Federico Halbherr (15 February 1857 in Rovereto, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire – 17 July 1930 in Rome) was an Italian archaeologist and epigrapher, known for his excavations on Crete.

Federico (English Frederick) Halbherr was born into a prosperous family in Rovereto, then part of Austria, in the district of Trentino.

The distant ancestors of the name were a Swiss family, goldsmiths by occupation, that had arrived in Trentino centuries ago, during its long period of being an independent kingdom.

Federico had an older half-brother, Bernardino, whose mother, Marietta (Giongo) Halbherr, had died of complications a few days after his birth.

His most important Greek discovery was the major inscription in the Greek Doric script of the late 6th and early 5th centuries BC containing the Gortyn code on family law, which was found in the 1884-87 excavations at Gortyn – a cast of it is on display in the Sala Dutuit of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei's base at Palazzo Corsini alla Lungara (Halbherr was an associate of the academy).

Students under him included, among others, Gaetano de Sanctis, Luigi Pernier and above all Margherita Guarducci, who completed and edited Halbherr's work on his death.

For all the time that he explored and excavated in Crete, and was accepted as a valued friend by the British and Americans, Halbherr was, strictly speaking, not Italian, but Austrian.

An American expedition from the University of Michigan under Richard Norton, Director of the Archaeological Institute of America, began excavating at Cyrene in 1910.

Shortly Herbert Fletcher De Cou, an archaeologist, was shot to death from ambush, ostensibly for being too forward with a married Arab woman.