Building in 1888, which was enlarged in 1913–1916, 1958–1959, and 1992. Construction of a residential/dining facility, Loring Hall, took place in 1930.

In 1922, Joannes Gennadius, a prominent Greek diplomat, offered to donate his extensive personal library on the history and culture of Greece to the ASCSA if the school would build a separate building to house it and make the collection available to researchers of any nationality. A gift from the Carnegie Foundation made possible construction of the Gennadeion, a neoclassical marble structure, which opened in 1926. It houses not only rare books but also Edward Lear landscapes of Greece and archival material on the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann.

Immediately after its foundation, the ASCSA launched a program of excavation and publication—even before the school began construction of its permanent headquarters. The first major ASCSA site was the Argive Heraion, excavated between 1892 and 1895. The school’s two largest continuing excavations are at Corinth and in the Athenian Agora, but members of the school have explored Greek sites that span a very wide range, both chronologically and geographically, including Franchthi Cave, Lerna, Olynthos, Messenia, Nemea, Samothrace, Keos, and Kommos.

Work began in Corinth in 1896, and the excavation of a major ancient Greek city lent prestige to the fourteen-year-old U.S. institution. The French and Germans had earlier secured permits to excavate at Delphi (the Americans had also wanted a permit to excavate there but had failed to obtain one) and Olympia, respectively. Excavation in the historic Plaka district of Athens to uncover the classical Agora started in 1931. Reconstruction of the Stoa of Attalos to serve as the excavation headquarters; a museum was begun in 1953 and completed in 1956.

The ASCSA initially published reports of its fieldwork in the American Journal of Archaeology, but the opening of the Agora excavations prompted the school to create its own journal, Hesperia, in 1932. The ASCSA also publishes a multivolume series for each of its major excavations, monographs on diverse topics, site guides, and a series of inexpensive Picture Books for the general public. The school offers a formal curriculum as well as research fellowships for graduate students during the academic year and a summer program for both students and teachers. It is the official liaison between more than 150 affiliated North American colleges and universities and the Greek Ministry of Culture, which grants all fieldwork permits.

Fred S. Kleiner

References

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

Hoff, M. 1996. “American School of Classical Studies at Athens.” In An Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology, 44–45. Ed. N.T. de Grummond. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Lord, L.E. 1947. A History of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 1882–1942: An Intercollegiate Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Meritt, L.S. 1984. History of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1939–1980. Princeton, NJ: American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Norton, C.E. 1903. “The Founding of the School at Athens.” American Journal of Archaeology 7: 351–356.

American Schools of Oriental Research

The American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) is the principal North American research organization for the study of the ancient Near East. Founded in 1900 under the aegis of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), the Society of Biblical Literature, and the American Oriental Society, the ASOR is a consortium of approximately 140 North American colleges, universities, museums, seminaries, and libraries. Its administrative offices are currently on the campus of Boston University and are housed in the same building as the AIA’s national headquarters.

Like its AIA siblings, the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and the American Academy in Rome, ASOR is a privately funded rather than a government-funded institution. ASOR has three permanent research centers abroad: the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological