Belgian anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss is still quite influential on archaeology today (not to mention philosophy, theology, and literature). His theories, oddly enough, had to do with seeking general human traits, arguing that there are certain concepts, certain dualities, that are hard-wired into all human beings. These include the concepts of left and right, up and down, male and female, back and front, night and day, and the like.
Lévi-Strauss' real contribution to anthropology, and, not to put to fine a point on it, the world as it is today, was the recognition of the fully-human status of people who do not live the way "we" in the first world do. His recognition of the universality of traits, the "hard-wired" structuralist concepts that are described above, grew out of his Marxist training: Lévi-Strauss recognized the colonial, paternalistic attitude of early researchers in anthropology, and made us look at ourselves and the world at large in a completely different manner.
Lévi-Strauss was born in Belgium, and educated at the Sorbonne in France; and as a Jew, was in France when the Nazis came. He fled to the United States where he taught at New York City's New School for Social Research. There he met and influenced, and was influenced by, Franz Boaz, another of anthropology's great leaders. Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1959, where he taught at Paris's College de France, until he retired in 1982. He died in Paris in 2009, one month shy of his 101st birthday.
A Few of Lévi-Strauss' Important Books
All of which, I might point out, are still in print
