Jacob W. Gruber (born February 26, 1921) is an American anthropologist, archaeologist, historian of science and educator.
Gruber was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on February 26, 1921 and grew up in Akron, Ohio as one of seven children. He attended Buchtel High School and received a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1942, with honors in Classical Archaeology, and was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Ob He was drafted into the United States Army upon graduation, and served as a member of the 254th Engineer Supply Company of the Persian Gulf command, based in Iran, from 1942-1945, and subsequently returned to Oberlin where he received his M.A. degree in Sociology and Anthropology in 1947. His thesis was Three Aspects of Early Iron Age Culture in Greece.
He received his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, under Loren Eisley. He also studied with ethnographers Frank Speck and Alfred Irving Hallowell. He spent the summers of 1954 and 1955 visiting Iroquois reservations in New York State studying ceremonial masks, staying at the Allegany Reservation near Salamanca, New York in 1955. His dissertation on 19th century naturalist St. George Jackson Mivart laterbecame the book A Conscience in Conflict: The Life of St. George Jackson Mivart.
Gruber went on to become a specialist in the history of 19th-century natural sciences, writing on Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Darwin, and especially Richard Owen, founder of the British Museum of Natural History. Over a period of nearly two decades Gruber located, redacted, and edited the extensive extant Owen correspondence.
In 1984 Gruber was a Fulbright Scholar at the Turnball Library in Wellington, New Zealand, where he researched the history of the discovery and description of the moa.