Washington, D.C. – June 5, 2015 In a special ceremony at the Embassy of Greece in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, June 3rd, Dr. Malcolm Hewitt Wiener was awarded with the Gold Cross of the Order of Honor by the Hellenic Republic for his contribution to the study of Aegean Prehistory.
The decoration, on behalf of the President of the Hellenic Republic, was presented by the Ambassador of Greece to the United States, Mr. Christos Panagopoulos, who praised the vision and generosity of Dr. Wiener.
Dr. Wiener, expressing his gratitude for the recognition, spoke warmly about the importance of studying those first complex societies of the western world and referred to the quantum leaps made possible by the use of innovative scientific applications.
Dr. Wiener’s extensive publication on the Eastern Mediterranean world in the Bronze Age include the emergence, florescence and collapse of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece, their relationship to the civilizations of the Near East and Egypt, and the chronology of the ancient world via comparisons of radiocarbon, tree-ring, ice-core and astronomical dates in relation to the ancient texts, inscriptions and stratigraphy of the artifacts. His recent publications have examined the interaction of human agency including warfare with climate change and pandemics in the collapse of civilizations.
In 1982, he founded the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP), the largest in the world in this field of research, which continues to fund the excavations in the Aegean and fellowships for scholars. Some of Dr. Wiener’s awards include honorary doctorates from University of Sheffield, Eberhard-Karl University Tübingen, University of Athens, University of Cincinnati, University College London, Dickinson College, University of Arizona, the Gold Cross of the Order of Honor (Greece), and the Ring of Honour of the German Academy in Mainz.
Dr. Wiener was born in Tsingtao, China, is married to Carolyn Talbot Seely and they have four children, all present at the ceremony. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Law School. He served as an Ensign/Lt. in the United States Navy, as well as an advisor to the U.S. Department of State on the International Convention on Illicit Traffic in Antiquities, and was the founder and CEO of related investment firms between 1971 and 1987.
