From Bryn Mawr Now:
For the second year in a row, a graduate of Bryn Mawr’s department of classical and Near Eastern archaeology has won the Archaeological Institute of America’s Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement, the organization’s highest honor. Susan Irene Rotroff ’68 was awarded the medal at the Institute’s annual meeting in January.
Rotroff is the eighth Bryn Mawr graduate to win this laurel. Two other winners of the award were Bryn Mawr professors; thus Bryn Mawr-affiliated archaeologists make up about a fifth of the winners of the AIA Gold Medal (see a list of other Gold Medal winners from Bryn Mawr below).
Rotroff is the Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches courses in both the department of classics and the department of art history and archaeology.
Recognized as a top authority on Hellenistic pottery, Rotroff has been a leader in using the material culture of ancient societies to understand the daily lives of their people. She has published multiple volumes on pottery found at the Athenian Agora, a site to which she has returned throughout her career; she has also published on sites in Turkey and other areas of Greece. She was awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 1988.
“Susan Irene Rotroff epitomizes all that professional archaeologists should aspire to: inspired teaching, extensive fieldwork, and an international reputation as a scholar,” says the AIA’s award citation.
When Rotroff began her career, Hellenistic archaeology was a somewhat neglected field, she says. Earlier archaeologists had tended to disdain it as “not aesthetically interesting.”
“It was regarded as the decadent period that followed the height of the classical period,” she explains. “Now people try a little bit more to take each period on its own merits. We understand Hellenistic art as something with different aims and different aesthetics.”
As a Princeton graduate student, Rotroff was given a thorough introduction to the archaeology of the period by Dorothy Burr Thompson, a fellow Bryn Mawr graduate (and fellow winner of the AIA Gold Medal). She served as Thompson’s research assistant.
“She was working on Hellenistic figurines, trying to date them,” Rotroff recalls, “and she kept sending me back to the utilitarian pottery from the same site for reference. I decided that in my work, I would focus on the pottery.”
Rotroff ultimately co-authored a book on Hellenistic pottery and terracottas with Dorothy Burr Thompson and her husband, Homer Thompson.
Her professional activity ensures frequent contact with the Bryn Mawr Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, Rotroff says.
“You can’t do classical archaeology without running into people from Bryn Mawr,” she says. “It’s just a major presence in the field.”
rogueclassicism 