• January 9, 2026 | 8:00 AM - 10:30 AM
• Continental 5, Ballroom Level

4G: Etruscans in America: Gold Medal Symposium in Honor of Nancy Thomson de Grummond (Colloquium)

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Sponsored by:
AIA Gold Medal Committee

Organizers:
Lora Holland Goldthwaite, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Alexandra A. Carpino, Northern Arizona University

Overview Statement:
This symposium addresses a field of study that has interested Nancy T. de Grummond from early in her career, when she first wrote a chapter on rediscovery of the Etruscans for the handbook Etruscan Life and Afterlife, edited by Larissa Bonfante (1986). Later in her ambitious Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology (1996), de Grummond included many articles on Etruscan archaeology, art, sites, museums, and individual archaeologists. The history of Etruscan studies in America was folded into the much larger topic of the development of Etruscan archaeology in Italy and Europe, including in the important appendix to her seminal monograph, Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend (2006). Since then, relatively little has to date been published on the American contribution and there exists no general work on the participation of Americans in this significant field of classical and Mediterranean archaeology. Exceptional in this regard is the 2017 colloquium at the Toronto AIA, organized by Alexandra Carpino and Richard de Puma, “Collecting and Presenting the Etruscans in North America.” Like the edited volume that followed, Collecting and Collectors from Antiquity to Modernity, ed. Alexandra Carpino, Tiziana D’Angelo, Maya Muratov, and David Saunders (2018), this colloquium focused on the formation of the Etruscan collections in major American museums. It is remarkable that the richness of Etruscan-centered scholarship has not included the highly important work done in the 20th century by other pioneering professionals in the United States–de Grummond herself prominently among them—that is the topic of this symposium.