The Trustees of the American Numismatic Society (ANS) have named Dr. Ruth Pliego as the recipient of the 2023 Archer M. Huntington Medal Award for Excellence in Numismatic Scholarship. The award will be presented on June 13, 2024, at the ANS headquarters in New York City, followed by the Silvia Mani Hurter Memorial Lecture by the honoree: “Archer M. Huntington and the Visigothic Coins: Revisiting the La Capilla Hoard.”
Dr. Ruth Pliego holds a Ph.D. from the University of Seville in Spain (2006), where she serves as a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology. She has been involved with the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid (2012-2013) and as a Research Fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (2017-2018). Her research residencies include the University of Padua (2018), the University of Hamburg (at the Roman Islam Center, 2020) and the University of Lisbon (2020-2021).
Pliego has published extensively on the coinage of the Visigothic kingdom, including the two-volume La moneda visigoda (Sevilla, 2009), since updated with “La moneda visigoda: Anexo I” (2012) and “Visigothic currency: Recent developments and data for its study” (2020). Her other interests include a comprehensive approach to examining Visigothic bronze coins from a broader Mediterranean perspective (“Rethinking the minimi of the Iberian peninsula and Balearic islands in the Late Antiquity,” 2020). Her research has intersected with her work in the digital humanities applied to numismatics within the framework of Monedaiberica.org. Pliego has been part of the FLAME (Framing the Late Antique and Early Medieval Economy) Project at Princeton University since 2015, and is involved in the study of the Roman Tetrarchic hoard of Tomares at the Archaeological Museum of Seville-University. She is currently co-coordinator on the “La Monnaie dans l’Occident Méditerranéen” (MONOM) Project at Casa de Velázquez, Madrid.
The Archer M. Huntington Award is conferred annually in honor of the late Archer M. Huntington, President of the ANS from 1905–1910, and was first presented to Edward T. Newell in 1918. In 2023, the Society commissioned a new medal for the award, designed by Eugene L. Daub.
The American Numismatic Society, founded in 1858, is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization based in New York City dedicated to the study of coins, medals, and all other numismatic objects. The ANS holds one of the largest collections of numismatic objects in the world and a research library. For more information about the ANS, visit numismatics.org.