The Conferring of Honorary Degrees
Spyros Iakovidis

Citation Presented by Christofilis Maggidis
Christopher Roberts Assistant Professor of Archaeology, Classical Studies

Spyros Iakovidis, professor and archaeologist, we honor you today for a life-time of distinguished accomplishments in the humanities. For over fifty years you have excavated some of the most important archaeological sites in Greece, including Athens, Perati, Pylos, Eleusis, Thera, Glas, and Mycenae, bringing back to light vital fragments of the Aegean Prehistory with meticulous precision and unparalleled clarity. The high standards of your excavations, your ability to extract maximum information from minimal evidence, coupled with your keen insights and sense of interpretation led to a remarkable confluence of key site and a born excavator, mutually realizing their full potential. The monumental publications of your excavations have emerged as basic points of reference in Mycenaean archaeology; your monograph The Mycenaean Acropolis of Athens, an exemplary archaeological study based on minute traces and diverse evidence, illuminated the practically unknown Mycenaean phase of the Athenian Acropolis; your book Perati shed new light on Mycenaean burial customs, trade and foreign contacts, and modified the relative and absolute chronology of the final Mycenaean period; your book Late Helladic Citadels on Mycenaean Greece is still the best archaeological synthesis of the Mycenaean citadels; your publication of Glas reconstructed this unique Mycenaean citadel, while the on-going and eagerly awaited publications of your thirty-year-long survey and excavation at Mycenae, one of the most renowned sites worldwide, will further enrich the study of Mycenaean civilization for the years to come. Your influential and plethoric scholarship, including your numerous books and articles, excavation reports, international conference papers, and invited lectures all around the globe, mark you justly as a world-leading authority in Mycenaean archaeology.

Throughout your life you have proved that teaching and research are neither hermetically tight nor mutually exclusive, but intertwined and interdependent in an harmonious and productive symbiosis, rather than isolated in a false dichotomy: in the classroom and in the field alike, you have been a venerated and beloved professor to many generations of students and scholars at the University of Athens (Greece), Heidelberg University (Germany), and the University of Pennsylvania, and mentor to several privileged students of yours, now scholars following in your footsteps.

For your distinguished academic achievements, you have been elected member of three world-renowned Academies (Academy of Athens, Academy of the Lincei, Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna), honorary fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and member of the Athens Archaeological Society; furthermore, you have been recently bestowed the highest honor by the President of Greece for your distinguished contribution to Greek archaeology (Grand Commander, Order of the Phoenix). You are indeed a great scholar of a generation which transcended time and academic boundaries; we hope that you will continue to give voice to the ancient stones and trace the past buried deep in the rich Greek soil: (translation- he remains worth, who investigates) (Plutarch).

Mr. President, it is a privilege and an honor to present to you Spyros Iakovidis, for the honorary degree of Doctor of Archaeology.

Conferring of the degree by William G. Durden
President

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