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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

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 .

#3352

William Abel Caudill

1920 - 1972 (52 years)

William Abel Caudill was an applied medical anthropologist. His work centered on psychiatry, and the influence of culture on personality. Caudill was especially interested in diagnosis and treatment of mental issues in Japan. Caudill was the first to identify the field of medical anthropology, and was active in organizing it during its formative years.

#3353

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.

#3354

Phyllis Kaberry

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...

#3355

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.

#3356

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.

#3357

R. J. Hopper

1910 - 1987 (77 years)

Robert John Hopper, FSA was an archaeologist and historian of Ancient Greece. He was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Sheffield. He was Dean of the university's Faculty of Arts from 1967 to 1970.

#3358

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.

#3359

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.

#3360

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.

#3361

George Wynn Brereton Huntingford

1901 - 1978 (77 years)

George Wynn Brereton Huntingford was an English linguist, anthropologist and historian. He lectured in East African languages and cultures at SOAS, University of London from 1950 until 1966. In 1966, Huntingford went to Canada to organise the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Brunswick at Fredericton, and retired to Málaga the next year, where he lived after his retirement.

#3362

Hallam L. Movius

Hallam L. Movius

1907 - 1987 (80 years)

Hallam Leonard Movius was an American archaeologist most famous for his work on the Palaeolithic period. Career He was born in Newton, Massachusetts and attended Harvard College, graduating in 1930. After receiving his PhD from Harvard and serving in the 12th Air Force in North Africa and Italy during World War II, he returned to Harvard and became a professor of archaeology there. Eventually he also became curator of Paleolithic Archaeology at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

#3363

David Bidney

1908 - 1987 (79 years)

David Bidney was an American anthropologist and philosopher associated with the Indiana University. In 1950 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in anthropology and cultural studies.

#3364

Dorothea Leighton

1908 - 1989 (81 years)

Dorothea Cross Leighton was an American social psychiatrist and a founder of the field of medical anthropology. Leighton held faculty positions at Cornell University and the University of North Carolina and she was the founding president of the Society for Medical Anthropology. She and her husband, Alexander Leighton, wrote The Navajo Door, which has been described as the first written work in applied medical anthropology.

#3365

Hortense Powdermaker

Hortense Powdermaker

1900 - 1970 (70 years)

Hortense Powdermaker was an American anthropologist best known for her ethnographic studies of African Americans in rural America and of Hollywood. Early life and education Born to a Jewish family, Powdermaker spent her childhood in Reading, Pennsylvania, and in Baltimore, Maryland. She studied history and the humanities at Goucher College, graduating in 1921. She worked as a labor organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers but became dissatisfied with the prospects of the U.S. labor movement amid the repression of the Palmer Raids. She left the United States to study at the London Schoo...

#3366

Theophile Meek

1881 - 1966 (85 years)

A scholar at the University of Toronto, Theophile James Meek published widely on archaeology, corresponded with Wm. F. Albright, and was a frequent contributor to the Encyclopædia Britannica on subjects related to the archaeology of both Palestine and Egypt. He may have played a part in working out the chronology of Egypt which soon became the prevailing mainstream chronology among scholars, and which the Encyclopedia Americana still upholds today. More recently, the Britannica has lowered its dates somewhat currently, with Manfred Bietak, an eminent Egyptologist placing them even later.

#3367

Charles H. Fairbanks

1913 - 1984 (71 years)

Charles Herron Fairbanks was an archaeologist/anthropologist. He conducted archaeology at the Ocmulgee National Monument in Macon, Georgia where he developed rigorous, painstaking field methodology. His 1967-1969 excavations on the slave cabins at Kingsley Plantation, Fort George Island, Florida—the southernmost of the Sea Islands—were the first of their kind in the United States. Undertaken to "learn more about slave life," he called his practice "Plantation Archaeology," and for more than a decade the graduate program he led at the University of Florida was the only one in the nation with a...

#3368

Edward H. Spicer

1906 - 1983 (77 years)

Edward Holland Spicer was an American anthropologist who combined the four-field approach outlined by Franz Boas and trained in the structural-function approach of Radcliffe-Brown and the University of Chicago. He joined the anthropology faculty at the University of Arizona in 1946 and retired from teaching in 1976. Spicer contributed to all four fields of anthropology through his study of the American Indians, the Southwest, and the clash of cultures defined in his award-winning book, Cycles of Conquest. Spicer combined the elements of historical, structural, and functional analysis to address the question of socio-cultural change.

#3369

Robert Bennett Bean

1874 - 1944 (70 years)

Robert Bennett Bean was an associate professor of anatomy and ethnologist adept to craniometry and the concept of "race", whose scientific work was discredited by his mentor but who nonetheless became a professor at the University of Virginia and remained so until his death.

#3370

Biraja Sankar Guha

1894 - 1961 (67 years)

Biraja Sankar Guha was an Indian physical anthropologist, who classified Indian people into races around the early part of the 20th century and he was also a pioneer to popularize his scientific ideas in the vernacular. He was the first Director of the Anthropological Survey of India .

#3371

J. Louis Giddings

1909 - 1964 (55 years)

James Louis Giddings Jr. was an American archaeologist who made significant contributions to Arctic archaeology. During three decades of his fieldwork in Northwest Alaska he established evidence of human occupation ranging as far back as 4,000 B.C.E.

#3372

George E. Mylonas

1898 - 1988 (90 years)

George Emmanuel Mylonas was a prominent Greek and Aegean archaeologist. Early life While a student in Athens during the Greco–Turkish War of 1919–1922, he joined the Greek Army and was later taken prisoner. While a prisoner of war he lost enough weight that the permanent ID band on his wrist was easily taken on and off and exchanged with other prisoners. His future wife fled Asia Minor with only her tennis racket and spent the war living with family friends in Greece.

#3373

Wilhelm Baehrens

Wilhelm Baehrens

1885 - 1929 (44 years)

Wilhelm Adolf Baehrens was a German classical scholar. The son of professor Emil Baehrens , Wilhelm Baehrens was born in Groningen. After visiting the local gymnasium he stepped in his early deceased father's footsteps by studying philology and papyrology at the University of Groningen. He also stayed few semesters at Halle, Göttingen and Berlin. In 1910 Baehrens received his doctor's degree at Groningen with his dissertation Panegyricorum latinorum editionis novae praefatio maior accedit Plinii panegyricus. For two years he acted as assistant schoolmaster at the Groningen gymnasium, until in 1912 he published his Beiträge zur lateinischen Syntax.

#3374

Božo Škerlj

1904 - 1961 (57 years)

Božo Škerlj was a Slovene anthropologist, author of eleven books and over 200 scientific articles published in journals at home and abroad. Škerlj was born in Vienna in 1908. He studied biology and geography at the University of Ljubljana and graduated in 1926. He then specialized in Prague and Brno and later in Germany and Norway. In 1944 he was interred in Dachau concentration camp and after the end of the Second World War became professor at the University in Ljubljana. He died in 1961 in Ljubljana.

#3375

Herman Wirth

1885 - 1981 (96 years)

Herman Wirth was a Dutch-German historian, a Nazi and scholar of ancient religions and symbols. He co-founded the SS-organization Ahnenerbe but was later pushed out by Heinrich Himmler. Biography Born in Utrecht on 6 May 1885, Wirth studied Flemish Dutch philology, literature, history and musicology at Utrecht and Leipzig, receiving his doctorate in 1911 from the University of Basel with a dissertation on the demise of the Dutch folk song. He taught Dutch language at the University of Berlin from 1909 to 1914.

#3376

George Augustus Auden

1872 - 1957 (85 years)

George Augustus Auden was an English physician, professor of public health, school medical officer, and writer on archaeological subjects. Biography Auden was born at Horninglow, Burton-upon-Trent, the sixth son of John Auden, the first vicar of the Church of St John the Divine, and his wife Sarah Eliza, daughter of William Hopkins, of Dunstall, Staffordshire. The Audens were minor gentry with a strong clerical tradition, originally of Rowley Regis, which was then in Staffordshire.

#3377

Irene Emery

1900 - 1981 (81 years)

Irene Emery was an American art historian, scholar, curator, textile anthropologist, sculptor, and modern dancer. She was known for her pioneering research in systematically describing global textiles, and was a leading authority on ancient fabrics and textiles, and for her published book The Primary Structures of Fabrics: An Illustrated Classification .

#3378

Giovanni Becatti

1912 - 1973 (61 years)

Giovanni Becatti was an Italian Classical art historian and archaeologist. Born at Siena, Becatti was educated at the University of Rome under Giulio Giglioli. Becatti was appointed to the Superintendency of Ostia in 1938. He was professor of Archeology and History of Classical Art at the University of Pisa and at the University La Sapienza of Rome .

#3379

Edith Hall Dohan

1877 - 1943 (66 years)

Edith Hayward Hall Dohan was an American archaeologist who earned Bryn Mawr College's first classical archaeology Ph.D. Hall was part of an excavation team with Harriet Boyd in her early career that most notably brought the first Mycenaean and pre-Mycenaean collection to be displayed in America. Hall later wrote The Decorative Art of Crete in the Bronze Age, which was published in 1906 that breaks down the evolution of the art and pottery in Crete from the Bronze Age.

#3380

W. J. Varley

1904 - 1976 (72 years)

William Jones Varley, FSA was a British geographer and archaeologist, particularly known for his excavations of English Iron Age hillforts, including Maiden Castle and Eddisbury hillfort in Cheshire, Old Oswestry hillfort in Shropshire, and Castle Hill in West Yorkshire. He was also a pioneer of geographical research and education in colonial Ghana where he worked from 1947 to 1956, and was involved in historical conservation there.

#3381

Harry Skinner

1886 - 1978 (92 years)

Henry Devenish Skinner , known as Harry Skinner or H.D. Skinner, was a notable New Zealand soldier, ethnologist, university lecturer, museum curator and director, and librarian. Early life and education The son of William Skinner and Margaret Bracken Devenish, Henry Devenish Skinner was born in New Plymouth, New Zealand, on 18 December 1886.

#3382

Diane Barwick

1938 - 1986 (48 years)

Diane Elizabeth McEachern Barwick was a Canadian-born anthropologist, historian, and Aboriginal-rights activist. She was also a renowned researcher and teacher in the field of Australian Aboriginal culture and society.

#3383

Axel Boëthius

1889 - 1969 (80 years)

Axel Boëthius was a scholar and archaeologist of Etruscan culture. Boëthius was primarily a student of Etruscan and Italic architecture. His father was the historian Simon Boëthius. As a student, Boëthius studied at the Uppsala University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1918. He taught at Uppsala during which time he excavated at Mycenae in Greece. In 1925 he was selected as the first director of the Swedish Institute at Rome by the Swedish crown prince Gustav Adolf . He became professor of archaeology at the Göteborg University in 1934, a post he held until 1955. He also served as rector of the university .

#3384

Furio Jesi

1941 - 1980 (39 years)

Furio Jesi was an Italian historian, writer, archaeologist, and philosopher. Biography The only son of "war hero" Bruno Jesi, Furio Jesi was an independent scholar of myth, Egyptology, history of Mediterranean religions, philology and archeology, most notable for his work on extending the ideas of Károly Kerényi including studies of the science of myth and the difference between classic Myths and "Technified Myths".

#3385

Pei Wenzhong

1904 - 1982 (78 years)

Pei Wenzhong , or W. C. Pei, was a Chinese paleontologist, archaeologist and anthropologist born in Fengnan. He is considered a founding figure of Chinese anthropology. Career Pei graduated from Peking University in 1928 and went to work for the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Geological Survey of China joining the excavations of the Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian, where he was named the field director of the excavations the following year. The work at Zhoukoudian was carried out under difficult conditions: for example, the scientists had to ride there on mules, some 40 km southwest of the city of Beijing.

#3386

Eva Verbitsky Hunt

1934 - 1980 (46 years)

Muriel Eva Verbitsky de Hunt was an Argentine cultural anthropologist, academic and writer who moved to the United States in the late 1950s. She is remembered for her contributions to symbolic anthropology and ethnohistory. Together with her husband Robert Hunt, she performed innovative regional work in Oaxaca, Mexico, in the 1960s.

#3387

D.R. Bhandarkar

1875 - 1950 (75 years)

Devadatta Ramakrishna Bhandarkar was an Indian archaeologist and epigraphist who worked with the Archaeological Survey of India . Born in Marathi Gaud Saraswat Brahmin family, he was the son of eminent Indologist, R. G. Bhandarkar.

#3388

Wilhelm Kubitschek

1858 - 1936 (78 years)

Wilhelm Kubitschek was an Austrian classical historian, epigrapher and numismatist. From 1875 he studied history, epigraphy and archaeology at the University of Vienna, where his teachers included Otto Hirschfeld and Otto Benndorf. Afterwards, he furthered his education in Berlin as a student of Theodor Mommsen. From 1881 he taught classes at gymnasiums in Hollabrunn and Vienna, and in 1887 qualified as a university lecturer in ancient history. In 1896 he became an associate professor at the University of Graz, and during the following year, returned to Vienna as curator of the Imperial Coin Collection at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

#3389

Kazimierz Żurowski

1909 - 1987 (78 years)

Kazimierz Żurowski was a Polish archaeologist. He was a professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, and researcher of a Bronze Age and early Middle Ages. Author of book Gniezno, pierwsza stolica Polski .

#3390

Sune Lindqvist

1887 - 1976 (89 years)

Sune Lindqvist was a Swedish archaeologist and scholar. He worked at the Swedish History Museum, where he was responsible for the finds from the boat graves at Valsgärde, and later at Uppsala University, where he wrote two major works alongside several hundred other publications.

#3391

Otto E. Ravn

1881 - 1952 (71 years)

Otto Emil Ravn was a Danish Assyriologist and professor at the University of Copenhagen.

#3392

Lodewijk Grondijs

Lodewijk Grondijs

1878 - 1961 (83 years)

Lodewijk Herman Grondijs or Louis Grondijs was a Dutch Byzantologist, physics teacher, war correspondent and soldier. Early life Grondijs was born in the Dutch East-Indies, now known as Indonesia, and via his mother was one eighth Indonesian. He spent most of his youth in the East Indies and graduated in 1896 from grammar school in Surabaya.

#3393

E. Wyllys Andrews IV

1916 - 1971 (55 years)

Edward Wyllys Andrews IV was an American archaeologist noted for research of Maya civilization. During his career with Tulane University's Middle American Research Institute, Andrews focused on Mayan ruins, rediscovering several sites and leading investigation into Balankanche, Kulubá, Coba, and more.

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