John Victor Murra (24 August 1916 – 16 October 2006) was a Ukrainian-American professor of anthropology and a researcher of the Inca Empire.
Born Isak Lipschitz in Odesa, Ukraine, Russian Empire, in 1916, Murra emigrated to the United States in 1934 and completed an undergraduate degree in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1936.
Serving as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, he initially worked as a smuggler out of Perpignan, France.
His work included the development of a new perspective of the Inca Empire, where trade and giftgiving among kin were common.
Through extensive perusal of Spanish colonial archives and court documents, he found that the Inca dwelling in the rainforest hiked into the Andes to trade crops for products like wool from their mountain-dwelling kin.