Famous Archaeologists

Thomas Jefferson was born April 13, 1743, in Shadwell, Virginia. He was one of the most influential Founding Fathers of the United States. He grew up in a wealthy family with six sisters and one brother. He received an excellent education under figures like Reverend James Maury and William Small. Jefferson explored many subjects, including philosophy, mathematics, horticulture, and mechanics. This curiosity prepared him for roles as statesman, architect, and inventor. His political career began in earnest.

Mark Lehner is an American archaeologist with over 30 years of experience excavating in Egypt. As director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates, he conducts interdisciplinary archaeological investigation. Specialists examine every excavated object to map the site, from buildings down to pollen spores. His international team currently runs the Giza Plateau Mapping Project. They excavate and map the ancient city of the builders of the Giza pyramid complex, which dates to the fourth dynasty of Egypt.

Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon lived from January 5, 1906, to August 24, 1978. She was a leading British archaeologist specializing in Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She excavated Tell es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho, between 1952 and 1958. Kenyon is considered one of the most influential archaeologists of the 20th century. She served as Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford from 1962 to 1973.

Howard Carter was a British archaeologist and Egyptologist. He became world-famous after discovering the intact tomb (KV62) of Tutankhamun, the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh, in November 1922.

Stuart McKee Struever was born in 1931. He is an American archaeologist and anthropologist. Struever made major contributions to the archaeology of the Woodland Period in the US midwest. He led several archaeology research and education foundations. He taught anthropology at Northwestern University.

Jesse Walter Fewkes was an American anthropologist, archaeologist, writer, and naturalist.

Jerald T. Milanich is an American anthropologist and archaeologist specializing in Native American culture in Florida. He serves as Curator Emeritus of Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He holds multiple professorships at the University of Florida, including Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences, and the Center for Latin American Studies. Milanich earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Florida. He won several awards for his books, including the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sir Arthur John Evans lived from July 8, 1851, to July 11, 1941. He was an English archaeologist and a pioneer in studying Aegean civilization during the Bronze Age. Evans is famous for unearthing the palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete. He pursued Heinrich Schliemann's concept of a Mycenaean civilization but found a different culture: the Minoan, distinct from the structures and artifacts in the eastern Mediterranean. Evans also defined Cretan scripts, Linear A and Linear B, as well as an earlier pictographic writing.

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was born July 14, 1868, and died July 12, 1926. She was an English writer, traveller, administrator, political officer, and archaeologist. Her knowledge and contacts greatly influenced British imperial policy-making. She traveled extensively through Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Arabia. Bell supported the Hashemite dynasties in modern Jordan and Iraq alongside T. E. Lawrence. She played a major role in establishing and administering the modern state of Iraq.

John Lloyd Stephens lived from November 28, 1805, to October 13, 1852. He was an American explorer, writer, and diplomat. Stephens played a key role in rediscovering the Maya civilization across Middle America. He also planned the Panama railroad.

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey lived from August 7, 1903, to October 1, 1972. He was a Kenyan paleoanthropologist and archaeologist. His work demonstrated that humans evolved in Africa, especially through discoveries at Olduvai Gorge with his wife, Mary Leakey. Leakey established a program of palaeoanthropological inquiry in eastern Africa. Many members of the Leakey family became prominent scholars. He also fostered field research.

Karl Gustav Vollmöller, or Vollmoeller, lived from May 7, 1878, to October 18, 1948. He was a German philologist, archaeologist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and aircraft designer. Vollmöller is famous for the religious spectacle-pantomime The Miracle. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1930 film The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel), which starred Marlene Dietrich.

Sir Leonard Woolley was a British archaeologist. He is best known for his excavations at Ur in Mesopotamia. Woolley was considered one of the first 'modern' archaeologists. He received a knighthood in 1935 for his contributions to archaeology.

Alpheus Hyatt Verrill, known as Hyatt Verrill, lived from July 23, 1871, to November 14, 1954. He was an American zoologist, explorer, inventor, illustrator, and author. He was the son of Addison Emery Verrill, the first professor of zoology at Yale University. Verrill authored many books on natural history and science fiction.

John Garstang was a British archaeologist of the ancient Near East, focusing on Anatolia and the southern Levant. He was born to Walter Garstang of Blackburn and the younger brother of Professor Walter Garstang, FRS, a marine biologist and zoologist. He studied at Queen Elizabeth's, Blackburn, and Jesus College, Oxford. After undergraduate studies in mathematics at Oxford, he focused his attention on archaeology. From 1897 to 1908, he excavated Roman sites in Britain, Egypt, Nubia, Asia Minor, and North Syria. Between 1909 and 1914, he worked in the Sudan and Meroe.

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, 4th Baronet (April 30, 1834 – May 28, 1913), was an English banker, politician, philanthropist, scientist, and polymath. He worked in his family company as a banker but contributed significantly to archaeology, ethnography, and biology. Lubbock coined the terms "Paleolithic" and "Neolithic" for the Old and New Stone Ages. He helped establish archaeology as a scientific discipline and influenced nineteenth-century debates on evolution.

Robert Duane Ballard, born June 30, 1942, is a retired United States Navy officer and a University of Rhode Island professor of oceanography. He is known for underwater archaeology, maritime archaeology, and the archaeology of shipwrecks. He discovered the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998. In 2002, he found the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 and visited Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who saved its crew. He currently leads ocean exploration on E/V Nautilus.

Count Jan Potocki (March 8, 1761 – December 23, 1815) was a Polish nobleman and adventurer. He served as a Polish Army Captain of Engineers, ethnologist, Egyptologist, linguist, traveler, and author during the Enlightenment. His exploits made him a legendary figure in Poland. Outside Poland, he is known for his novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.

Ignace Jay Gelb was a Polish-American ancient historian and Assyriologist. He pioneered the scientific study of writing systems.

Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American cultural anthropologist. He earned his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first anthropology doctorate awarded by Columbia. Kroeber became the first professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Anthropology. He directed the Museum of Anthropology from 1909 through 1947. Kroeber studied Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people.

Thor Heyerdahl (October 6, 1914 – April 18, 2002) was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with backgrounds in zoology, botany, and geography. He became known for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947. During this voyage, he sailed 8,000 km (5,000 mi) across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. The expedition aimed to show that ancient people could make long sea voyages and created contact between different cultures. This work supported a diffusionist model of cultural development.

Kwang-chih Chang, also known as K.C. Chang, was a Chinese/Taiwanese archaeologist and sinologist. He taught archaeology at Harvard University and served as Vice-President of the Academia Sinica. He was also a curator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He introduced modern Western methods into the study of ancient Chinese history. He brought new discoveries in Chinese archaeology to Western audiences by translating Chinese texts into English. He pioneered Taiwanese archaeology and encouraged multi-disciplinary research.

Mary Douglas Leakey, FBA (née Nicol, February 6, 1913 – December 9, 1996), was a British paleoanthropologist. She discovered the first fossilized Proconsul skull, an extinct ape now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also found the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Mary Leakey worked with her husband, Louis Leakey, at Olduvai Gorge. They uncovered fossils of ancient hominines and the earliest hominins, along with the stone tools they produced. She developed a system for classifying these stone tools.

Prosper Mérimée (September 28, 1803 – September 23, 1870) was an important French writer of the Romantic school and a pioneer in the novella form. He also acted as an archaeologist and historian, playing a role in architectural preservation. He is best known for his novella Carmen, which inspired Bizet's opera. Mérimée learned Russian and translated works by major writers like Pushkin and Gogol into French. From 1830 to 1860, he served as the inspector of French history.

Zahi Hawass (Arabic: زاهي حواس‎; born May 28, 1947) is an Egyptian archaeologist, Egyptologist, and former Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs. He has worked at archaeological sites in the Nile Delta, the Western Desert, and the Upper Nile Valley.

Walter Bryan Jones, Ph.D. (1895–1977), was an American geologist and archaeologist. Born in Alabama, Jones earned his Bachelor of Science from the University of Alabama and his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Jones and his three brothers, Howard, Edwin, and Raymond, served in World War I and World War II. During World War II, he was stationed in New Guinea. He sent anthropological collections back to the Alabama Museum of Natural History. Jones's oldest son, Nelson Bolling Jones, was killed in Germany on April 2, 1945, fighting the German Army. He lived to see another son, Doug.

Sir Robert Ludwig Mond, FRS, FRSE (September 9, 1867 – October 22, 1938), was a British chemist and archaeologist.

John Lewis Romer, born 30 September 1941 in Surrey, UK, is a British Egyptologist, historian, and archaeologist. He created and appeared in many TV archaeology series. These include Romer's Egypt, Ancient Lives, Testament, The Seven Wonders of the World, Byzantium: The Lost Empire, and Great Excavations: The Story of Archaeology.

Gabriel Byrne is a renowned Irish actor, film director, producer, writer, cultural ambassador, and audiobook narrator. He was born on May 12, 1950, in Dublin, Ireland. Byrne pursued an interest in the arts despite early challenges. He attended University College Dublin to study archaeology and linguistics. He made his acting debut in the Irish drama series The Riordans and quickly gained recognition for his talent. This success opened doors to Hollywood.

Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen (November 30, 1817 – November 1, 1903) was a German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, and archaeologist. He was one of the greatest classicists of the 19th century. His work on Roman history remains important for modern research. In 1902, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work, 'A History of Rome'. He received this award after nomination by 18 members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

James Henry Breasted (August 27, 1865 – December 2, 1935) was an American archaeologist, Egyptologist, and historian. After earning his PhD from the University of Berlin in 1894, he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago. In 1901, he became director of the Haskell Oriental Museum at the university, focusing on Egypt. In 1905, Breasted was promoted to full professor and held the first chair in Egyptology and Oriental History in the United States. In 1919, he founded the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, which became a center for interdisciplinary study.

Théodore Reinach (July 3, 1860 – October 28, 1928) was a French archaeologist, mathematician, lawyer, papyrologist, philologist, epigrapher, historian, numismatist, musicologist, professor, and politician.

William Foxwell Albright (May 24, 1891 – September 19, 1971) was an American archaeologist, biblical scholar, philologist, and expert on ceramics.

Ian Richard Hodder was born 23 November 1948 in Bristol. He is a British archaeologist and a pioneer of postprocessualist theory in archaeology. This theory first took root among his students and in his own work between 1980 and 1990. During this time, he had students like Henrietta Moore, Ajay Pratap, Nandini Rao, Mike Parker Pearson, Paul Lane, John Muke, Sheena Crawford, Nick Merriman, Michael Shanks, and Christopher Tilley. As of 2002, Hodder holds the Dunlevie Family Professorship of Anthropology at Stanford University in the United States. Since 1993, Hodder and an international team of archaeologists have carried out new research.

Fred Vargas is the pseudonym for Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau (born June 7, 1957 in Paris), a French historian, archaeologist, and novelist. She is known for her work on the Black Death as a historian and archeologist. Her crime fiction policiers won three International Dagger Awards from the Crime Writers Association for three novels: 2006, 2008, and 2009. She became the first author to win this honor. Siân Reynolds translated her works into English; he was also recognized by the international award.

William Henry Holmes (December 1, 1846 – April 20, 1933), known as W.H. Holmes, was an American explorer, anthropologist, archaeologist, artist, scientific illustrator, cartographer, mountain climber, geologist, and museum director.

Sylvanus Griswold Morley (June 7, 1883 – September 2, 1948) was an American archaeologist, epigrapher, and Mayanist scholar. He significantly contributed to the study of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization in the early 20th century. Morley directed extensive excavations at the Maya site of Chichen Itza on behalf of the Carnegie Institution. He published many large compilations and treatises on Maya hieroglyphic writing. 'Vay' Morley was one of the leading Mesoamerican archaeologists.

Edgar Lee Hewett (November 23, 1865 – December 31, 1946) was an American archaeologist and anthropologist focusing on the Native American communities of New Mexico and the southwestern United States. He gained fame for pushing the Antiquities Act, a pioneering conservation law. He founded and first directed the Museum of New Mexico. He also served as the first president of the New Mexico Normal School, which is now New Mexico Highlands University. Hewett's dealings with Maria Martinez, the great potter of San Ildefonso Pueblo, were instrumental.

Zelia Maria Magdalena Nuttall was an American archaeologist and anthropologist. She specialized in pre-Aztec Mexican cultures and pre-Columbian manuscripts. She discovered two forgotten manuscripts in private collections, including the Codex Zouche-Nuttall. Nuttall was among the first to identify artifacts dating from the pre-Aztec period.

Henri Édouard Prosper Breuil (1877–1961), known as Abbé Breuil, was a French Catholic priest. He served as a member of the Society of Jesus and worked as an archaeologist, anthropologist, ethnologist, and geologist. Breuil studied cave art in the Somme and Dordogne valleys. He also studied areas including Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, China, Ethiopia, British Somaliland, and Southern Africa.

Kathleen O'Neal Gear was an award-winning American writer born in Tulare, California. She earned a B.A. in Religious Studies from California State University, Bakersfield in 1977. Gear completed graduate work in archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her M.A. from California State University, Chico and conducted Ph.D. research in American Indian history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Gear served as a state historian and archaeologist for Wyoming, Kansas, and Nebraska for the U.S. Department of the Interior.

David Russell Harris, FSA, FBA (December 14, 1930 – December 25, 2013), was a British geographer, anthropologist, archaeologist, and academic. He specialized in the origins of agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals. Harris directed the Institute of Archaeology at University College London and served as Professor Emeritus of the Human Environment at the Institute.

Gordon Randolph Willey (March 7, 1913 – April 28, 2002) was an American archaeologist. Colleagues called him the "dean" of New World archaeology. Willey conducted fieldwork in South America, Central America, and the Southeastern United States. He pioneered theories for settlement patterns. Willey worked as an anthropologist for the Smithsonian Institution and taught at Harvard University.

Barry Clifford (born 1945) is an underwater archaeological explorer. He discovered the remains of Samuel Bellamy's wrecked pirate ship, the Whydah. The Whydah is the only fully verified and authenticated pirate shipwreck from the Golden Age of Piracy found globally. Artifacts from this wreck give historians unique insights into the material, political, and social culture of early 18th-century piracy. The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in 1988 that Clifford rightfully owned 100% of the Whydah.

Harold Lewis Dibble (1951 – June 10, 2018) was an American Paleolithic archaeologist. His main research focused on lithic reduction. He conducted fieldwork in France, Egypt, and Morocco. Dibble was a professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He served as Curator-in-Charge of the European Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Professor Ervn Čern-Křetnsk was a Doctor of Medicine and Professor at Charles University in Prague. He was born in 1913 in Podom, Moravia. He received his college education in the Těn Region, where he lived since age 12. He studied medicine in Brno. The Gestapo arrested him in November 1939. He spent time imprisoned at Brnos pilberk Castle and was then deported to the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg Nazi concentration camp. As a doctor, he worked in ear, nose, and throat (ORL) clinics in Brno, Hradec Krlov, and the Central Military Hospital in Prague.

Henri "Hans" Frankfort (February 24, 1897 – July 16, 1954) was a Dutch Egyptologist, archaeologist, and orientalist.

Maximilian Schich is a German archaeologist, semantic data analyst, and art historian.

Sir Marc Aurel Stein (Hungarian: Stein Márk Aurél; November 26, 1862 – October 26, 1943) was a Hungarian-born British archaeologist. He gained fame for his explorations and archaeological discoveries in Central Asia. Stein also taught at Indian universities and worked as an ethnographer, geographer, linguist, and surveyor. His collection of books and manuscripts from the Dunhuang caves is vital for studying the history and art of Buddhism in Central Asia. He wrote several volumes on his expeditions and finds, including Ancient Khotan and Serindia.

Augustus Le Plongeon (May 4, 1826 – December 13, 1908) was a French-American photographer, archeologist, antiquarian, and author. He studied the pre-Columbian ruins of America, focusing on the Maya civilization in the northern Yucatán Peninsula. Although some of his writings contained controversial notions that later proved false, Le Plongeon left a lasting legacy through his photographs of the ancient ruins. He is also considered one of the earliest proponents of Mayanism.