Who’s Backing Archaeological Research? Here are Five Funders Digging Up the Past
/
Mayan Ruins in belize. MaxMaximovPhotography/shutterstock
Archaeology stands out among the humanities for the extent to which it’s been romanticized and sensationalized over the years. In your typical Hollywood treatment, whoever’s financially backing the work tends to figure in the plot, often bringing none-too-pure motives to their interest in whatever alien artifact or conspiracy-laden MacGuffin is dug up.
But setting Indiana Jones aside, private funding and patronage has always played a crucial — and sometimes controversial — role in the development and evolution of real-world archaeology.
From the financial backing that George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, provided to Howard Carter in his excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb a century ago, to foundation support for, say, contemporary research into the effect of a changing climate on the ancient peoples of North America, philanthropy has helped shape the field and make a big difference for researchers seeking to find, preserve and understand traces of humanity’s ancient past.
Confronted with the challenge of finding grants, archaeologists have a number of funding sources they can turn to, including their own universities, public sector sources and sometimes individual donors. Other archaeologists work for museums that pull in philanthropic support, and some work for private firms or public agencies, conducting site excavations prior to construction projects.
There are, however, also private foundations in the U.S. that back archaeological work. Where that funding’s concerned, there’s some overlap between those funding core humanities institutions like museums, which draw in a lot more philanthropic support overall, and those specifically backing field work and preservation.
Funding for the field isn’t always clear cut. Some of the biggest humanities-focused philanthropic institutions in the country, like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with its work on monuments and public sites, or the J. Paul Getty Trust through its museum offerings and arts grants, aren’t necessarily backing archaeological field work despite the fact that parts of their funding are certainly archaeology adjacent. In recent years, the field has also had to contend with the problem of the past looting of archaeological artifacts, taken from their places of origin and eventually ending up in museums or the hands of private collectors — some of whom are also archaeology donors.
To give readers a sense of a few American philanthropies backing archaeology today, here’s a non-exhaustive list of some grantmakers to note.
Packard Humanities Institute
Based in Los Altos, California, and dating back to 1987, the Packard Humanities Institute is a separate philanthropic organization from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, from which it was originally endowed. Drawing on assets of around $834 million in 2022, the institute engages with archaeology — and the humanities more broadly — in several ways.
One is grantmaking: Support goes to U.S. universities as well as international institutions working on excavations and preservation work, often for sites in the ancient Mediterranean. Grants totaled around $22 million in 2022, and include funding for the British School of Athens’ Knossos Research Center, the Herculaneum Conservation Project in Italy, and ancient Roman excavations by researchers out of the University of Notre Dame.
The Packard Humanities Institute also constructed and maintains a physical facility in Santa Clarita, California, called the PHI Stoa architecturally inspired by colonnaded structures common in ancient Greek cities. The PHI Stoa was designed to house the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the institute continues to provide financial support for film preservation work there.
Leon Levy Foundation
The late Leon Levy made a fortune on Wall Street and was a noted New York-area philanthropist before passing away in 2003. He and his wife, Shelby White, built up a vast collection of ancient antiquities, gave copiously to museums like the Met and funded archaeological research in Israel. When Levy died, the Leon Levy Foundation was formed from his estate. White remains a key leadership figure at the foundation as founding trustee.
Today, the foundation puts its assets of about $415 million to work backing a wide range of grantees across the arts and humanities, as well as other interest areas. Its archaeology funding flows through its Ancient World program area to places like the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU, the White Levy Program for Archaeological Publications (support for unpublished field work, mostly in the Near East and North Africa), and the Shelby White and Leon Levy Lod Mosaic Archaeology Center in Israel.
In 2023, Shelby White gained notoriety in the debate around questionably sourced artifacts when a number of such pieces were seized from her home, “some of which had been purchased from dealers who would later be accused of trafficking in illicit artifacts,” according to the New York Times. Over the years, White and Levy had already relinquished dozens of artifacts found to have been looted from their original places of origin.
Alphawood Foundation
Not every foundation supporting archaeology focuses on Greece and Rome. The Chicago-based Alphawood Foundation, for instance, maintains a program area dedicated to archaeological field work on ancient Maya sites in countries like Belize, Guatemala and Mexico. Established in 1991 by Newsweb Corporation Chairman Fred Eychaner, Alphawood also supports the arts and arts education, HIV/AIDS-related work, LGBTQ advocacy and racial justice organizations.
The foundation’s funding for Maya archaeology goes to a fairly extensive list of universities engaged in that research, all of them based in the United States. In 2022, support went to places like Texas Tech University for the Chan Chich Archaeological Project in Belize, Winthrop University for research in the Salinas de los Nuevos region of Mexico and Guatemala, and Washington University at St. Louis for work in El Tintal, Guatemala, among other destinations.
Wenner-Gren Foundation
Most academic institutions make a distinction between archaeology and anthropology, the latter of which is this foundation’s focus. But there is a lot of overlap, with archaeology sometimes considered a subdiscipline under the larger anthropology umbrella. The Wenner-Gren Foundation dates back to the 1940s, when industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren established it under a different name. It began supporting anthropology during the mid-20th century, and took on, according to the foundation, “a strong identity emphasizing the internationalism and broad-based nature of anthropology, featuring programs for archaeologists and sociocultural, biological and linguistic anthropologists around the globe.”
With about $200 million in assets in 2022, the Wenner-Gren Foundation devotes much of its annual grant budget to supporting individual researchers. It also details their work in thorough reports on completed research, released on a yearly basis. Archaeology research projects completed in 2022 included a study of death and ancestry in ancient Aksum, Ethiopia, and research into how ancient inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest interacted with the land, among others.
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
As one of the nation’s premier humanities grantmakers, the Mellon Foundation’s purview extends into a number of areas relevant to archaeology, including the wider liberal arts education ecosystem that undergirds institutions like museums and university research programs. Since its move to prioritize social justice in 2020, Mellon has also reinforced a broader funding trend toward areas of inquiry centering peoples and places that have been disregarded in the past, a trend that extends to archaeology.
Grants to support archaeological field work aren’t currently a focus for Mellon, but it has been an active funder of related fields like historical preservation. In addition, its headline Monuments Project is a high-dollar effort to reimagine and reconsider how monuments and memorials fit into public space, with implications for how American humanities funders orient themselves toward the study of historical sites.
Nevertheless, a big question going forward is to what extent flagship humanities backers like Mellon — as well as public funding sources like the National Endowment for the Humanities — will sustain their funding for fields like archaeology, areas of inquiry that can have great bearing on how we understand ourselves, but have never enjoyed extensive or steady support from the philanthropic establishment.
