The summer before heading off to college, Andrea Berlin’s parents gifted her a mini educational vacation: a sightseeing trip around Israel, followed by a two-week dig alongside professional archaeologists on a site in the desert. Most of the other kids in the group hated it, Berlin recalls; they slept in tents and awoke at 4:30 every morning to get started. “It’s just like you imagine in the movies—you had to shake out your shoes to make sure there’s not a scorpion,” she says.
But despite these hardships, she couldn’t get enough. “I thought of it as history in my hands,” says Berlin, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences professor of archaeology and religion. “The second I got in a trench, I was standing in the eighth century BCE, and holding a pot that people hadn’t seen in almost 3,000 years. It was as if I could imagine somebody else’s hands that long ago holding it.”
This passion propelled Berlin toward a career in archaeology. Today, she is the James R. Wiseman Chair in Classical Archaeology at CAS and an expert in ancient ceramics. On excavations in the eastern Mediterranean—including Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus—she focuses on the later ancient empires and kingdoms, like those led by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE and King Herod the Great in the first century BCE. She is especially interested in understanding the realities of daily life.
In recognition of this work, Berlin has been named the 2025 recipient of the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement by the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). This award, presented earlier this month at the group’s annual meeting, is AIA’s highest honor. Berlin’s colleague, John Marston, a CAS professor of archaeology and anthropology, describes it as the field’s “Nobel Prize.”
Berlin says she was sitting in her office when she found out she had won the award and burst into tears.
“In college, I remember reading about famous archaeologists winning this award,” says Berlin. “The person after whom my professorship chair is named—James Wiseman [founder of BU’s archaeology department and a CAS professor emeritus of archaeology and of art history and classical studies]—was himself a winner of the award. I never saw it coming. It was a complete surprise and really amazing.”
Infatuated with the Levant
Berlin’s first dig happened in the region known as the Levant, roughly modern-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, and home to the world’s three major religions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity). Since then, she has felt pulled to focus her research there. In an article she wrote for the Biblical Archaeology Review, Berlin shared how scholars have studied the area since the 19th century and that excavations “have revealed the places behind the stories in the Bible and Qur’an: ancient temples, palaces, cities, farmsteads, workshops, and graveyards. These same excavations have produced millions of artifacts, none more abundant than pottery.”