Susan Rotroff, Ph.D., the Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences, has been awarded archeology’s 2011 gold medal for achievement from the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA).
Rotroff
She will be presented with the award at the group’s annual meeting in January 2011.
The award is made annually in recognition of a scholar who has made distinguished contributions to archeology through his or her fieldwork, publications and/or teaching.
As a member of the Department of Classics in Arts & Sciences, Rotroff’s main focus is on the ancient Mediterranean. She teaches courses in ancient Greek as well as in the archeology of the Greek and Roman worlds.
Since 1970, she has been working at the ancient Agora of Athens, a major ongoing excavation involved in the archeological investigation of the center of the ancient city of Athens. Her work there has included both excavation and publication and has focused primarily on ceramics.
Excavations that Rotroff supervised in the 1970s led to the study and publication of a rich deposit of material that had been used by the public magistrates of Athens in the 5th century B.C. It shed light on the ancient Athenian custom of public dining, which has developed into a continuing interest of hers.
Rotroff recently completed a long-term project publishing the Hellenistic pottery that has been found at the site. She also is working with colleagues in physical anthropology and zooarcheology on a well deposit excavated in the 1930s, which along with ceramics includes the bones of 450 newborn infants and some 150 dogs.
Although most of her research has been conducted in Athens, she also has worked on other sites in the Mediterranean, most recently on the island of Samothrace in the Agean, at Sardis in Turkey, and on the underwater excavation of a 1st-century B.C. shipwreck at Kizilburun in Turkey.
The AIA is North America’s oldest and largest organization devoted to the world of archeology. The institute is a nonprofit group founded in 1879 and chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1906. Today, the AIA has nearly 200,000 members belonging to more than 100 societies in the United States, Canada and around the world.
Rotroff is the third member of the WUSTL community to win the gold medal. The late George E. Mylonas, Ph.D., founding chair of the university’s Department of Art History and Archaeology in Arts & Sciences, was awarded it in 1970, and Patty Jo Watson, Ph.D., the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor Emerita, was honored in 1999.
For more information on the award, visit archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10100.