Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson Hearst was an American philanthropist, feminist and suffragist. Hearst was the founder of the University of California Museum of Anthropology, now called the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the co-founder of the National Parent-Teacher Association.
Ishi was the last known member of the Native American Yahi people from the present-day state of California in the United States. The rest of the Yahi were killed in the California genocide in the 19th century. Widely described as the "last wild Indian" in the U.S., Ishi lived most of his life isolated from modern North American culture, and was the last known Native manufacturer of stone arrowheads. In 1911, aged 50, he emerged at a barn and corral, 2 mi (3.2 km) from downtown Oroville, California.
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. Le Guin.
Robert Harry Lowie was an Austrian-born American anthropologist. An expert on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, he was instrumental in the development of modern anthropology and has been described as "one of the key figures in the history of anthropology".
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.
Friedrich Max Uhle was a German archaeologist, whose work in Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia at the turn of the Twentieth Century had a significant impact on the practice of archaeology of South America.
Caroline Mytinger, was an American portrait painter born in Sacramento, California, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She is best known for her paintings of indigenous people in the South Seas during the late 1920s. These paintings are in the custody of the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology on UC Berkeley's campus in Berkeley, CA. Her work was featured in the museum's 2008 exhibition "Face to Face: Looking at Objects That Look at You."
Donald Ward Lathrap was an American archaeologist who specialized in the study of neolithic American culture. He was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at the time of his death.
Patrick Vinton Kirch is an American archaeologist and Professor Emeritus of Integrative Biology and the Class of 1954 Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the former Curator of Oceanic Archaeology in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and director of that museum from 1999 to 2002. Currently, he is professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Hawai'i Manoa, and a member of the board of directors of the Bishop Museum.
Ira Stuart Jacknis was an American anthropologist who studied Native American art of the Northwest Coast. Jacknis had studied anthropology and art history as an undergraduate, deepening his interests in the history of anthropology while working as an intern at the Smithsonian Institution under curator William C. Sturtevant. He then continued his studies in history and anthropology under the tutelage Nancy Munn, Raymond Fogelson, and George W. Stocking at the University of Chicago. Much of Jacknis' work connected to ethnography, art history, and the history of anthropology.
William R. Bascom was an award-winning American folklorist, anthropologist, and museum director. He was a specialist in the art and culture of West Africa and the African Diaspora, especially the Yoruba of Nigeria.
Pliny Earle Goddard was an American linguist and ethnologist noted for his extensive documentation of the languages and cultures of the Athabaskan peoples of western North America. His early research, carried out under the auspices of the University of California, Berkeley, focused on the Hupa and adjacent Athabaskan groups in northwestern California. After moving to New York in 1909 at the invitation of Franz Boas his scope expanded to include the Athabaskans of the Southwest, Canada, and Alaska. During the 1910s and 1920s. as Boas's junior colleague at the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University, Goddard played a major role in creating the academic infrastructure for American Indian linguistics and anthropology in North America.
Harold Colyer Conklin was an American anthropologist who conducted extensive ethnoecological and linguistic field research in Southeast Asia and was a pioneer of ethnoscience, documenting indigenous ways of understanding and knowing the world.
Samuel Alfred Barrett was an anthropologist and linguist who studied Native American peoples.
Lila Morris O'Neale was an American anthropologist and historian of textiles. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931 for her research on prehistoric textiles in Peru.
Isabel Truesdell Kelly (1906–1982) 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.
Cyril Daryll Forde FRAI was a British anthropologist and Africanist.
Burton Benedict was an American anthropologist. He interrupted his studies at Harvard University to serve in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. After graduation he studied for a doctorate at the London School of Economics and afterwards carried out field work with the university and McGill University in Mauritius and the Seychelles. He joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968 and spent the rest of his career there, rising to dean of social sciences. He was made director of the university's Lowie Museum of Anthropology and was responsible for securing additional funding from the William Randolph Hearst Foundation. He was director when the museum was renamed after one of its founders Phoebe Apperson Hearst. After retirement in 1994 he continued to volunteer at the museum and at the Oakland Zoo.
Thomas Talbot Waterman was an American anthropologist who studied indigenous groups in North and Central America, particularly Northern California. He is best known for being one of the anthropologists who brought Ishi to the University of California's Museum of Anthropology(later the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology).
Anna Hadwick Gayton was an American anthropologist, folklorist, and museum curator. She is most recognized for her role in "compiling and analyzing Californian Indian mythology" and was elected President of the American Folklore Society in 1950.
