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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Anthropology,
#3351
Otto E. Ravn
1881 - 1952 (71 years)
Otto Emil Ravn was a Danish Assyriologist and professor at the University of Copenhagen.
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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.
Go to Profile#3353
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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Johannes Brøndsted
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Johannes Balthasar Brøndsted was a Danish archaeologist and prehistorian. He was a professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of the National Museum of Denmark. Biography Brøndsted was born at Grundfør in Jutland, Denmark. He was the son of Kristine Margrethe Bruun and Holger Brøndsted . His father was a parish priest. In 1909, he took his matriculation examination at Sorø Academy, after which he briefly studied law and art history at the University of Copenhagen and took his examination in classical philology in 1916. In 1920, he received his doctorate for his work on the ...
Go to Profile#3355
Gavril Katsarov
1874 - 1958 (84 years)
Gavril Iliev Katsarov was a Bulgarian historian, classical philologist and archeologist. Rector of Sofia University. Director of the National Archaeological Museum and the Bulgarian Archeological Institute.
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Homer Barnett
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Homer Garner Barnett was an American anthropologist and teacher. Education He began his studies at Stanford in civil engineering but soon quit to rethink his major. When he returned to Stanford it was as a liberal arts major with an emphasis on philosophy. He graduated in 1927. He later attended the University of California, Berkeley for his Ph.D., granted in 1938. His specialization was culture change and applied anthropology.
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Ella Kivikoski
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Ella Margareta Kivikoski was the first Finnish female to earn a doctorate in archaeology in Finland. In 1931, she studied at the Baltic Institute in Stockholm and developed a scholarly working relationship with the Estonian archaeologist Harri Moora. She was a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Helsinki from 1948 until 1969, specializing in both Finnish and Nordic archaeology. Her specialty was the Finnish Iron Age.
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Jan Czekanowski
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Jan Czekanowski was a Polish anthropologist, statistician, ethnographer, traveller, and linguist. His scientific contributions include introducing his system of racial classification and founding the field of computational linguistics.
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Sverre Marstrander
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Sverre Marstrander was a Norwegian professor in archaeology. Marstrander was born in Oslo, Norway. He earned his Magister degree in classical archaeology at the University of Oslo in 1937. He worked with the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters at Trondheim . Marstrander became a professor in Nordic archaeology at the University of Oslo in 1968. In that same year he was appointed as the manager of the University of Oslo Museum of National Antiquities and was in the position until 1980. His most important studies were in the research of Norwegian Bronze Age rock carvings, which showed in his dr.philos.
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Ramaprasad Chanda
1873 - 1942 (69 years)
Ramaprasad Chanda was an Indian anthropologist, historian and archaeologist from Bengal. A pioneer in his field in South Asia, Chanda's lasting legacy is the Varendra Research Museum, he established in Rajshahi , a leading institute for research on the history of Bengal. He was the first head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Calcutta from 1920- 1921. He was also a professional archaeologist and worked in the Archaeological Survey of India. Chanda was one of the founders the Indian Anthropological Institute and was its president during 1938–1942. He represented India in the first International Congress of Anthropology held in London in 1934.
Go to Profile#3361
Clairève Grandjouan
1929 - 1982 (53 years)
Clairève or Claireve Grandjouan was a French-born American archaeologist. She had a B.A. and Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College. After working on excavations in Athens, she became General Secretary of the Archaeological Institute of America and editor of its Bulletin, while teaching at New York University . She then taught at Hunter College from 1968, becoming chairman of classical and Oriental studies in 1968 and full professor in 1981.
Go to Profile#3362
Gero von Merhart
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Gero Merhart von Bernegg was a German archaeologist. Although he worked at the same time when German nationalism and Nazi archaeology was dominant in Germany, he was not a "Nazi archaeologist". He came into conflict with Hans Reinerth.
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Shakir Mustafa Salim
1919 - 1985 (66 years)
Shakir Mustafa Salim was an Iraqi social anthropologist who taught in the Department of Sociology at Baghdad University. He compiled A Dictionary of Anthropology: English-Arabic . Marsh Dwellers of the Euphrates Delta Salim is best known for his groundbreaking ethnographic work, Marsh Dwellers of the Euphrates Delta, submitted as his doctoral thesis in University College, London , first published in Arabic in Baghdad in two volumes , and subsequently published in English as number 23 in the series London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology . This was an anthropological repor...
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L. P. Wenham
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Leslie Peter Wenham FSA was a British archaeologist, historian, and professor who excavated in York, on Hadrian's Wall and Malton. He was the first to produce a comprehensive report of a Romano-British Cemetery.
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Ernst Herzfeld
1879 - 1948 (69 years)
Ernst Emil Herzfeld was a German archaeologist and Iranologist. Life Herzfeld was born in Celle, Province of Hanover. He studied architecture in Munich and Berlin, while also taking classes in Assyriology, ancient history and art history.
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Konrad Jażdżewski
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Konrad Jażdżewski was a Polish professor of archeology, doctor honoris causa at the University of Łódź. He was the first to conduct excavations at Brześć Kujawski. Publications JAZDZEWSKI, KONRAD. Poland. 240 pp. with 77 photos, 27 line drawings, 3 maps, & 3 tables, 8vo, cloth. New York, Praeger, 1965. Ancient People and Places Series.Konrad Jażdżewski, Urgeschichte Mitteleuropas .Archaeological Research on course of the new investments - Interstate Highways A-1 and A-2, by foundation of Konrad Jażdżewski Institute of archeology and Anthropology
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Dorothy Lamb
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Lady Brooke Nicholson, , better known by her maiden name Dorothy Lamb, was a British archaeologist and writer known for her catalogue of terracotta in the Acropolis Museum, Athens and her work in Mediterranean field archaeology.
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Isabelle Raubitschek
1914 - 1988 (74 years)
Isabelle Kelly Raubitschek was an American art historian, archaeologist, and professor of art at Stanford University. Biography Raubitschek was born in Boston, and was the oldest of three children. She began to study foreign languages as a child, eventually becoming fluent in Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Latin, Italian, French and German. She met and studied with the art historian, Margarete Bieber, when she attended Barnard College in 1935. While at Barnard, she received the Lucille Pulitzer scholarship, which provided finances for four full years of study. She continued her graduate education at Columbia University and in 1936 went to the Institute of Art and Archaeology at Sorbonne.
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Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz
1839 - 1911 (72 years)
Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz was a German archeologist. He has been called the founder of modern iconology . He served as director of the collection of antique sculpture and vases at the Berlin Museum and also as the director of the antiquarium of the Berlin Museum . Kekulé was the nephew of the organic chemist August Kekulé.
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Santo Mazzarino
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Santo Mazzarino was an Italian historian considered to be a leading 20th-century historian of ancient Rome. He was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. Mazzarino was born in Catania. As a scholar and faculty member of the University of Catania and University of Rome La Sapienza, Mazzarino was viewed as one of Italy's leading historians. His influential book La fine del mondo antico examined the death of Rome as a result of decadence. The book was widely read among non-specialists as well and has been translated into several languages. Mazzarino's primary historical contributions covered sub...
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Hans Schleif
1902 - 1945 (43 years)
Hans Philipp Oswald Schleif was a German architect, architectural and classical archaeologist and member of the SS , last occupying the rank of Standartenführer . He was a member of the Nazi Party since 1937, with membership number 5,380,876.
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Emanuel Löwy
1857 - 1938 (81 years)
Emanuel Löwy, or Emanuel Loewy was a classical archaeologist and theorist who employed the methodology of universal psychological sources of form in his work. Löwy was influenced by the concept of "das Gedächtnisbild" by Ernst Brücke. Löwy was also a friend of the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Among his academic specialties was the art of ancient Greek vase painting.
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André Godard
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
André Godard was an archaeologist, architect and historian of French and Middle Eastern Art. He served as the director of the Iranian Archeological Service for many years. Life Godard was born in Chaumont. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris, he studied Middle Eastern archaeology, particularly that of Iran, and later became known for designing the National Museum of Iran, where he was appointed inaugural director in 1936. He was also instrumental in the design of Tehran University campus.
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Jotham Johnson
1905 - 1967 (62 years)
Jotham Johnson was an American classical archaeologist. He was educated at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania where he received his doctorate in 1931. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh and then joined the faculty of New York University. He was the chairman of classics at the time of his death from an apparent heart attack.
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Wilhelmina van Ingen Elarth
1905 - 1969 (64 years)
Wilhelmina van Ingen Elarth was an archaeologist and art history and classical studies professor. She studied at Vassar and received her doctorate at Radcliffe. In addition to her research contributions to the classics, she also bridged her interest to contemporary art and architecture. Her grandfather was Henry van Ingen.
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Otto Reche
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Otto Carl Reche was a German anthropologist and professor from Glatz , Prussian Silesia. He was active in researching whether there was a correlation between blood types and race. During the Second World War he openly advocated the genocide of ethnic Poles. Once a member of the Nazi Party, he remained active in anthropological issues following the downfall of Nazi Germany.
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Adolf Ellegard Jensen
1899 - 1965 (66 years)
Adolf Ellegard Jensen was one of the most important German ethnologists of the first half of the 20th century. Jensen's main research interests were myth, ritual and cult. He furthered the theory of Cultural Morphology founded by Leo Frobenius. Jensen is mostly known for his research on religious sacrifice that led him to the introduction of the concept of Dema Deity. His best-known work is 'Myth and Cult Among Primitive Peoples', published in 1951.
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Erich Swoboda
1896 - 1964 (68 years)
Erich Swoboda was an Austrian historian and ancient Roman archaeologist. In 1946, he became an associate professor at the University of Graz and became the director of the Institute for the History of Antiquity and Antiquity in Vienna. From 1951 to 1953, he served as a dean, and from 1960 to 1961 was the rector of the university. He received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
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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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