“greater unity and uniformity” to the institute’s diverse publications. Henceforth, AJA would be the sole venue for the publication of articles on the fieldwork and research conducted by the AIA’s new American schools of classical studies established in 1882 in Athens and in 1895 in Rome. Although AJA no longer has a monopoly on AIA research (the American School in Athens, for example, has published its own journal, Hesperia, since 1932), more than a century later the second series continues to appear in quarterly fascicles. AJA remains the AIA’s official journal and publishes each April the abstracts of the papers presented at the institute’s annual meeting in December; the citations of the AIA’s awards for scholarship, teaching, and service; and the texts of important resolutions of the AIA’s governing council.

Although the original mission of AJA was to “treat all branches of Archaeology and Art—Oriental, Classical, Early Christian, Mediaeval, and American,” the archaeology of the AIA’s own continent never gained a strong foothold in the journal, and scholars of medieval art preferred to publish their research in art history publications rather than archaeological journals. From the beginning, AJA, like the AIA itself, reflected its founders’ preoccupation with the classical world, especially Greece. The defined scope of AJA today is “the art and archaeology of ancient Europe and the Mediterranean world, including the Near East and Egypt, from prehistoric to late antique times.” In recent years, although retaining its focus on Greece and Rome, AJA has published articles on all periods of Old World art and archaeology as well as newsletters on fieldwork in Cyprus, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Sardinia, Syria, and Turkey. Other regular features have been a series of critical reviews of Aegean prehistory, book reviews, obituaries, and the proceedings of the AIA’s annual meetings.

In conformity with an AIA 1973 resolution opposing the illicit international trade in antiquities and the despoliation of archaeological sites, AJA’s editorial policy precludes “the announcement or initial scholarly presentation of any object in a private or public collection acquired after 30 December 1973, unless the object was part of a previously existing collection or has been legally exported from the country of origin.”

Fred S. Kleiner

References

Donohue, A.A. 1985. “One Hundred Years of the American Journal of Archaeology: An Archival History.” American Journal of Archaeology 89: 3–30.

Dyson, S.L. 1985. “Two Paths to the Past: A Comparative Study of the Last Fifty Years of American Antiquity and the American Journal of Archaeology.” American Antiquity 50: 452–463.

———. 1998. Ancient Marbles to American Shore: Classical Archaeology in the United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Kleiner, F.S. 1990. “On the Publication of Recent Acquisitions of Antiquities.” American Journal of Archaeology 94: 525–527.

———. 1996. “The American Journal of Archaeology and the Archaeological Institute of America.” American Journal of Archaeology 100: 1–4.

American School of Classical Studies at Athens

The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the largest foreign research center in Greece, is dedicated to the study of Greek archaeology, history, and culture. Founded in 1882 by the archaeological institute of america (AIA), the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) was conceived as a place where U.S. scholars could study classical Greek monuments at first hand. In establishing a research center in Greece, the AIA was following the lead of France, whose school in Athens had opened in 1846, and of Germany, which had inaugurated the Athenian branch of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in 1874. But unlike its European counterparts, the ASCSA, like the AIA itself, was (and still is) a privately funded organization dependent on college and university support as well as the generosity of individuals and foundations.

The ASCSA began in rented quarters near the Arch of Hadrian, but two years later the Greek government donated land for a permanent home on the south slope of Mt. Lykabettos adjacent to the plot previously given to the British School of Archaeology. The Americans moved into their newly constructed Main