Vocation : Science : Anthropology

D. L. True (August 31, 1923 – June 20, 2001) was an archaeologist who worked in California, particularly San Diego County, and in northern Chile.
Born in San Pedro, California, son of a lumberyard foreman, True worked in a shipyard and served as an aerial-gunnery instructor for the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. After the war he established a small avocado ranch in Pauma Valley, an inland area in northern San Diego County, also working as a school bus driver.
True became interested in and thoroughly familiar with the archaeological remains of the Pauma region's prehistoric cultures. Under the mentorship of Clement W. Meighan, he enrolled in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was cited by Time magazine as one of the dozen top graduates in 1961. He went on to receive his doctorate from UCLA in 1966, with a dissertation entitled "Archaeological Differentiation of Shoshonean and Yuman Speaking Groups in Southern California". He served on the anthropology faculty of the University of California, Davis, from 1965 until his retirement.
True was instrumental in defining the Pauma, San Luis Rey, and Cuyamaca complexes and in elucidating their roles in regional prehistory. Together with Claude N. Warren, he also helped to clarify understanding of the early San Dieguito and La Jolla complexes.

Moritz Freiherr von Leonhardi (9 March 1856 – 27 October 1910) was a German anthropologist.

Clyde Snow (January 7, 1928 – May 16, 2014) was an American forensic anthropologist. Some of his skeletal confirmations include John F. Kennedy, victims of John Wayne Gacy, King Tutankhamun, victims of the Oklahoma City bombing, and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Ricardo E. Alegría Gallardo (April 14, 1921 – July 7, 2011) was a Puerto Rican scholar, cultural anthropologist and archaeologist known as the "father of modern Puerto Rican archaeology".

Lydia Cabrera (May 20, 1899, in Havana, Cuba – September 19, 1991, in Miami, Florida) was a Cuban independent ethnographer, writer, and literary activist. She was an authority on Santería and other Afro-Cuban religions. During her lifetime she published over one hundred books; little of her work is available in English. Her most important book is El Monte (Spanish: "The Wilderness"), which was the first major ethnographic study of Afro-Cuban traditions, herbalism and religion. First published in 1954, the book became a "textbook" for those who practice Lukumi (orisha religion originating from the Yoruba and neighboring ethnic groups) and Palo Monte (a central African faith) both religions reaching the Caribbean through enslaved Africans. Her papers and research materials were donated to the Cuban Heritage Collection - the largest repository of materials on or about Cuba located outside of Cuba - forming part of the library of the University of Miami. A section in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's book Tres Tigres Tristes is written under Lydia Cabrera's name, in a comical rendition of her literary voice. She was one of the first writers to recognize and sensitively publish on the richness of Afro-Cuban culture and religion. She made valuable contributions in the areas of literature, anthropology, art, ethnomusicology, and ethnology.
In El Monte, Cabrera fully described the major Afro-Cuban religions: Regla de Ocha (commonly known as Santeria) and Ifá, which are both derived from traditional Yoruba religion; and Palo Monte, which originated in Central Africa.
Both the literary and anthropological perspectives in Cabrera's work assume that she wrote about mainly oral, practical religions with only an “embryonic” written tradition. She is credited by literary critics for having transformed Afro-Cuban oral narratives into literature, which is, written works of art, while anthropologists rely on her accounts of oral information collected during interviews with santeros, babalawos, and paleros, and on her descriptions of religious ceremonies.
There is a dialectical relationship between Afro-Cuban religious writing and Cabrera's work; she used a religious writing tradition that has now internalized her own ethnography.

Ruth Martha Shady Solís (born December 29, 1946, Callao, Perú) is a Peruvian anthropologist and archaeologist. She is the founder and director of the archaeological project at Caral.

Antonio Machado Álvarez, better known by his pseudonym Demófilo (Santiago de Compostela, 1848 – Seville, 4 February 1893), was a Spanish writer, anthropologist, and folklorist. He was the son of the noted Spanish folklorist, Cipriana Álvarez Durán.

Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (January 20, 1908 in Tlacotalpan, Veracruz –1996 in Xalapa, Veracruz) was a Mexican anthropologist known for his studies of marginal populations. His work has focused on Afro-Mexican and indigenous populations. He was the director of the National Indigenous Institute and as Assistant Secretary for Popular Culture and Continuing Education he was responsible for forming government policy towards indigenous populations. For this reason he is important in the field of applied anthropology.