February 26, 2025
The Archaeological Institute of America is pleased to announce that the Gold Medal Committee has selected Professor Nancy Thomson de Grummond as the 2026 recipient of the Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement. This award, presented each year at the AIA Annual Meeting, recognizes distinguished contributions to archaeology, primarily through research and/or fieldwork. The Gold Medal is the highest honor the Institute bestows.
Nancy Thomson de Grummond, the M. Lynette Thompson Professor of Classics at Florida State University, has had a long and distinguished career of service to the AIA and the profession of Classical Archaeology. In 1977 she founded the international summer program “Excavations in Chianti” for work at the Italian site of Cetamura del Chianti. She became field director at the site in 1983 and has continued to direct the excavations there for the past 42 years. She gained international attention for her work at Cetamura in 2006 for her discovery of an Etruscan sanctuary, in 2013 for the discovery of water-logged grape seeds from an Etruscan well, and in 2016 for the discovery of a buried hoard of Roman Republican coinage.
Her legacy of teaching and service at FSU is also remarkable, and over the years she has directed countless research projects at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels. She received the AIA’s Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2015, and in 2022, the AIA’s Martha and Artemis Joukowsky Distinguished Service Award for her service to the AIA on local, regional, and national levels over the course of many years.
Over 500 students, graduate and undergraduate, have been on her archaeological field school crews in Italy and in Ukraine, and she has directed more than 30 students in museum internships in the US and Italy. For many years she and her FSU students have worked with a home for blind people in Tallahassee, teaching them about archaeology through touch, using 3-D artifacts and broken flowerpots for reconstruction.
De Grummond has made archaeological research and its results a focus of her life’s work via museum exhibitions. She has organized a total of 16 public exhibitions since the 1970s, always involving students and colleagues in all aspects of the process. She worked tirelessly behind the scenes to create a museum that would house artifacts from Cetamura, and in 2023 the doors of the Museum of the Origins of Chianti, partly funded by the European Union, opened in Gaiole, just a few kilometers from the site of Cetamura.
She is the author of four books and twelve edited volumes, which include Etruscan Myth, Sacred History and Legend (2006), Cetamura del Chianti (2020), and two volumes of the Corpus Speculorum Etruscorum (2007, 2023). Etruscan Studies in the U.S. would not be the burgeoning field it is today without the contributions of Nancy de Grummond.
Professor de Grummond will be honored at the Awards Ceremony at the 2026 Annual Meeting in San Francisco. There will also be a Gold Medal colloquium in her honor.
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