American Journal of Archaeology

Since the beginning of archaeological exploration on Crete, agricultural storage has attracted a great deal of scholarly interest. The discovery of several palaces on the island has provided a range of evidence concerning storage: the development of a complex written accounting system, the production of thousands of storage jars, the building of storerooms, and built installations apparently devoted to long-term grain storage (the so-called kouloures at Knossos, Malia, and Phaistos). However, the presence in nonpalatial sites of structures that can plausibly be interpreted as silo complexes for long-term grain storage has not attracted much attention. This article is concerned with the Late Bronze Age evidence from Ayia Triada in the Mesara Plain, which has four such complexes, two of which are still unpublished. By drawing on the results of recent fieldwork, I contrast these buildings with those of other Mycenaean and Near Eastern sites to place Ayia Triada in its wider Aegean and Mediterranean context. Through the use of information found in the local Linear A and nonlocal Linear B documents, together with the archaeological evidence, this article highlights the role that long-term grain storage played within the local political economy in the 14th and 13th centuries B.C.E.

Early Mycenaean (Late Helladic [LH] II–IIIA1) Greece witnessed major changes in the built environment, including new types of mortuary architecture and the appearance of corridor buildings (a megaron-type structure with an interior corridor and subsidiary rooms). These architectural developments have been interpreted as material reflections of an established sociopolitical hierarchy and the emergence of palatial elites, while the corridor buildings have been identified as seats of palatial administrators or the king. This article shifts the focus from the traditional dichotomous scheme of “palatial” and “nonpalatial” Mycenaean architecture to the ways in which the new built environment, and the corridor buildings in particular, shaped social interaction, influenced particular behaviors, and ultimately transformed sociopolitical structures. It is argued that rather than symbolizing elite power, the Early Mycenaean corridor buildings played an active role in structuring social relations by providing a locale not only for the display and negotiation of individual and group identities during inclusive ritualized activities but also for the creation of social cohesion and commonality. By creating patterns of encounter and contexts for interaction between distinct groups and the community at large, the LH II–IIIA1 corridor buildings created profoundly different experiences and practices from those of the earlier periods, experiences that shaped sociopolitical developments and generated social change.

In 2010, a portion of a well-preserved domestic building dating to the later part of Early Minoan (EM) I was excavated at Priniatikos Pyrgos, east Crete. Though only a small portion of this house was available to investigate, there was clear evidence for several architectural and habitation phases. The final domestic activities were particularly well preserved because the building was deliberately destroyed in an event that included burning. There was a distinct and clearly defined ritual component to this event, including the decommissioning of household objects. Because of the rapid abandonment and destruction of this building, the excavated area contained well-preserved evidence for the character of use of the building in its final days. This preliminary discussion focuses primarily on this portion of the house and contextualizes it within the overall excavation at Priniatikos Pyrgos, its environs recorded in the Vrokastro Survey Project, and EM I Crete more generally. It provides detailed analyses of industrial, domestic, trade, and ritual activities through the study of stratigraphy, architecture, ceramics, faunal remains, plant remains, obsidian, metal, and plaster. It concludes with a discussion of the character of activity that took place when the building was abandoned.

See all awards and past winners on the Archaeological Institute of America’s website.

The 115th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America was held in conjunction with the 145th Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association in Chicago, Illinois, on 2–5 January 2014.

On 3 January, Elizabeth Bartman, President, presented the Institute’s 49th Annual Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement to L. Hugh Sackett, and the Martha and Artemis Joukowsky Distinguished Service Award to Ann Santen.

Andrew Moore, First Vice President, presented the 33rd Annual Pomerance Award for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology to Waldo Tobler, and the 18th Annual Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award to Steven Tuck of Miami University.

Carla Antonaccio, Vice President for Research and Academic Affairs, presented the 25th Annual James R. Wiseman Book Award to Bryan Burns for Mycenaean Greece, Mediterranean Commerce, and the Formation of Identity (New York 2012). Jane Buikstra, Center for American Archaeology, presented the 4th Annual Felicia A. Holton Book Award to Joyce Tyldesley for Tutankhamen: The Search for an Egyptian King (New York 2012). Andrew Moore presented the inaugural Award for Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology to Fasti Online (www.fastionline.org).

Laetitia LaFollette, Vice President for Professional Responsibilities, presented the AIA’s Outstanding Public Service Award to Corine Wegener, the Conservation and Heritage Management Award to the Staffordshire Hoard Conservation Project, and the Award for Best Practices in Site Preservation to the California Archaeological Site Stewardship Program. The texts of these award citations are printed below.

Andrew Moore also announced Miriam Clinton (University of Pennsylvania), Epaminondas Kapranos (25th Ephoreia of Classical and Prehistoric Archaeology of West Crete), Sarah Murray (Notre Dame University), Thomas F. Strasser (Providence College), and Panayiotis Karkanas, Eleni Panagopoulou, and Nicholas Thompson (the Ephoreia of Speleology and Palaeoanthropology of Southern Greece) as the recipients of the Poster Session Award for “The Excavation at Mesolithic Damnoni: The Discovery of a New Culture on Crete.” The Poster Session Runner-Up Award was presented to Lynn A. Kvapil (Butler University) and Bernard Frischer, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Lee Taylor-Nelms (Indiana University) for “The Hadrian’s Villa Project: Studying the Impact of Three-Dimensional Virtual World Technology in the Undergraduate Classroom.” Sophie Crawford-Brown(University of Pennsylvania) and Ann Glennie and Allison Smith (Florida State University) received the Best Poster Designed by a Student Award for “Cosa Excavations, 2013.”

Elizabeth Bartman presented the Graduate Student Paper Award for 2013 to Annemarie Catania (Phillips University, Marburg, Germany).

On 4 January, at the 135th Meeting of Council, the following were elected to the Institute’s Governing Board: Andrew Moore, President; Jodi Magness, First Vice President; Michael Wiseman, General Trustee; Monica Smith, Academic Trustee; and Brian J. Heidtke, Trustee Emeritus.

On 3–5 January, 380 papers and posters were delivered in 69 sessions. Abstracts for these are printed in the 115th Annual Meeting Abstracts (Boston 2013), which is available online or in print (see the Annual Meeting section of the Archaeological Institute of America’s website or contact the Institute for information).

Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement

L. Hugh Sackett

The Archaeological Institute of America is proud to award the 2014 Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement to L. Hugh Sackett.

Sackett amply fulfills all the criteria expected for this prestigious award. First, he is a lifelong, dedicated teacher. In his position at Groton School in Massachusetts, which he has held since the 1950s, he has instructed hundreds of individuals, in Groton and in Greece, about Greek archaeology and the classics, in ways that have affected their lives most profoundly. In more than one case, his students have followed his lead into the world of archaeological research.

In fieldwork, Sackett has left his mark on more, and more significant, sites than most of us could ever dream of, let alone actually claim. Knossos (including the Unexplored Mansion), Palaikastro, Lefkandi, the Dema House, and the Vari House—these are a few of the high points in a long and distinguished field career in which he has continually practiced excellent and meticulous fieldwork.

Let us highlight two other exemplary characteristics of Sackett’s record. First is his breadth of interest. In an age of increasing specialization, it is not often that the same person edits books on a prehistoric ivory kouros and on a Roman colony, or writes classic articles on Attic country houses and on bull’s head rhyta—or that a master excavator also happened to be a pioneer of diachronic regional survey in the late 1960s. But all these things are true of Sackett. Second, he possesses an acute sense of responsibility for every project he has started, from the initial fundraising stage to final publication. In some cases, he has inherited data sets or sites that could easily have been orphaned or abandoned, as so many data sets and sites sadly are.

People may not agree about which aspect of Sackett’s work represents his most significant legacy. Some would point to the major Cretan site of Palaikastro and the impact of discoveries there on our conceptions of Minoan Crete, others to the revolutionary discovery and exploration of Iron Age Lefkandi and the light cast on a so-called Dark Age. It is a wonderful thing to be able to have such a debate about a single archaeologist.

L. Hugh Sackett is a scholar of great vigor, astute judgment, and endless patience. He has served our field well for more than 60 years as teacher, field archaeologist, and advocate for Greek heritage—and he has done it all with great humility, loyalty, and generosity of spirit. He is an eminent and most deserving recipient of the 2014 Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement.

Martha and Artemis Joukowsky Distinguished Service Award

Ann Santen

The Archaeological Institute of America is pleased to present the 2014 Martha and Artemis Joukowsky Distinguished Service Award to Ann Santen.

Santen epitomizes the archaeological volunteer. She has given much of her time and energy to make the AIA a better and more effective institution, and in so doing she has greatly benefited archaeology.

Santen recently ended a term as a Society Trustee of the AIA and has served as president of the Cincinnati Society since 2007. Under Santen’s energetic tenure, the Cincinnati Society has expanded its reach into the community in exciting and rewarding ways. The society has increased its membership to include more local residents and students of all ages. Santen even subsidizes student memberships out of her own pocket. Under her leadership, the society developed its first website and won the AIA’s Best Website Award in 2008.

Santen’s vision for increasing the footprint of archaeology in Cincinnati has been to recruit graduate students for an outreach program in schools and community centers throughout the metro area. She provided her own money as a seed grant to show that her ideas worked, and this resulted in the society receiving an AIA Society Outreach Grant in 2008. By the end of 2012, this program had delivered more than 300 presentations that reached an estimated 10,000 people. There is no better evidence of Santen’s devotion and dedication than these numbers.

Ann Santen’s numerous contributions to the AIA are impressive, and she is a most deserving recipient of the 2014 Martha and Artemis Joukowsky Distinguished Service Award.

Pomerance Award for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology

Waldo Tobler

The Archaeological Institute of America is pleased to present the 2014 Pomerance Award for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology to Waldo Tobler.

Tobler is professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. A founding father of geographic information science (GISci) and the geographic information systems (GIS) that have revolutionized numerous scientific aspects of the practice of archaeology, he was instrumental in developing several techniques of spatial analysis. Tobler also played an important role in the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis scientific consortium, within which interdisciplinary archaeological work has flourished since the 1980s.

Tobler’s seminal articles cover analytical cartography, human movement, projections of historical maps, and the design of the first computer technique for digitally superimposing maps within a map in–map out framework. The last technique lies at the heart of today’s modern GIS software. In his work on spatial distributions, Tobler elucidated the “first law of geography,” which directly underpins a wide range of GISci techniques and analyses, including spatial autocorrelation. The Pomerance Award is the first recognition he has received from archaeologists for the impact of his research on our field.

Tobler’s 1971 article “A Cappadocian Speculation,” published with S. Wineburg (Nature [1971] 39–41), used place-name references from the Kültepe cuneiform texts dating to the Old Assyrian Trading Colony period and attempted to situate them in geographic space using models of movement and interaction. It continues to be cited and used within archaeology today. His work on modeling human movement, notably “Tobler’s hiking function,” frequently forms the mathematical basis for archaeological least-cost path analyses.

For all these reasons, we honor Waldo Tobler with the 2014 Pomerance Award for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology.

Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award

Steven Tuck

The Archaeological Institute of America is pleased to present the 2014 Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award to Steven Tuck, professor of classics at Miami University.

A superlative teacher at an institution ranked among the very top nationwide in its commitment to teaching, Tuck is of that rare breed of college professor who is both popular and rigorous. A master lecturer and successful mentor with the consummate skill to engage his students by making ancient Mediterranean culture seem urgently contemporary, he has perfected his craft through hard work and fine instinct. His classes are laboratories of experimentation and adaptation; they are, like their subject matter, solid and permanent monuments forever in a state of becoming.

Tuck is known far beyond the boundaries of his university or even the AIA, for he is one of the featured professors in the popular Great Courses series, to which he has contributed 36 video lectures and 24 additional lectures in print on the themes of Roman civilization, cities, daily life, and material culture.

Steven Tuck is, in short, both a builder of educational monuments and a monument in his own right. He is an excellent recipient of the 2014 Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award.

James R. Wiseman Book Award

Bryan Burns

The Archaeological Institute of America is pleased to present the 2014 James R. Wiseman Book Award to Bryan Burns for Mycenaean Greece, Mediterranean Commerce, and the Formation of Identity (New York 2012).

Burns’ book is an innovative study that will have an important impact on Bronze Age Aegean and classical archaeology. In one of the first monographic treatments of consumption studies in classical archaeology, Burns combines current archaeological theory with meticulous analysis of particular artifacts and the cultures that produced and circulated them.

Burns confronts how the act of importation, whether of raw materials or finished goods, and the objects themselves were transformed into social power by the Mycenaeans. He also demonstrates that various regions of the Bronze Age mainland had different trajectories in the importation and consumption of foreign items and their subsequent transformation into social power.

For all these reasons, Bryan Burns’ Mycenaean Greece, Mediterranean Commerce, and the Formation of Identity is a most worthy recipient of the 2014 James R. Wiseman Book Award.

Felicia A. Holton Book Award

Joyce Tyldesley

The Archaeological Institute of America and the Center for American Archaeology are pleased to present the 2014 Felicia A. Holton Book Award for a major work of nonfiction written for the general public to Joyce Tyldesley for Tutankhamen: The Search for an Egyptian King (New York 2012).

Tyldesley presents an overview of King Tutankhamen’s tomb and insights into the achievements of Howard Carter and other archaeologists. She provides detailed information on the tomb’s discovery in 1922, its layout, and its contents, as well as the varied reactions in the press and among the intelligentsia of the day to the spectacular objects the tomb yielded. In particularly riveting sections, she explores the results of the multiple autopsies that have been performed on the young king’s mummy. She discusses the candidates for Tutankhamen’s parents and his brief reign in the context of later dynastic history. Tyldesley devotes an entertaining chapter to the imagined “curse” of the tomb, a subject of endless fascination to the public, and concludes with a thoughtful examination of the reception of King Tut today and the spate of blockbuster museum exhibitions.

Tyldesley’s volume stands out for its thorough scholarship, creative organization, and engaging style. It is a most worthy recipient of the 2014 Felicia A. Holton Book Award.

Award for Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology

Fasti Online

The Archaeological Institute of America is pleased to present the inaugural Award for Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology to Fasti Online (www.fastionline.org).

Fasti Online is a pioneering online scholarly resource. The site serves as a peer-reviewed, open access journal where preliminary and interim excavation reports can be published. It is a model for what an online resource should be—in terms of research, scholarship, accessibility, and sustainability.

The site’s value lies in its elegant simplicity, both conceptually and practically. Fasti Online gives up-to-date, season-by-season reporting for more than 3,000 excavations in 13 different countries. These form an online database searchable by free text in any of the participating languages. The excavation records include brief descriptions and are accompanied by extensive bibliographies and photographs. The records are created in conjunction with national universities and archaeological services. Thus, the site is generated from the participant countries rather than from outside institutions. As a result, it is multilingual, making it accessible beyond the Anglophone world. The site has made the reporting of archaeological research more immediate and much more accessible both to the field and to the general public.

Fasti Online is a most deserving recipient of the inaugural Award for Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology.

Outstanding Public Service Award

Corine Wegener

The 2014 Outstanding Public Service Award of the Archaeological Institute of America is presented to Corine Wegener.

Through her work as cultural heritage preservation officer in the Office of the Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution, Wegener coordinates the Smithsonian’s efforts to preserve heritage threatened by natural disasters and armed conflict around the world.

Wegener came to this position through the military. A major in the U.S. Army Reserve from 1982 to 2004, she served in Iraq, Bosnia, and Guam in posts that ranged from military liaison to the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad to civil affairs economic special projects officer in Bosnia.

One of her responsibilities has been education, both in the military and stateside. As a refugee operations officer, she coordinated education programs in two refugee camps for thousands of Iraqi Kurdish refugees. At the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, she served as associate curator of Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture.

Wegener is most proud of her work as the founder and first president of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, the American branch of the NGO founded in 2006 to support implementation of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. Wegener herself co-led the lobbying efforts to secure U.S. Senate ratification of the 1954 Hague Convention in 2008. She also developed Hague Convention training courses for U.S. Army and Marine Corps civil affairs units.

The Archaeological Institute of America is pleased to present the 2014 Outstanding Public Service Award to Corine Wegener for her extraordinary work in protecting world heritage.

Conservation and Heritage Management Award

Staffordshire Hoard Conservation Project

The Archaeological Institute of America is pleased to present the 2014 Conservation and Heritage Management Award to the Staffordshire Hoard Conservation Project (SHCP) for its excellent work on the conservation of the spectacular Anglo-Saxon artifacts found in Staffordshire, United Kingdom, and for its associated public education programs.

SHCP is a unique project executed by the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. Since its inception in 2010, the project has used an innovative, team-based approach to conservation. The team has conserved the Anglo-Saxon gold and garnet artifacts to the highest standard, and the project has given more than 20 students the opportunity to learn from scholars and from handling the hoard itself.

Because of the immense interest in the hoard, SHCP made it a priority to involve the public in conservation efforts. Public programs include open lectures, studio tours, family days, and written and video blogs that create a supportive public community. These efforts have reached thousands of people, who have become engaged with the project.

The 2014 Conservation and Heritage Management Award recognizes the inspiring efforts of the Staffordshire Hoard Conservation Project in the domains of conservation and public outreach.

Award for Best Practices in Site Preservation

California Archaeological Site Stewardship Program

The Archaeological Institute of America is pleased to present its 2014 Award for Best Practices in Site Preservation to the California Archaeological Site Stewardship Program (CASSP) for its grassroots efforts to involve and train local communities in the preservation of archaeological sites in California.

CASSP, a statewide program directed by the Society for California Archaeology, trains local volunteers to visit assigned sites on public lands regularly and to report the conditions there to the local supervising archaeologist. By regularly monitoring sites, CASSP ensures that any potential problems are detected early and can be corrected quickly, thus limiting the extent of damage. CASSP operates under the philosophy that public lands belong to all of us and that we therefore need to find a responsible way to engage the public in site protection. Trained site stewards provide an additional interface between the recreational user and the agency archaeologists so that archaeological resources can be protected from harm and managed for future generations. Since the program’s inception in 1999, nearly 1,400 people have participated in 75 CASSP workshops at locations across the state.

The Archaeological Institute of America hopes that CASSP’s efforts in community stewardship will serve as an inspiration to others as they look for innovative ways to preserve our archaeological heritage. The California Archaeological Site Stewardship Program fully merits the 2014 Award for Best Practices in Site Preservation for its exemplary work.

Tel Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley of Israel has been the most cited type-site of the Early Bronze Age Levant since the excavations of the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. Through the efforts of the Tel Aviv University Megiddo Expedition, the stratigraphic sequence of the Early Bronze Age has been significantly refined, and a new monumental temple dating to Early Bronze Age IB (ca. 3000 B.C.E.) has been discovered. This Great Temple has proven to be the most monumental structure of the period in the Levant. This discovery provides new evidence for the rise of social and political complexity in the region.

The excavations of the Greek settlement of Ai Khanoum took place between 1965 and 1978; they are not yet fully published, and work is still in progress. This article presents the spatial organization of the town by taking into account the results of recent research, which help clarify the different stages of its history. Ai Khanoum was founded as a city by the Seleucid king Antiochos I (r. 281–261 B.C.E.) and thereafter underwent development, particularly from the beginning of the second century. But it was only under Eucratides (r. ca. 170–145) that it took the form we now know. Several elements considered in this article shed light on the nature and functions of the settlement: its urban organization, the division between public spaces and private spaces, and the extent of Greek influence on these elements. We know that Ai Khanoum was a royal residence and that the Seleucid and Graeco-Bactrian kings were very much present there throughout its history. It may have looked like other eastern royal capitals of that time, whose architecture, which combined eastern and Greek influences, was inspired by that of the royal residences of the eastern part of the Seleucid kingdom.

This article approaches gender as a means of understanding cultural identity in Italy before the Roman conquest. Most scholars have assumed based on written sources that the ancient inhabitants of Samnium, who are noted for their fierce resistance to Rome, shared a gender system in which men were primarily regarded as warriors and women as caretakers of the household. Archaeological support for this view has been sought in the contrast between burials containing weapons (assumed to belong to men) and those containing jewelry or personal ornaments (attributed to women). In line with recent studies that challenge such a view, I employ statistical methods to verify correlations between grave goods, sex, age, and social status. Results reveal that cultural attitudes toward gender among the Samnites were complex. In many cases, gender configurations were structured in such a way that both men and women performed similar social activities and may have participated as equals in commensal politics. These findings demonstrate the potential for quantitative archaeological analysis to enhance our knowledge of cultural identity and social organization in an area of the ancient world for which there is very little written evidence.

The Lydians originally lived alongside peoples of various ethnic cultures in an area surrounded by Ionia to the west, Phrygia to the east, Mysia to the north, and Caria to the south. This core territory expanded during Mermnad rule in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., especially in the reign of Croesus (ca. 560–546 B.C.E.). Local pottery at the Lydian capital of Sardis is a starting point for identifying both the regional aspects of Lydian pottery and its eclecticism, which includes elements from eastern Greek and Phrygian pottery and common conventions of Anatolian painting. It might seem challenging and difficult to distinguish these individual elements, but this cultural mixing is exactly what characterizes Lydian pottery. This article explores the Phrygian features or influences on the Lydian painted pottery from Sardis.

Toward the end of the third millennium B.C.E., Minoan funerary customs changed, and people began to favor the use of clay receptacles—pithoi or larnakes—for the bodies of the dead. This article offers a comprehensive study of the funerary pithoi of the period, comprising a review of the available material and its classification, distribution, and dating, the relation of container to tomb types, and the specific use of pithoi within funerary ritual. It also assesses the importance of pithoi as an investment in terms of the material wealth that they represent and the knowledge of the complex techniques of handling dead bodies that they require. Finally, it examines the symbolic connotations of the pithos and argues that its wide adoption was part of a general turn toward the concept of the regeneration of life. This concept shifted the emphasis of the funerary realm toward the social dimension—namely, toward the reallocation of the roles and resources of the dead among the living. Such a shift helped people come to terms with contemporary social reality and shaped the agency of emerging elites, which led to the establishment of the first Minoan palaces and transformed Crete from a series of kin-based communities to a group of proto-states.

Since the summer of 2009, the ancient site of Gabii has been the focus of excavations conducted by the University of Michigan. Stratigraphic investigations near the urban core are revealing the complex sequence of occupation in this Latin city, which emerged in the Early Iron Age. The spatial distribution of intramural burials of the Orientalizing and Archaic periods shows that the settlement was initially organized in separate habitation clusters. The city was provided with monumental fortifications by the late seventh or early sixth century B.C.E., but its layout was radically modified in the fifth century B.C.E., and a uniform orthogonal plan was imposed across the entire site. Three domestic structures dating to the Middle Republican period have been identified in two of the city blocks. Significant modifications of this sector of Gabii are attested from the first century B.C.E. Excavation data confirm that the city began to decline dramatically at this time. Areas in the upper part of the site were taken up for industrial activities or transformed into burial grounds and were finally abandoned in the Late Imperial period. These preliminary results document how ancient cities in the region developed and decayed; the findings have also provided the basis for further research on-site in 2012–2014.