librarian at Yale's Brothers in Unity Library until 1865, until he accepted a position teaching Latin and Greek at Olivet College.
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Gustav Körte
1852 - 1917 (65 years)
Gustav Körte was a German classical archaeologist. He was the brother of philologist Alfred Körte and surgeon Werner Körte . Körte was born in Berlin. He studied classical philology and archaeology at the University of Göttingen, then continued his education with Heinrich Brunn at Munich . From 1875, he performed research in Italy and Greece, where he worked was an assistant at the German Archaeological Institute in Athens .
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Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard Gerhard
1795 - 1867 (72 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard Gerhard was a German archaeologist. He was co-founder and secretary of the first international archaeological society. Biography Gerhard was born at Posen, and was educated at Breslau and Berlin. The reputation he acquired by his Lectiones Apollonianae led soon afterwards to his being appointed professor at the gymnasium of Posen. On resigning that office in 1819, on account of weakness of the eyes, he went in 1822 to Rome, where he remained for fifteen years.
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Attilio Degrassi
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Attilio Degrassi was an archeologist and pioneering Italian scholar of Latin epigraphy. Degrassi taught at the university of Padova where he trained, among others, the epigraphist Silvio Panciera, currently on the faculty of the University of Rome "La Sapienza".
Go to Profile#3215
Vivian Wade-Gery
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Vivian Wade-Gery was a British classical archaeologist. Career Whitfield studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin and Somerville College, Oxford, where she obtained a BA degree in 1924. She was subsequently appointed lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading, and in 1924 to 1925 she received a Gilchrist studentship to study at the British School at Athens to study Greek topgraphy. She spent the period 1927 to 1928 again at the British school at Athens, on leave from Reading and supported by the Bryce studentship, Lady Margaret Hall and the Ireland Trustees, this time studying Spart...
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Bernard Pyne Grenfell
1869 - 1926 (57 years)
Bernard Pyne Grenfell FBA was an English scientist and egyptologist. Life Grenfell was the son of John Granville Grenfell FGS and Alice Grenfell. He was born in Birmingham and brought up and educated at Clifton College in Bristol, where his father taught. He obtained a scholarship in 1888 and enrolled at The Queen's College, Oxford.
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Montague Chamberlain
1844 - 1924 (80 years)
Montague Chamberlain was a Canadian-American businessman, naturalist, and ethnographer. Biography Chamberlain was born in St. John, New Brunswick, British North America. He spent the first few decades of his life as a bookkeeper and later manager of a grocery company in St. John. In his mid-twenties, he also became a dedicated amateur ornithologist. In 1883 he co-founded the American Ornithologists' Union, which today stakes its claim as "the oldest and largest organization in the New World devoted to the scientific study of birds." In 1888 Chamberlain became a resident member and editor for the Nuttall Ornithological Club, and a founding member of the American Ornithologists' Union.
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Evelyn Abbott
1843 - 1901 (58 years)
Evelyn Abbott was an English classical scholar, born at Epperstone, Nottinghamshire. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he excelled both academically and in sports, winning the Gaisford Prize for Greek Verse in 1864, but after a fall in 1866 his legs became paralysed. He managed to graduate in spite of his handicap, and was elected fellow of Balliol in 1874. His best-known work is his History of Greece in three volumes , where he presents a sceptical view of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Among his other works are Elements of Greek Accidence , and translations of several German books on ancient history, language and philosophy.
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George Ewart Bean
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
George Ewart Bean was an English archaeologist and writer who specialized in classical Turkey. His father William Jackson Bean was a botanist, author, and curator of Kew Gardens. Bean was educated at St Paul's School, London from 1916 to 1921. He attended Pembroke College, Cambridge and won the Schoolbred Scholarship and the John Stewart of Rannoch Scholarship for Classics.
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William Moir Calder
1881 - 1960 (79 years)
Sir William Moir Calder, FBA was a Scottish archaeologist, epigraphist, classicist, and academic. He was Hulme Professor of Greek at the University of Manchester from 1913 to 1930, and Professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh from 1930 to 1951.
Go to Profile#3221
Louis Dupree
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Louis Dupree was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, and scholar of Afghan culture and history. He was the husband of Nancy Hatch Dupree, who was the Board Director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University in Afghanistan and author of five books about Afghanistan. The husband and wife team from the United States worked together for 15 years in Kabul, collecting as many works written about Afghanistan as they could. They travelled across the country from 1962 until the 1979 Soviet intervention, conducting archaeological excavations.
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John E. Stambaugh
1939 - 1990 (51 years)
John Evan Stambaugh was an American classical scholar and professor at Williams College. Stambaugh was educated at Trinity College and then at Princeton University, earning a Ph.D. in 1967. Stambaugh taught at Williams from 1965 until 1990 and was a specialist in the field of Greco-Roman religion as well as early Christianity. In addition to teaching at Williams, Stambaugh was a fellow of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. and a faculty and managing committee member and chair of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, Italy.
Go to Profile#3223
Hugh O'Neill Hencken
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Hugh O'Neill Hencken was an American archaeologist who specialized in Iron Age Europe. He was curator of European archaeology at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, from 1932 to 1972. Career O'Neill Hencken was born in New York City on January 8, 1902, to an Irish American family. He studied at Princeton University and the University of Cambridge, where he obtained his doctorate in archaeology in 1929. He was appointed the curator of European archaeology at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 1932, serving until his retirement in 1972. During this period he also held posit...
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Albert Spaulding
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Albert Clanton Spaulding was an American anthropologist and processual archaeologist who encouraged the application of quantitative statistics in archaeological research and the legitimacy of anthropology as a science. His push for thorough statistical analysis in the field triggered a series of academic debates with archaeologist James Ford in which the nature of archaeological typologies was meticulously investigated—a dynamic discourse now known as the Ford-Spaulding Debate. He was also instrumental in increasing funding for archaeology through the National Science Foundation.
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Michelle Rosaldo
1944 - 1981 (37 years)
Michelle "Shelly" Zimbalist Rosaldo was a social, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist famous for her studies of the Ilongot people in the Philippines and for her pioneering role in women's studies and the anthropology of gender.
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Charles Gibson
1920 - 1985 (65 years)
Charles Gibson was an American ethnohistorian who wrote foundational works on the Nahua peoples of colonial Mexico and was elected President of the American Historical Association in 1977. He studied history at Yale University with George Kubler, and he taught for a number of years at University of Iowa before moving to University of Michigan. His dissertation on the Nahua polity of Tlaxcala , a key ally of the Spaniards in the conquest of Mexico, was the first major study of conquest and early colonial era Nahuas from the indigenous perspective. It remains a model for scholars working on Me...
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A. W. Lawrence
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Arnold Walter Lawrence was a British authority on classical sculpture and architecture. He was Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University in the 1940s, and in the early 1950s in Accra he founded what later became the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board as well as the National Museum of Ghana. He was the youngest brother of T. E. Lawrence and his literary executor.
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David L. Clarke
1937 - 1976 (39 years)
David Leonard Clarke was an English archaeologist and academic. He is well known for his work on processual archaeology. Early life and education Clarke was born in Kent, England. He studied at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, from which he obtained his PhD in 1964 under the supervision of Grahame Clark.
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A. M. Woodward
1883 - 1973 (90 years)
Arthur Maurice Woodward was a British archaeologist and ancient historian who was director of the British School at Athens from 1923 to 1929. He was later head of the department of ancient history at the University of Sheffield. During the First World War he served with the British Army in the British Salonika Force and was mentioned in despatches.
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Peter Lawrence
1921 - 1987 (66 years)
Peter Lawrence was a British-born Australian anthropologist and pioneer in the study of Melanesian religions. Lawrence was born in Lancashire, and read classics at the University of Cambridge. Between 1942 and 1946 he served in the Royal Navy before returning to Cambridge at the end of World War II. He conducted his first fieldwork among the Garia people in southern Madang Province, Papua New Guinea in 1949–1950. Supervised by Meyer Fortes, he received his PhD in 1951 with a thesis entitled "Social structure and the process of social control among the Garia, Madang District, New Guinea".
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Truman Michelson
1879 - 1938 (59 years)
Truman Michelson was a linguist and anthropologist who worked from 1910 until his death for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. He also held a position as ethnologist at George Washington University from 1917 until 1932.
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Georges Dossin
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Georges Gilles Joseph Dossin was a Belgian archaeologist, Assyriologist and art historian. Biography He studied in Liège and Paris, earning doctorates in classical philology and oriental history and literature . From 1924 to 1945 he taught classes on the art history of Asia Minor at the Institut Royal d'Histoire de l'Art et d'Archeologie de Bruxelles, and in the meantime, taught various courses in the fields of art history and archaeology at the University of Liège ; classes in Akkadian language at the Institut des Hautes Études de Belgique in Brussels , and classes in oriental history and A...
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Ronald F. Tylecote
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Ronald Frank Tylecote was a British archaeologist and metallurgist, generally recognised as the founder of the sub-discipline of archaeometallurgy. Education and profession The son of doctor Frank Edward Tylecote, he was born in Manchester and educated at Oundle School. He obtained an MA from Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1938, and an MSc from the University of Manchester in 1942, and a PhD on the oxidation of copper from the University of London in 1952.
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T. Eric Peet
1882 - 1934 (52 years)
Thomas Eric Peet was an English Egyptologist. Biography Thomas Eric Peet was the son of Thomas and Salome Peet. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby and at Queen's College, Oxford. From 1909 onwards he conducted excavations in Egypt for the Egypt Exploration Fund. From 1913 to 1928, he was lecturer in Egyptology at Manchester University, though he also saw service in World War I as a lieutenant in the King's Regiment . From 1920 to 1933, he was Brunner Professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. In 1933 he was appointed Reader in Egyptology at the University of Oxford.
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A. J. Arkell
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Anthony John Arkell MBE MC FSA , known as A. J. Arkell, was a British archaeologist and colonial administrator noted for his work in the Sudan and Egypt. Biography Anthony John Arkell was born at Hinxhill Rectory, Hinxhill, Kent, England. He was the son of Reverend John Norris and Jessie Arkell . He won a scholarship to Bradfield College, where he was head boy. He next won the Jordell Scholarship in Classics to The Queen's College, Oxford.
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Aurel Stein
1862 - 1943 (81 years)
Sir Marc Aurel Stein, was a Hungarian-born British archaeologist, primarily known for his explorations and archaeological discoveries in Central Asia. He was also a professor at Indian universities.
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Robert Wauchope
1909 - 1979 (70 years)
Robert Wauchope was a well-respected American archaeologist and anthropologist, whose academic research specialized in the prehistory and archaeology of Latin America, Mesoamerica, and the Southwestern United States.
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Aylward M. Blackman
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Aylward Manley Blackman, FBA was a British Egyptologist, who excavated various sites in Egypt and Nubia, notably Buhen and Meir. Having taught at Worcester College, Oxford, he was Brunner Professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool from 1934 to 1948. He was additionally a special lecturer at the University of Manchester, and was involved in or led a number of excavations with the Egypt Exploration Society.
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Fred Nadel
1903 - 1956 (53 years)
Siegfried Frederick Nadel was a British anthropologist, specialising in African ethnology. Early life and education Siegfried Ferdinand Stephan Nadel was born on 24 April 1903 in Lemberg , Galicia, part of the Habsburg monarchy. Both parents were born in Lemberg. His family, his father Moritz was a senior railway lawyer, moved to Vienna in 1912. After attending State Real Gymnasium , 1913–1921, he enrolled at the Musik-academie in the University of Vienna; his early ambition was to be a conductor and composer. He was an extraordinarily talented polymath. Music led him to the psychology of music and general psychology was at that time affiliated with philosophy.
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Alan P. Merriam
1923 - 1980 (57 years)
Alan Parkhurst Merriam was an American ethnomusicologist known for his studies of music in Native America and Africa. In his book The Anthropology of Music , he outlined and develops a theory and method for studying music from an anthropological perspective with anthropological methods. Although he taught at Northwestern University and University of Wisconsin, the majority of his academic career was spent at Indiana University where he was named a professor in 1962 and then chairman of the anthropology department from 1966 to 1969, which became a leading center of ethnomusicology research under his guidance.
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John Sydenham Furnivall
1878 - 1960 (82 years)
John Sydenham Furnivall was a British-born colonial public servant and writer in Burma. He is credited with coining the concept of the plural society and had a noted career as an influential historian of Southeast Asia, particularly of the Dutch East Indies and British Burma. He published several books over a long career, including the influential Colonial Policy and Practice and wrote for more than 20 major journals, although his work is now criticized as being Eurocentric and biased in favor of continued colonialism.
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Glyn Daniel
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
Glyn Edmund Daniel was a Welsh scientist and archaeologist who taught at Cambridge University, where he specialised in the European Neolithic period. He was appointed Disney Professor of Archaeology in 1974 and edited the academic journal Antiquity from 1958 to 1985. In addition to early efforts to popularise archaeological study and antiquity on radio and television, he edited several popular studies of the fields. He also published mysteries under the pseudonym Dilwyn Rees.
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Cyril Fox
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Sir Cyril Fred Fox was an English archaeologist and museum director. Fox became keeper of archaeology at the National Museum of Wales, and subsequently served as director from 1926 to 1948. His most notable achievements were collaborative. With his second wife, Aileen Fox, he surveyed and excavated several prehistoric monuments in Wales. With Iorwerth Peate, he established the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans, and with Lord Raglan, he authored a definitive history of vernacular architecture, Monmouthshire Houses.
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Raoul Naroll
1920 - 1985 (65 years)
Raoul Naroll was a Canadian-born American anthropologist who did much to promote the methodology of cross-cultural studies. Early life and education Naroll was born in Toronto, Ontario but was raised in Los Angeles and attended UCLA at the age of 16, dropping out in his junior year to join the military.
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Berthold Ullman
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Berthold Louis Ullman was an American classicist. Life and career Ullman was born in Chicago to Louis Ullman and Eleanora Fried. He was educated at the University of Chicago . He joined the faculty at Chicago and also taught at the University of Pittsburgh and Iowa State University. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1925 until 1944 before moving to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, becoming Kenan professor of Latin and department chair. Ullman's library collection formed the core of the present classics department library at the University of North Carolina. Ullman was also president of the American Philological Association in 1935.
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Oscar Broneer
1894 - 1992 (98 years)
Oscar Theodore Broneer was a prominent Swedish American educator and archaeologist known in particular for his work on Ancient Greece. He is most associated with his discovery of the Temple of Isthmia, an important Panhellenic shrine dating from the seventh century B.C.
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Phyllis Kaberry
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Phyllis Mary Kaberry was a social anthropologist who dedicated her work to the study of women in various societies. Particularly with her work in both Australia and Africa, she paved the way for a feminist approach in anthropological studies. Her research on the sacred life and significant role of the Aboriginal women of Australia proved to be a controversial topic, as anthropology during her years of early fieldwork was male-dominated, filled with the misconceptions that men were the superior in any aspect of life. Contributing proof of women's significance to societal development and org...
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Franz Cumont
1868 - 1947 (79 years)
Franz-Valéry-Marie Cumont was a Belgian archaeologist and historian, a philologist and student of epigraphy, who brought these often isolated specialties to bear on the syncretic mystery religions of Late Antiquity, notably Mithraism.
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Morris Steggerda
1900 - 1950 (50 years)
Morris Steggerda was an American physical anthropologist. He worked primarily on Central American and Caribbean populations. Life and career Steggerda was born in Holland, Michigan, the son of Sena and John Steggerda. He was of Dutch descent. He received an A.B. from Hope College in 1922, and an A.M. and Ph.D. from the Department of Zoology of the University of Illinois, in 1923 and 1928 respectively. His first academic position was as assistant professor of zoology at Smith College , but most of his career was spent as an investigator with the Carnegie Institution for Science at Cold Spring Harbor, New York .
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Friedrich Solmsen
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Friedrich W. Solmsen was a philologist and professor of classical studies. He published nearly 150 books, monographs, scholarly articles, and reviews from the 1930s through the 1980s. Solmsen's work is characterized by a prevailing interest in the history of ideas. He was an influential scholar in the areas of Greek tragedy, particularly for his work on Aeschylus, and the philosophy of the physical world and its relation to the soul, especially the systems of Plato and Aristotle.
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