JOHN H. KROLL (1938-2026)

In Memory of John H. Kroll (1938-2026)

It is with great sadness that the American Numismatic Society announces the passing of John H. Kroll, former ANS Trustee and Second Vice President, ANS Life Fellow, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He was a frequent visitor to the ANS, which he had just visited before Christmas, as he was trying to finish an article on a 5th-century BCE Athenian tetradrachm excavated at the site of Eretria.

Born in Washington, D.C., Kroll received his B.A. in Classics from Oberlin College and then went on to Harvard University for his Ph.D. in Greek archaeology and history. While at Harvard, he first came to the ANS as a student in the Graduate Summer Seminar in 1963. Subsequently, Kroll became one of the most distinguished scholars in Greek numismatics and economic history, serving for years as the numismatist for the American excavations in the Athenian Agora. In 1993, he published a volume on the nearly 17,000 coin finds from this site.

He also served as Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin for more than thirty years, mentoring students in Greek history, archaeology, and numismatics. While in Austin, he married Lisa Kallet, also a distinguished ancient historian, with whom he co-authored The Athenian Empire: Using Coins as Sources, published in 2020 in the joint ANS-Cambridge University Press series, Guides to the Coinage of the Ancient World. She passed away in February 2025. Following their move to Oxford, England, in 2006, he was named an Honorary Research Associate of the Heberden Coin Room at the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford.

To mark his retirement from the University of Texas at Austin, the ANS published a book in his honor, Agoranomia: Studies in Money and Exchange Presented to John H. Kroll, edited by one of his former students at the University of Texas, ANS Chief Curator Peter van Alfen, in 2007.

We express our deepest condolences to his family, friends, and former colleagues who had the privilege of knowing him, especially the countless students whom he taught during his long career. A full obituary will be published in the ANS Magazine at a later date.

To read the complete article, see:
In Memory of John H. Kroll (1938-2026) (https://numismatics.org/pocketchange/in-memory-of-john-h-kroll-1938-2026/)

Agoranomia: Studies in Money and Exchange Presented to John H Kroll
by Peter Van Alfen (Editor)

Offered to John H Kroll upon his retirement from the University of Texas at Austin, this volume features essays on Greek coinage, exchange, and polis economies from the Archaic to Hellenistic periods. Included in the collection are studies that explore aspects of Homeric and Archaic exchange, the law of sale, and cavalry costs. Other studies examine the social, economic and historical contexts of coinages from Abdera, Athens, "Lete," Lydia, Mylasa, and Side, and present new interpretative approaches to "cooperative" coinage and those from archaeological sites.

Table of Contents

• Hélène Nicolet-Pierre: Les Talents D'Homère;
• Raymond Descat: Argyrnetos: Les transformations de l'échange dans la Grèce archaïque;
• Robert W. Wallace: KUKALIM, WALWET, and the Artemision Deposit: Problems in Early Anatolian Electrum Coinage;
• Jonathan H. Kagan: Small Change and the Beginning of Coinage at Abdera;
• Selene Psoma: The "Lete" Coinage Reconsidered;
• Edward E. Cohen: A Legal Fiction: The Athenian Law of Sale;
• Catherine Grandjean: Athens and Bronze Coinage; Graham J. Oliver: Polis Economies and the Cost of the Cavalry in Early Hellenistic Athens;
• Richard Ashton and Gary Reger: The Pseudo-Rhodian Drachms of Mylasa Revisited;
• Andrew R. Meadows: Amyntas, Side, and the Pamphylian Plain;
• François de Callataÿ: Greek Coins from Archaeological Excavations: A Conspectus of Conspectuses and a Call for Chronological Tables;
• Emily Mackil and Peter G. van Alfen: Cooperative Coinage.

For more information, or to order, see:
Agoranomia: Studies in Money and Exchange Presented to John H Kroll (https://www.amazon.com/Agoranomia-Studies-Money-Exchange-Presented/dp/0897222989)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web