Humboldt Foundation honours Polish archaeologist Aleksander Bursche

The archaeologist and numismatist Aleksander Bursche has spent decades studying the coinage of the Roman Imperial Era and its spread in Barbaricum, the areas outside of the Roman Empire. His outstanding research on the roots of Germanic coinage has opened up new perspectives on the relations between Romans and the Germanic tribes. Through his numismatic analyses which interpret coins not only as a means of payment but also as a medium of communication and as symbols, Bursche has shaped our understanding of the contacts the Roman Empire had with outside societies in Late Antiquity. His work in this area makes vital contributions to the study of economic, political and identitary networks in the transition period of Late Antiquity. 
Bursche is particularly active in the area of science communication and “digital numismatics”: Together with several colleagues, he founded the Copernicus Science Centre, a modern science museum, in Warsaw. As part of the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU) project, he is involved in the establishment of a web-based online databank which records finds of counterfeit Roman coins.

A professor at the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw in Poland since 2000, Aleksander Bursche is a recipient of the Order of Polonia Restituta awarded by the President of Poland. He has also received an Award of the Royal Numismatic Society in London and the Honorary Award of the Gesellschaft für internationale Geldgeschichte (Society for the International History of Money). He has already established close contacts with Germany through a Humboldt Research Fellowship in Frankfurt am Main and a guest professorship at the University of Kiel. He will use the Reimar Lüst Award to undertake a research stay at the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology in Mainz and its Schleswig branch.

The Reimar Lüst award is granted to humanities scholars and social scientists from abroad who have shaped academic and cultural relations between Germany and their own countries. The award is valued at €80,000. Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, in collaboration with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, grants up to two Reimar Lüst Awards. Aleksander Bursche is the only Reimar Lüst Award winner in 2025.

The astrophysicist Reimar Lüst served as President of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation from 1989 to 1999 and was a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for many years. In appreciation of his life-long work to promote international exchange between scientists and scholars, the Humboldt Foundation established the Reimar Lüst Award for International Scholarly and Cultural Exchange in collaboration with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation in 2006. 

Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables more than 2,000 researchers from all over the world to spend time conducting research in Germany. The Foundation maintains an interdisciplinary network of well over 30,000 Humboldtians in more than 140 countries around the world – including 61 Nobel Prize winners.