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,
#3251
Harold North Fowler
1859 - 1955 (96 years)
Harold North Fowler was an American classicist. He was married to Mary Blackford Fowler. He was the original translator of a number of Plato's works for the Loeb Classical Library collection. External links
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Heinrich Bulle
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Heinrich Bulle was a German archaeologist born in Bremen. He studied classical archaeology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich, where he was a student of Heinrich Brunn . From 1898 to 1902, he was a lecturer at the University of Würzburg, followed by an associate professorship at the University of Erlangen. In 1908, he returned to Würzburg as a professor, where he was also director of the "Martin von Wagner Museum". Bulle was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
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Benedikt Niese
1849 - 1910 (61 years)
Jürgen Anton Benedikt Niese , also known as Benedict, Benediktus or Benedictus Niese, was a German classical scholar. Niese was born in Burg, on the island of Fehmarn, then part of the German Confederation but ruled by King Frederick VII of Denmark. His father was Emil August Niese, pastor in the town, and his mother was born Benedicte Marie Matthiessen. He was educated at the Domgymnasium in Schleswig and then from 1867 at Bonn and Kiel, studying under Alfred von Gutschmid. After volunteering for the army during the Franco-Prussian War, he was awarded a PhD in 1872. After teaching for a short time in a secondary school in Flensburg, he travelled in Italy and France.
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Sergei Teploukhov
1888 - 1934 (46 years)
Sergei Aleksandrovich Teploukhov was an archaeologist from the Soviet Union. From 1920 to 1932, Teploukhov conducted research on the archaeological remains of various periods in Siberia and Central Asia. He was the first to devise a classification of the archaeological cultures of Southern Siberia. Teploukhov was arrested on suspicions of nationalism on November 26, 1933 and was found dead in his cell on March 10, 1934.
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William Sanders Scarborough
1852 - 1926 (74 years)
William Sanders Scarborough is generally thought to be the first African American classical scholar. Born into slavery, Scarborough served as president of Wilberforce University between 1908 and 1920. He wrote a popular university textbook on Classical Greek that was widely used in the 19th century.
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Johann Matthias Gesner
1691 - 1761 (70 years)
Johann Matthias Gesner was a German classical scholar and schoolmaster. Life He was born at Roth an der Rednitz near Ansbach. His father, Johann Samuel Gesner, a pastor in Auhausen, died in 1704, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. Gesner's mother, Maria Magdalena , remarried, and Johann Matthias's stepfather, Johann Zuckermantel, proved supportive.
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Gerhard Lindblom
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Karl Gerhard Lindblom was an ethnographer from Sweden who worked in East Africa in the 1910s. He was the principal author of materials on the Akamba peoples. Additionally, he worked as the Director of the Museum of Stockholm beginning in 1928 and in 1935 he became a professor at the University of Stockholm.
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Pieter Helbert Damsté
1860 - 1943 (83 years)
Pieter Helbert Damsté was a Dutch classical scholar. Biography Damsté was born in Wilsum as the son of preacher Barteld Roelof Damsté and Richardina Jacoba Gesina Gallé. His 1885 dissertation was called Adversaria critica ad C. Valerii Flacci Argonautica. He taught Latin at Utrecht University.
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Gonçalo Sampaio
1865 - 1937 (72 years)
Gonçalo António da Silva Ferreira Sampaio was a Portuguese botanist. He studied mathematics at the University of Coimbra and chemistry, mineralogy and botany at the Polytechnic Academy of Porto. From 1890 he served as an assistant naturalist at the Polytechnic Academy. From 1912 to 1935 he was a professor of botany at the faculty of sciences of the University of Porto. As a taxonomist he described around 50 new species of vascular plants, five new species of desmids and about 70 new taxa of lichens that included the genus Carlosia . The mycological genus Sampaioa commemorates his name.
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Risieri Frondizi
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Risieri Frondizi was an Argentine philosopher, anthropologist, and rector of the University of Buenos Aires. Background Risieri Frondizi Ercoli was born on 20 November 1910 in Posadas, Argentina. His parents were Julio Frondizi and Isabel Ercoli, who had arrived in the 1890s from Gubbio, Umbria, Italy. Frondizi had seven brothers and six sisters. They included Arturo Frondizi , Ricardo and Silvio . Frondizi studied at Harvard University. In 1943, Frondizi received his MA from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In 1950, he received a doctorate from the National Autonomous University...
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Antal Hekler
1882 - 1940 (58 years)
Antal Hekler was a Hungarian/German classical archaeologist and art historian. He was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Life He wrote his doctoral thesis in political science in 1903 and then studied classical archaeology in Munich under Adolf Furtwängler, where he wrote his second doctoral thesis, before he returned to his birthplace Budapest, where he first worked at the city's national museum and later held a chair for Christian archaeology and history of art at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Budapest.
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Anastasios Orlandos
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Anastasios Orlandos was a Greek architect and historian of architecture. Biography A descendant of Ioannis Orlandos, Anastasios was born and died in Athens. He studied as a civil engineer in the National Technical University of Athens, and completed his studies in archaeology at the University of Athens, where he later served as a professor. He was among the leading researchers in ancient and Byzantine architecture, and responsible for the restoration of many ancient and medieval monuments throughout the country. He was also chairman of the Academy of Athens in 1950, and from 1951 until his d...
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Karl Otfried Müller
1797 - 1840 (43 years)
Karl Otfried Müller was a German professor, scholar of classical Greek studies and philodorian. Biography He was born at Brieg in Silesia, then in the Kingdom of Prussia. His father was a chaplain in the Prussian army, and he was raised in the atmosphere of Protestant Pietism. He attended the gymnasium of his town. His university education was partly in Breslau and partly in Berlin. In Berlin, he was spurred towards the study of Greek literature, art and history by the influence of Philipp August Böckh. In 1817, after the publication of his first work, Aegineticorum liber, on the Aegineta...
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Poliziano
1454 - 1494 (40 years)
Agnolo Ambrogini , commonly known as Angelo Poliziano or simply Poliziano, anglicized as Politian, was an Italian classical scholar and poet of the Florentine Renaissance. His scholarship was instrumental in the divergence of Renaissance Latin from medieval norms and for developments in philology. His nickname Poliziano, by which he is chiefly identified to the present day, was derived from the Latin name of his birthplace, Montepulciano .
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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.
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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 ...
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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".
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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