News – 2023 Gold Medal Winner Announcement

February 1, 2022

The Archaeological Institute of America is pleased to announce that the Gold Medal Committee has selected Professor Andrew F. Stewart as the recipient of the 2023 Gold Medal for Outstanding Archaeological Achievement. This award, presented annually at the AIA-SCS Annual Meeting, recognizes distinguished contributions to archaeology, primarily through research and/or fieldwork. The gold medal is the highest distinction awarded by the Institute.

Professor Stewart has advanced archeology and art history through publications and fieldwork during his extraordinarily productive and diverse career. It has changed our field and the way we think about it. In particular, it has transformed our knowledge and understanding of ancient Greek sculpture, through focused empirical research on dates, individual works and artists, as well as through wide-ranging discussions of sexuality, reception , semiotics, psychology, economics and cultural theory. . He is the author of eight books, each essential to the field, as well as over a hundred scientific articles and journals. In addition to his work on visual culture and publications on sculpture interpretation, Stewart directed the Berkeley excavations at Tel Dor in Israel for twenty years (1986-2006), where he oversaw the field school and led the work in an innovative and prescient way, notably the study of the interactions between Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians and others. He is highly regarded for his intelligence in simultaneously considering detail and larger issues and for his ability to unite disciplinary approaches and ideas from multiple sources in deeply insightful ways. As one of the scholars writes in support of his nomination comments, “Andrew Stewart was the most important historian of Greco-Roman art in the English-speaking world, and one of the top three or four anywhere on earth.”

Professor Stewart’s teaching, fully integrated with his research and fieldwork, has been exceptionally influential. His “powerful vitality of thought and writing” is available to all students and colleagues; he trained some of the most gifted and important young scholars in the world and influenced the training of almost all classical archaeologists working today through his individual interactions or his transformation of the field and its teaching. He introduced generations of students to the art and archeology of the ancient Mediterranean through his courses at Berkeley, through his work with the Berkeley Museum collections, and through his work at Tel Dor and Athens. , among others. A former student specifies: “His teaching has the same virtues as his erudition. In class and in conversation, he is eclectic and open-minded in method, grounded in empirical data, incredibly well-prepared and disciplined…. The result of this dedication has been an unparalleled sense of community, partnership and familiarity. Stewart also serves as a mentor and colleague to countless other researchers around the world. His generosity of spirit is famous, extending to his own students during their time with him and after graduation and to the many other people with whom he interacts in person or otherwise. His ability to listen carefully to people at any stage of learning or thinking about antiquity and help them think through a problem or idea is legendary, as is his overriding desire to deepen knowledge and the work of everyone around him.

For all of these reasons, he is richly deserving of the highest honor the AIA can bestow, the Gold Medal for Outstanding Archaeological Achievement.