People·In brief
Malcolm Wiener, founder of the Institute for Aegean Prehistory, dies at 91
The American scholar and patron died on 12 October. In Cyprus he backed excavations at Pyla and Maroni and the final publication of the Kouklia tombs.
Malcolm H. Wiener, the American investor who became a student of the Aegean Bronze Age and one of its main funders, died on 12 October 2026, aged 91. The Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus mourned him on 14 October, recalling that he funded fieldwork and research in Cyprus, including the excavations at Pyla and Maroni.
After seeing Greece as a young US Navy lieutenant at the end of the 1950s, Wiener went on to Harvard Law School and then to investment management. The Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP), which he set up in 1981, is according to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens the world's leading funder of Aegean prehistorians. He built and endowed the School's laboratory for archaeological science, opened in 1992 and named after him, and chaired its board between 2011 and 2016. The School counts over 60 articles by him, many on Bronze Age chronology and on contacts between Mediterranean cultures.
In 1998 the A. G. Leventis Foundation held its Nicosia conference on White Slip ware, the handmade tableware of Late Bronze Age Cyprus, in his honour. From 2007 to 2013 INSTAP grants paid for the last phase of Hector Catling's work on the tombs excavated at Palaepaphos (Kouklia) in 1951–1954, including the drawings and photographs; the volumes came out in 2020.