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,
#3351
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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Albert Egges van Giffen
1884 - 1973 (89 years)
Albert Egges van Giffen was a Dutch archaeologist. Van Giffen worked at the University of Groningen and University of Amsterdam, where he was a professor of Prehistory and Germanic archaeology. He worked most of his career in the Northern provinces of the Netherlands, where he specialized in hunebeds and tumuli.
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Peter von Blanckenhagen
1909 - 1990 (81 years)
Peter Heinrich von Blanckenhagen was a scholar of Roman art, and especially ancient wall painting. Early life Born in Latvia, von Blanckenhagen and his family fled to Germany following the Bolshevik Revolution. It was in German universities that he received his training in Classical archaeology.
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C. W. M. Hart
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
Charles William Merton Hart was a social anthropologist and sociologist best known for his study of the Tiwi people of the Bathurst and Melville Islands in north Australia during the 1920s. He has been described as a "legendary ethnographer".
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Hans Dragendorff
1870 - 1941 (71 years)
Hans Dragendorff was a Baltic German scholar who introduced the first classification system for the type of Ancient Roman pottery known as Samian ware or Terra sigillata, in 1896, using type numbers. His scheme was based on the varying forms the vessels took and although it has since been augmented and refined by others, it is still common to refer to 'Dragendorff type 37' bowls, for example.
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Hans Ehelolf
1881 - 1939 (58 years)
Hans Wilhelm Heinrich Ehelolf was a German Hittitologist. He was born in Hanover, Lower Saxony. He began his oriental studies in Marburg, focusing on Assyriology, Semitic linguistics, Indology, and Biblical exegesis. He wrote a PhD thesis entitled Ein Wortfolgeprinzip im Assyrisch-Babylonischen and received his degree on July 29, 1914. Ehelolf served in World War I and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class and the Turkish Iron Crescent.
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Vladimir Vikentyev
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Vladimir Mikhailovich Vikentyev was an Egyptologist from the Russian Empire. He graduated from the Romano-German department of the faculty of Historical philology at Moscow University with a first class diploma. In 1915 he was hired by the Historical museum named after Tsar Alexander III. In 1922 he went abroad. He taught Egyptian philology and the ancient history of the Near East at Cairo University.
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Frank Edward Brown
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Frank Edward Brown was a preeminent Mediterranean archaeologist. Education Educated at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, , Brown went on to receive his doctorate at Yale University, with a dissertation on Plautus . He would then serve as Assistant Professor of Classics there until the United States entered World War II, during which time he served the Office of War Information in Syria and Lebanon. In 1945 he became Director-General of Antiquities of the Republic of Syria.
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Carsten Høeg
1896 - 1961 (65 years)
Carsten Høeg was a Danish professor of classical philology and a Juris Doctor at the University of Copenhagen from 1926. He earned his Ph.D. with an ethnographic study of the Sarakatsani Greeks. He later published studies on classical Greek and Latin literature and on Byzantine music. From 1935 he was the founding director of the edition series Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae. During the German occupation of Denmark from 1940–1945, he was the leader of a resistance group within the Danish Freedom Council, whose task was assembling the list of Danish Nazis and Nazi collaborators to be prosecuted ...
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Camillo Praschniker
1884 - 1949 (65 years)
Camillo Praschniker was an Austrian archaeologist. He studied classical philology and archaeology at the universities of Innsbruck, Vienna and Berlin. At Berlin, his instructors were Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz, Hermann Winnefeld, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Heinrich Wölfflin. From 1908 to 1910, via a travel grant from the Austrian Archaeological Institute , he conducted research in Italy, Greece and Asia Minor. In 1912 he was named secretary of the ÖAI.
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Mary Belle McElwain
1874 - 1964 (90 years)
Mary Belle McElwain was an American classical scholar. Biography McElwain gained her BA from Wilson College in 1895. She subsequently taught Greek, English, and maths at the college until 1903. After teaching at a finishing school at Bryn Mawr until 1908 McElwain gained a MA from Cornell University in 1909 with a thesis titled "The Life of the Empress Livia Based on Latin and Greek Sources" and her PhD in 1910 on "The use of the imperative in Plautus". In 1936 she was awarded an honorary Litt. D. from Wilson College.
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Edward Winslow Gifford
1887 - 1959 (72 years)
Edward Winslow Gifford devoted his life to studying California Indian ethnography as a professor of anthropology and director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Franz Boas
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Franz Uri Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism.
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Bronisław Malinowski
1884 - 1942 (58 years)
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski was a Polish-British anthropologist and ethnologist whose writings on ethnography, social theory, and field research have exerted a lasting influence on the discipline of anthropology.
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Marcel Mauss
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology". The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology. Today, he is perhaps better recognised for his influence on the latter discipline, particularly with respect to his analyses of topics such as magic, sacrifice and gift exchange in different cultures around the world. Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. His most famous work is The Gift .
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Edward Burnett Tylor
1832 - 1917 (85 years)
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor was an English anthropologist, and professor of anthropology. Tylor's ideas typify 19th-century cultural evolutionism. In his works Primitive Culture and Anthropology , he defined the context of the scientific study of anthropology, based on the evolutionary theories of Charles Lyell. He believed that there was a functional basis for the development of society and religion, which he determined was universal. Tylor maintained that all societies passed through three basic stages of development: from savagery, through barbarism to civilization. Tylor is a founding figu...
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Alfred Kroeber
1876 - 1960 (84 years)
Alfred Louis Kroeber was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first professor appointed to the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He played an integral role in the early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served as director from 1909 through 1947. Kroeber provided detailed information about Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people, whom he studied over a period of years. He was the father of the acclaimed novelist, poet, and writer of short stories Ursula K.
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Julian Steward
1902 - 1972 (70 years)
Julian Steward Julian Steward was born on January 31, 1902. During his life, he developed the idea of cultural ecology. Steward developed his love of nature at Deep Springs Preparatory School, which he began attending at age 16. Steward graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Zoology. Throughout his career, Steward worked at the University of Michigan (where he established the anthropology department), the University of Utah, the Smithsonian, and the National Science Foundation. Steward wrote many essays and articles regarding his theory of cultural ecology including: Cultural ecology studies how environment can affect cultural similarities and differences.
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Paul Broca
1824 - 1880 (56 years)
Pierre Paul Broca was a French physician, anatomist and anthropologist. He is best known for his research on Broca's area, a region of the frontal lobe that is named after him. Broca's area is involved with language. His work revealed that the brains of patients with aphasia contained lesions in a particular part of the cortex, in the left frontal region. This was the first anatomical proof of localization of brain function.
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Edward Sapir
1884 - 1939 (55 years)
Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States. Sapir was born in German Pomerania, in what is now northern Poland. His family emigrated to the United States of America when he was a child. He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas, who inspired him to work on Native American languages. While finishing his Ph.D. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there.
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James George Frazer
1854 - 1941 (87 years)
Sir James George Frazer was a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion. Personal life He was born on 1 January 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of Katherine Brown and Daniel F. Frazer, a chemist.
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Gregory Bateson
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature .
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Lewis H. Morgan
1818 - 1881 (63 years)
Lewis Henry Morgan was a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist who worked as a railroad lawyer. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois. Interested in what holds societies together, he proposed the concept that the earliest human domestic institution was the matrilineal clan, not the patriarchal family.
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Theodor Waitz
1821 - 1864 (43 years)
Theodor Waitz was a German psychologist and anthropologist. His research in psychology brought him into touch with anthropology, and he will be best remembered by his monumental work in six volumes, Die Anthropologie der Naturvölker .
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Hans F. K. Günther
1891 - 1968 (77 years)
Hans Friedrich Karl Günther was a German writer, an advocate of scientific racism and a eugenicist in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He was also known as "Rassengünther" or "Rassenpapst" . He is considered to have been a major influence on Nazi racialist thought.
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Alfred Cort Haddon
1855 - 1940 (85 years)
Alfred Cort Haddon, Sc.D., FRS, FRGS FRAI was an influential British anthropologist and ethnologist. Initially a biologist, who achieved his most notable fieldwork, with W.H.R. Rivers, C.G. Seligman and Sidney Ray on the Torres Strait Islands. He returned to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he had been an undergraduate, and effectively founded the School of Anthropology. Haddon was a major influence on the work of the American ethnologist Caroline Furness Jayne.
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Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
1752 - 1840 (88 years)
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He is considered to be a main founder of zoology and anthropology as comparative, scientific disciplines. He has been called the "founder of racial classifications."
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Adolf Bastian
1826 - 1905 (79 years)
Adolf Philipp Wilhelm Bastian was a 19th-century polymath best remembered for his contributions to the development of ethnography and the development of anthropology as a discipline. Modern psychology owes him a great debt, because of his theory of the Elementargedanke, which led to Carl Jung's development of the theory of archetypes. His ideas had a formative influence on the "father of American anthropology" Franz Boas, and he also influenced the thought of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell.
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Al-Biruni
973 - 1048 (75 years)
Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni , known as al-Biruni, was a Khwarazmian Iranian scholar and polymath during the Islamic Golden Age. He has been called variously the "founder of Indology", "Father of Comparative Religion", "Father of modern geodesy", and the first anthropologist.
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Michel Leiris
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Julien Michel Leiris was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer. Part of the Surrealist group in Paris, Leiris became a key member of the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and head of research in ethnography at the CNRS.
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Alfred Russel Wallace
1823 - 1913 (90 years)
Alfred Russel Wallace was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic. It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting and quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species.
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W. H. R. Rivers
1864 - 1922 (58 years)
William Halse Rivers Rivers was an English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist known for treatment of First World War officers suffering shell shock, so they could be returned to combat. Rivers' most famous patient was the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, with whom he remained close friends until his own sudden death.
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Joseph Deniker
1852 - 1918 (66 years)
Joseph Deniker was a Russian Empire and French naturalist and anthropologist, known primarily for his attempts to develop highly detailed maps of race in Europe. Life Deniker was born in 1852 to French parents in Astrakhan, Russian Empire. He first studied at the university and technical institute of St. Petersburg, where he adopted engineering as a profession, and in this capacity, traveled extensively in the petroleum districts of the Caucasus, in Central Europe, Italy and Dalmatia. Settling in Paris, France in 1876, he studied at the Sorbonne, where he received a doctorate in natural science in 1886.
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Giuseppe Sergi
1841 - 1936 (95 years)
Giuseppe Sergi was an Italian anthropologist of the early twentieth century, best known for his opposition to Nordicism in his books on the racial identity of Mediterranean peoples. He rejected existing racial typologies that identified Mediterranean peoples as "dark whites" because they implied a Nordicist conception of Mediterranean peoples descending from whites who had become racially mixed with non-whites which he claimed was false. His concept of the Mediterranean race, identified Mediterranean peoples as being an autonomous brunet race and he claimed that the Nordic race was descended from the Mediterranean race whose skin had depigmented to a pale complexion after it moved north.
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