America/Institut Archéologique d’Amérique was incorporated in Canada as an independent affiliate of the AIA in the United States.

The original goal of the nineteenth-century organization was to support archaeological excavation and publication both at home and abroad, but Old World archaeology, especially classical archaeology, has always played a dominant role in the AIA. Although the institute founded a School of American Archaeology in 1907 (today the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico), the first archaeological schools the AIA created—and still its principal affiliated organizations—were the american school of classical studies at athens, founded in 1882, and the American School of Classical Studies in Rome, established in 1895, now a division of the American Academy in Rome. The AIA is also the “parent” of the american schools of oriental research, founded in 1900, which oversees three archaeological schools in Jerusalem; Amman, jordan; and Nicosia, cyprus.

The AIA’s first excavations took place between 1881 and 1883 at Assos in northwestern turkey, with the cosponsorship of the recently established Boston Museum of Fine Arts. (In one of the last agreements of its kind, the Turkish government granted the Boston museum permission to export one-third of the excavated finds to help build its collections of classical art.) After the AIA opened research schools abroad, almost all subsequent U.S. excavations in the Mediterranean and Mideast have been conducted under the auspices of AIA’s affiliates or individual universities rather than the institute itself.

Consistent with its founders’ belief in the importance of publication as well as exploration, the AIA inaugurated the american journal of archaeology (AJA) in 1885. A magazine aimed at a much larger popular audience, Art and Archaeology, appeared in 1914 but ceased publication two decades later. In 1948, the AIA launched a successor magazine, Archaeology, which currently appears bimonthly and has a circulation exceeding 200,000. Unlike AJA, which is a journal of Old World archaeology, Archaeology is global in scope. Between 1948 and 1973, the AIA also published a series of monographs in cooperation with the College Art Association, and in the 1990s, the institute initiated a new publication series consisting of both monographs and colloquium proceedings. The AIA also oversees the publication of the American volumes of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum.

Other than its status as a privately funded nonprofit organization, one of the distinctive features of the AIA that separates it from many other national archaeological societies is that it counts thousands of laypeople among its members. Central to its public outreach effort is its national lecture program, begun formally in 1896 although the institute had sponsored a lecture series by Rodolfo Lanciani a decade earlier. Currently, the AIA sends three lecturers annually to each of its local societies. The institute also holds an annual meeting at different cities throughout the United States and Canada at which scholars present the results of their fieldwork or research projects.

Fred S. Kleiner

References

Dow, S. 1980. “A Century of Humane Archaeology.” Archaeology (May–June): 42–51.

Dyson, S.L. 1998. Ancient Marbles to American Shores: Classical Archaeology in the United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Sheftel, P. S.1979. “The Archaeological Institute of America 1879–1979: A Centennial Review.” American Journal of Archaeology 83: 3–17.

———. 1996. “Archaeological Institute of America.” In An Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology, 61–63. Ed. N.T. de Grummond. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Thompson, H.A. 1980. “In Pursuit of the Past: The American Role, 1879–1979.” American Journal of Archaeology 84: 263–270.

Archaeometry

Although the term archaeometry is of fairly recent origin, it is now used to cover an important field of archaeological research, one that has its own journals, major symposium sessions, and research centers. The term archaeometry was coined by the British archaeologist christopher hawkes to name the bulletin of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of