Eszter Bánffy


Eszter Bánffy, is a Hungarian prehistorian, archaeologist, and academic. Since 2013, she has been Director of the Romano-Germanic Commission at the German Archaeological Institute. She is also a professor at the Archaeological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Education and academic career

Bánffy graduated from school in 1975. Between 1975 and 1980, she studied archaeology at the Faculty of Humanities and between 1977 and 1982 she also studied Indology at ELTE. In 1983, she studied at the University of Heidelberg on a scholarship.
Between 1983 and 1986, she was an academic postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Archaeology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1986 and 1988, she was a research assistant, between 1988 and 2005, a senior research associate, between 2001 and 2008, a scientific department head, from 2005 a scientific advisor, and from 2008 to 2011 a deputy scientific director. Since 2005, she has been a member of the board of the European Association of Archaeologists. In 2008, she was a visiting researcher at Harvard University. Since 2009, she has been an honorary professor at the University of Szeged.
Her research interests include the archaeology of the Neolithic and Copper Age, theoretical archaeology, and the archaeological legacies of early religions.

Honours

On 9 April 2015, Bánffy was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. In 2017, she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. She is also an elected Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Awards

Bánffy was awarded the "Révay" prize of the Society for Ancient History in 1986, the Soros "Open Society" Scholarship from 1998 to 1999 as well as the Fulbright Scholarship in 2006. She won the Kuzsinszky Bálint Memorial Medal in 2007 and the Field Discovery Award from Shanghai Archaeology Forum in 2017. In 2018, she was awarded the Félix Neubergh Prize by the University of Gothenburg. She also won the Flóris Rómer Plaque of the Hungarian Archaeological Society in 2020 and the Europa Prize of the Prehistoric Society in 2022.

Selected works

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