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,
#3301
Hans Reinerth
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Hans Reinerth was a German archaeologist. He was a pioneer of Palynology and modern settlement archaeology, but is controversial because of his role before and during the period of National Socialism.
Go to Profile#3302
Frans Blom
1893 - 1963 (70 years)
Frans Blom was a Danish explorer and archaeologist. He was most associated with his research of the Maya civilization of Mexico and Central America. Biography Frans Ferdinand Blom was born in Copenhagen, Denmark to a middle-class family of antique merchants. He passed a matriculation exam at Rungsted and received a trade education in Germany and Belgium. He started travelling, eventually reaching Mexico in 1919, where he found work in the oil industry conducting map and geologically survey the states of Veracruz, Tabasco, and Chiapas. Travelling to remote locations in the Mexican jungle, he became interested in the Maya ruins which he encountered where he was working.
Go to Profile#3303
Theodor Mommsen
1817 - 1903 (86 years)
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen was a German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician and archaeologist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest classicists of the 19th century. His work regarding Roman history is still of fundamental importance for contemporary research. He received the 1902 Nobel Prize in Literature for being "the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work, A History of Rome", after having been nominated by 18 members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He was also a prominent German politician, as a member of the Prussian and German parliaments.
Go to Profile#3304
Caroline Bond Day
1889 - 1948 (59 years)
Caroline Stewart Bond Day was an American physical anthropologist, author, and educator. She was one of the first African-Americans to receive a degree in anthropology. Day is recognized as a pioneer physical anthropologist whose study helped future black researchers and is used to challenge scientific racism about miscegenation.
Go to Profile#3305
Gutorm Gjessing
1906 - 1979 (73 years)
Gutorm Gjessing was a Norwegian archaeologist and ethnographer. He was director of the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Oslo and as major contributor to Circumpolar studies. Biography Gjessing was born at Ålesund in Møre og Romsdal, Norway. He was the son of parish priest Marcus Jacob Gjessing and Julie Kathrine Monrad .
Go to Profile#3306
Johannes Ranke
1836 - 1916 (80 years)
Johannes Ranke was a German physiologist and anthropologist. He was the son of theologian Friedrich Heinrich Ranke , the brother of pediatrician Heinrich von Ranke and father to pulmonologist Karl Ernst Ranke .
Go to Profile#3307
Ludwig Feuerbach
1804 - 1872 (68 years)
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was a German anthropologist and philosopher, best known for his book The Essence of Christianity, which provided a critique of Christianity that strongly influenced generations of later thinkers, including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Go to Profile#3308
Alfred William Howitt
1830 - 1908 (78 years)
Alfred William Howitt , , also known by author abbreviation A.W. Howitt, was an Australian anthropologist, explorer and naturalist. He was known for leading the Victorian Relief Expedition, which set out to establish the fate of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition.
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Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae
1821 - 1885 (64 years)
Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae was a Danish archaeologist, historian and politician, who was the second director of the National Museum of Denmark . He played a key role in the foundation of scientific archaeology. Worsaae was the first to excavate and use stratigraphy to prove C. J. Thomsen's sequence of the Three-age system: Stone, Bronze, Iron. He was also a pioneer in the development of paleobotany through his excavation work in the peat bogs of Jutland. Worsaae served as Kultus Minister of Denmark for Christen Andreas Fonnesbech from 1874 to 1875.
Go to Profile#3310
Mikhail Masson
1897 - 1986 (89 years)
Mikhail Yevgenyevich Masson was a Soviet archaeologist. He was the founder of the archaeology school in Central Asia and a professor, doctor of historical and archaeological sciences and member of the Turkmen Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#3311
Hugo Bernatzik
1897 - 1953 (56 years)
Hugo Adolf Bernatzik was an Austrian anthropologist and photographer. Bernatzik was the founder of the concept of alternative anthropology. Biography Hugo Adolf Bernatzik was a son of the Professor of Public Law at the University of Vienna and member of the House of Peers, Edmund Bernatzik . After school in 1915, he volunteered to join the Austro–Hungarian Army and was deployed among other places in Albania. In 1920, he abandoned his medical studies for financial reasons and became a businessman. After the early death of his first wife Margarete Ast , he embarked on extensive travels and expe...
Go to Profile#3312
Rudolf Martin
1864 - 1925 (61 years)
Rudolf Martin was a Swiss anthropologist, specializing in physical anthropology. Martin's second wife, Stefanie Oppenheim, survived him and edited a second edition of his physical anthropology textbook.
Go to Profile#3313
Charles Warren
1840 - 1927 (87 years)
General Sir Charles Warren, was an officer in the British Royal Engineers. He was one of the earliest European archaeologists of the Biblical Holy Land, and particularly of the Temple Mount. Much of his military service was spent in British South Africa. Previously he was Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, the head of the London Metropolitan Police, from 1886 to 1888 during the Jack the Ripper murders. His command in combat during the Second Boer War was criticised, but he achieved considerable success during his long life in his military and civil posts.
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Robert Knox
1791 - 1862 (71 years)
Robert Knox was a Scottish anatomist and ethnologist best known for his involvement in the Burke and Hare murders. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Knox eventually partnered with anatomist and former teacher John Barclay and became a lecturer on anatomy in the city, where he introduced the theory of transcendental anatomy. However, Knox's incautious methods of obtaining cadavers for dissection before the passage of the Anatomy Act 1832 and disagreements with professional colleagues ruined his career in Scotland. Following these developments, he moved to London, though this did not revive his car...
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Sven Nilsson
1787 - 1883 (96 years)
Sven Nilsson was a Swedish zoologist and archaeologist. Life and work Nilsson was director of the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet from 1828 to 1831, professor of Natural History at Lund University from 1832 to 1856, and rector of Lund University from 1845 to 1846.
Go to Profile#3316
W. J. Perry
1887 - 1949 (62 years)
William James Perry , usually known as W. J. Perry, was an academic in cultural anthropology at University College, London. Megalith culture, according to him, was transmitted to the rest of the world from Egypt.
Go to Profile#3317
Sarat Chandra Roy
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Sarat Chandra Roy was an Indian scholar of anthropology. He is sometimes regarded as the 'father of Indian ethnography', the 'first Indian ethnographer', and as the 'first Indian anthropologist'. Early life Born on 4 November 1871 to Purna Chandra Roy, a member of the Bengal Judicial Service, in a village in Khulna district , young Sarat came in contact with tribal people after his father was posted in Purulia. After his father's death in 1885, he was educated at his maternal uncle's home in Calcutta. In 1892, he graduated in English literature from the General Assembly's Institution . He ear...
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Yevgeni Pakhomov
1880 - 1965 (85 years)
Yevgeni Alexandrovich Pakhomov was a Russian, Georgiann and Azerbaijani numismatist and archaeologist and a recognized authority in the numismatics of the Caucasus. Biography Born in Stavropol, he graduated from the Tiflis Realschule in 1896, the St. Petersburg Archeological Institute in 1900, and the St. Petersburg Technological Institute in 1902. In 1920, he helped to organize the Museum of Azerbaijani History and was elected to the Academic Association of the University of Baku where he chaired the Department of Archeology and Numismatics from 1922 to 1930. He attained to the title of Pro...
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Gaston Maspero
1846 - 1916 (70 years)
Sir Gaston Camille Charles Maspero was a French Egyptologist known for popularizing the term "Sea Peoples" in an 1881 paper. Maspero's son, Henri Maspero, became a notable sinologist and scholar of East Asia.
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Josef Ladislav Píč
1847 - 1911 (64 years)
Josef Ladislav Píč was Czech archaeologist and paleontologist, one of founders of modern Czech archaeology. Píč studied history and Slavic languages at the Charles University in Prague . In 1883, he became docent of history at the university. Since 1893, he was named custodian and later director of archeologic collection at the National Museum in Prague. Píč created and maintained collection prehistoric artefacts. His major literary work was Starožitnosti země české , in three parts, about ancient history of Czech lands.
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William Ridgeway
1853 - 1926 (73 years)
Sir William Ridgeway, FBA FRAI was an Anglo-Irish classical scholar and the Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. Early life and education Ridgeway was born 6 August 1853, in Ballydermot in King's County, Ireland, the son of Rev. John Henry Ridgeway and Marianne Ridgeway. He was a direct descendant of one of Cromwell's settlers in Ireland. He was educated at Portarlington School and Trinity College, Dublin, then studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge before entering Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he completed the Classical tripos in 1880.
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Ernesto de Martino
1908 - 1965 (57 years)
Ernesto de Martino was an Italian anthropologist, philosopher and historian of religions. He studied with Benedetto Croce and Adolfo Omodeo, and did field research with Diego Carpitella into the funeral rituals of Lucania and tarantism.
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Margaret Murray
1863 - 1963 (100 years)
Margaret Alice Murray was a British-Indian Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and folklorist who was born in India. The first woman to be appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom, she worked at University College London from 1898 to 1935. She served as president of the Folklore Society from 1953 to 1955, and published widely over the course of her career.
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William Stukeley
1687 - 1765 (78 years)
William Stukeley was an English antiquarian, physician and Anglican clergyman. A significant influence on the later development of archaeology, he pioneered the scholarly investigation of the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire. He published over twenty books on archaeology and other subjects during his lifetime.
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Carl Blegen
1887 - 1971 (84 years)
Carl William Blegen was an American archaeologist who worked at the site of Pylos in Greece and Troy in modern-day Turkey. He directed the University of Cincinnati excavations of the mound of Hisarlik, the site of Troy, from 1932 to 1938.
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Emil Ludwig Schmidt
1837 - 1906 (69 years)
Emil Ludwig Schmidt was a German anthropologist and ethnologist. He was son-in-law to art historian Johannes Adolph Overbeck . Schmidt was born in Upper Eichstätt. Originally trained as a doctor, he studied medicine at the Universities of Jena, Leipzig and Bonn. From 1862 to 1865 he served as a surgical assistant to Wilhelm Busch at Bonn, afterwards working as a physician in Essen .
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Ludwig Borchardt
1863 - 1938 (75 years)
Ludwig Borchardt was a German Egyptologist. He is best known for finding a famous bust of Nefertiti at Amarna. Life Born in Berlin in 1863 into a well-established Jewish family, Borchardt was the second-oldest of six children of the merchant Hermann Borchardt and Bertha, née Levin . Also known as Herbert, Borchardt initially studied Architecture and later Egyptology under Adolf Erman. In 1895 he journeyed to Cairo and produced, with Gaston Maspero, the Catalogue of the Egyptian Museum .
Go to Profile#3328
John R. Napier
1917 - 1987 (70 years)
John Russell Napier, MRCS, LRCP, D.Sc. was a British primatologist, paleoanthropologist, and physician, who is notable for his work with Homo habilis and OH 7, as well as on human and primate hands/feet. During his life he was widely considered a leading authority on primate taxonomy, but is perhaps most famous to the general public for his research on Bigfoot.
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Gerhard Fischer
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Gerhard Fischer was a Norwegian architect and archaeologist. Biography Johan Adolf Gerhard Fischer was born in Bergen, Norway. He was the son of architect Adolph Fischer and Dorothea Margaretha Elisabeth Wilcken . Fischer studied at the Bergen Technical School , the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry in Oslo and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
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Gertrude Bell
1868 - 1926 (58 years)
Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist. She spent much of her life exploring and mapping the Middle East, and became highly influential to British imperial policy-making as an Arabist due to her knowledge and contacts built up through extensive travels. During her lifetime, she was highly esteemed and trusted by British officials such as High Commissioner for Mesopotamia Percy Cox, giving her great influence. She participated in both the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the 1921 Cairo Conference, which help...
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Isabel Kelly
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Isabel Truesdell Kelly was an American anthropologist known for her work with the members of the Coast Miwok tribe, members of the Chemehuevi people in the 1920s and 1930s, and her work later in life as an archaeologist working in Sinaloa, Mexico. She was trained by anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#3332
Heinrich Brunn
1822 - 1894 (72 years)
Heinrich Brunn, since 1882 Ritter von Brunn was a German archaeologist. He was known for taking a scientific approach in his investigations of classical Greek and Roman art, being credited with introducing the method of determining the date and source of sculptural fragments by way of thorough analysis of the account of anatomic detail.
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August Pauly
1796 - 1845 (49 years)
August Friedrich von Pauly was a German educator and classical philologist. From 1813 to 1818 he studied at the University of Tübingen, then furthered his education at Heidelberg as a student of Georg Friedrich Creuzer. Beginning in 1822, he served as rector of the Latin school in Biberach, followed by work as a gymnasium professor in Heilbronn . From 1830 until his death in 1845, he was an educator at the gymnasium in Stuttgart.
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Sophus Ruge
1831 - 1903 (72 years)
Sophus Ruge was a German geographer and historian, he studied about European discoveries and written works about Portuguese discoveries. His studies was a different vision on one traditionally followed in Portugal, he had translated a large part from Portuguese and had been influential in the development of Portuguese historiography.
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John Leland Champe
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
John Leland Champe was an academic and archaeologist especially influential in the area of Great Plains archaeology. Champe was born in 1895 in Elwood, Nebraska. In 1921, he earned a BA from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in mathematics. In 1924, he married Flavia Waters. Before moving to New York to enter the Ph.D. program in anthropology at Columbia University in 1938, Champe had been vice president and a claims adjustor at a Nebraska insurance company. While at Columbia, he studied under William Duncan Strong.
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Eduards Volters
1856 - 1941 (85 years)
Eduards Volters was a linguist, ethnographer, archaeologist who studied the Baltic languages and culture. He was a long-time professor at the Saint Petersburg University and Vytautas Magnus University .
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Ernest Arthur Gardner
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Ernest Arthur Gardner was an English archaeologist. He was the director of the British School at Athens between 1887 and 1895. Early life Gardner was born in Clapton, London, England on 16 March 1862 to Thomas Gardner and Ann Pearse. He was educated at the City of London School, a boys' private day school located in the City of London. He entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1880. He read for a Bachelor of Arts in Classics and graduated with a double first in 1884.
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Kenneth Murray
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Kenneth Crosswaithe Murray better known as K.C. Murray was an English art curator and teacher. The second son of the chess historian H. J. R. Murray and his suffragette wife Kate Crosthwaite, Murray was an elder brother of educationalist and biographer Elisabeth Murray, and a grandson of Sir James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
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Tihomir Đorđević
1868 - 1944 (76 years)
Tihomir Đorđević was a Serbian ethnologist, folklorist, cultural historian and professor at the University of Belgrade. Biography He received his B.A. in History and Philology at the Grandes écoles in Belgrade. He pursued his post-graduate studies in Vienna and Munich, where he received his doctorate in 1902. Among the Munich alumnae were Miloje Vasić, Veselin Čajkanović and Dragutin Anastasijević, his contemporaries.
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Alexander Conze
1831 - 1914 (83 years)
Alexander Christian Leopold Conze was a German archaeologist, who specialized in ancient Greek art. He was a native of Hanover, and studied at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin. In 1855 he obtained his doctorate at Berlin as a student of Eduard Gerhard. In 1863 he became an associate professor at the University of Halle, and from 1869 to 1877, he served as a professor of archaeology at the University of Vienna. In the 1870s, he performed two archaeological explorations at Samothrace . In 1876, with Otto Hirschfeld, he organized the Archaeologic-Epigraphic Seminar at the university. In...
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Lev Oshanin
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
Lev Vasilievich Oshanin was a Soviet professor, medical doctor, anthropologist, and founder of the department of anthropology at National University of Uzbekistan in Tashkent. Oshanin was most notable for his anthropological work in Central Asia.
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Gustav Riek
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
Johannes Gustav Riek was a German archaeologist from the University of Tübingen who worked with the SS Ahnenerbe in their excavations, and led the teams that excavated the Vogelherd Cave in 1931, the Heuneburg Tumulus burial mounds in 1937 and the Brillenhöhle 1955–63.
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Peter Kandela
#3344
Carl Watzinger
1877 - 1948 (71 years)
Carl Watzinger was a German archaeologist, who with Ernst Sellin, worked on uncovering the site of the ancient city of Jericho , and earlier, with Heinrich Kohl , conducted excavations at Capernaum .
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Józef Kostrzewski
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Józef Kostrzewski was a Polish archaeologist. Kostrzewski was born in Węglewo . He studied first in Kraków, then from 1910 onwards with Gustaf Kossinna at Berlin and graduated in 1914. Back in Poland, he was to turn Kossinna's settlement-archaeological method against its creator and to try to prove a Slavonic autochthonism in Poland from at least the Bronze Age onwards.
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R. A. Stewart Macalister
1870 - 1950 (80 years)
Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister was an Irish archaeologist. Biography Macalister was born in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Alexander Macalister, then Professor of Zoology, University of Dublin. His father was appointed professor of anatomy at Cambridge University in 1883, and he was educated at The Perse School, and then studied at Cambridge University.
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Thomas Gann
1867 - 1938 (71 years)
Thomas William Francis Gann was a medical doctor by profession, but is best remembered for his work as an amateur archaeologist exploring ruins of the Maya civilization. Personal history Thomas Gann was born in Murrisk Abbey, County Mayo, Ireland, the son of William Gann of Whitstable, England, and Rose Garvey of Murrisk Abbey. He was raised in Whitstable, where his parents were prominent in the social life of the town. Gann trained in medicine in Middlesex, England.
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Ivar Skarland
1889 - 1965 (76 years)
Ivar Skarland was a Norwegian anthropologist. Skarland was born in Høylandet, Norway, on September 2, 1899. He earned a diploma from the Steinkjer School of Forestry in Norway in 1921 before moving to the United States for further education. He studied English at the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines, graduating in 1935. In 1942, he was awarded a master's degree in Anthropology from Harvard University and in 1948 received a Ph.D. from the same institution. He was a student of Earnest Hooton. He worked with Otto W. Geist.
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Erik Holtved
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Dr. Erik Holtved was a Danish artist, archaeologist, linguist, and ethnologist. He was the first university-trained ethnologist to study the Inughuit, the northernmost Greenlandic Inuit. Career Holtved was born in Fredericia, Denmark in 1899.
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John O. Westwood
1805 - 1893 (88 years)
John Obadiah Westwood was an English entomologist and archaeologist also noted for his artistic talents. He published several illustrated works on insects and antiquities. He was among the first entomologists with an academic position at Oxford University. He was a natural theologian, staunchly anti-Darwinian, and sometimes adopted a quinarian viewpoint. Although he never travelled widely, he described species from around the world on the basis of specimens, especially of the larger, curious, and colourful species, obtained by naturalists and collectors in England.
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