Archaeology Magazine - March/April 2013 - 6

FROM THE PRESIDENT

Archaeological
Institute of America

Three Faces of American
Archaeology

Located at Boston University

OFFICERS
President

Elizabeth Bartman

ACH YEAR AT OUR annual meeting, the Archaeological Institute of America observes

a moment of silence in honor of members who have died during the prior year.
Among the names I read at this year’s ceremony were three archaeologists whose
careers epitomized the practice of archaeology in postwar America. I remember them here.
Crawford Greenewalt, Jr., fondly known to friends and colleagues as “Greenie,” directed
excavations at Sardis in present-day Turkey (ancient Anatolia) for more than 30 years.
When you include additional summers spent as an excavator and photographer, he worked
at the site for nearly 60 years. Although born to wealth and privilege, he devoted his life
to a relatively spare routine of digging, teaching, and research. Greenewalt was one of the
world’s leading experts in the archaeology of the Lydians, an ancient people last ruled by
King Croesus, who made Sardis his capital. Greenewalt uncovered important remains of
early citadel walls, as well as the furnaces used in antiquity to smelt ores and process gold.
Evelyn Byrd Harrison was born to an old and distinguished Virginia family that claimed
descent from Pocahontas. In the 1940s, as a young student proficient in Greek and
Latin, she was enlisted to put her obvious language abilities to work learning Japanese to
translate intercepted war messages. In her early career, Harrison worked with William Bell
Dinsmoor and other greats of Greek archaeology, whose ranks she joined. Like Greenewalt,
she spent nearly her entire professional career working at one site, in this case the Agora
of ancient Athens. For decades she was a key member of the Agora team supported by the
American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and ensured that its work—and the field
of Greek archaeology she influenced—had a strong component of formalist art history.
Gerhard M. Koeppel was born in Germany but emigrated to the United States as part
of a wave of foreign, mainly German, scholars hired in the great university expansion of the
1960s. Having studied with the renowned scholar of Roman art Heinz Kähler, Koeppel
helped establish Roman art and archaeology in the U.S. as a serious subject on a par with
the study of ancient Greece.
As individual as they were as archaeologists, each nonetheless embodies a larger aspect
of the practice of archaeology in postwar North America that today is rapidly disappearing.
Greenewalt and Harrison, spending virtually their entire careers at a single site, both
participated in decades-long projects largely focused on the excavation of monumental,
elite public buildings. Today, financial constraints and local sentiments tend to preclude
such “big digs.” The foreign-trained Koeppel descended from an Old World intellectual
tradition with roots in the nineteenth century that has now, likewise, largely disappeared.
With their passing, we reflect on the loss of values and practices that played a fundamental
role in the development of archaeology here and abroad for more than a century.

First Vice President

Andrew Moore
Vice President for Outreach and Education

Pamela Russell
Vice President for Research and Academic Affairs

Carla Antonaccio
Vice President for Professional Responsibilities

Laetitia LaFollette
Treasurer

David Ackert
Vice President for Societies

Thomas Morton
Treasurer

Brian J. Heidtke
Chief Executive Officer

Peter Herdrich
Chief Operating Officer

Kevin Quinlan

GOVERNING BOARD
Susan Alcock
Carla Antonaccio
Cathleen Asch
Barbara Barletta
David Boochever
Derek Counts
Julie Herzig Desnick
Michael Galaty
Greg Goggin
Ronald Greenberg
Michael Hoff
Jeffrey Lamia
Becky Lao
Lynne Lancaster
Deborah Lehr
Robert Littman
Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
Shilpi Mehta
Naomi Norman, ex officio
Maria Papaioannou
Eleanor Powers
Paul Rissman
Robert Rothberg
David Seigle
Chen Shen
Charles Steinmetz
Douglas Tilden
Claudia Valentino, ex officio
Shelley Wachsmann
Ashley White
Past President

C. Brian Rose
Trustees Emeriti

Norma Kershaw
Charles S. LaFollette
Legal Counsel

Mitchell Eitel, Esq.
Sullivan & Cromwell, LLP

Elizabeth Bartman
President, Archaeological Institute of America

Archaeological Institute of America
656 Beacon Street • Boston, MA 02215-2006
www.archaeological.org

ARCHAEOLOGY • March/April 2013

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Archaeology Magazine - March/April 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - March/April 2013