Charles K. Williams II

Charles K. Williams II died in Athens, Greece, on 16 September 2026, aged 96. No cause of death was made public. His death was announced by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, with which he had been involved for 64 years, and tributes followed from the Penn Museum, the British School at Athens and the American Academy in Rome. The American School described him as a towering figure, one of its greatest scholars, teachers and benefactors.

He was survived by his sister, Joan Rhame, his nieces Lucy Rhame and Abby Coffin, and his nephew E. Williams Rhame. His family said burial would take place in Easton at a later date.

Charles Kaufman Williams II was born on 19 June 1930 in Easton, Pennsylvania. He was educated at St. George's School and then at Princeton University, where he received a BA and an MFA in architecture.

He first worked as an architect, in the office of Philip Johnson, while taking classes at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. That training shaped everything that followed. His first archaeological work was as architect for the British scholar Alan Wace at Mycenae in the 1950s, and as a student he went on to dig at Morgantina in Sicily and at Gordion in Turkey, where he worked with Rodney Young of the Penn Museum in the 1961 and 1963 seasons. He later earned his PhD in classical archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. Lafayette College awarded him an honorary degree in humanities in 1979.

Williams arrived at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 1962 as a student associate member. He held the Corinth Excavations Fellowship in 1963 and 1964 and the Gorham Phillips Stevens Fellowship from 1964 to 1966.

In 1966 he became the first full-time director of the Corinth Excavations, a post he held until 1997. He worked across almost the whole of the large and complex site, from the Iron Age through the late Frankish period. Each autumn he led the School's students on a trip through the Corinthia and the Argolid, and each spring he taught excavation technique, not only to future field archaeologists but to classicists and ancient historians so they could judge archaeological evidence for themselves. Under him the Corinth training programme was formalised and the digitisation of the site's records began. A trained architect, he designed the excavation houses and was closely involved in the organisation of storage, conservation and records. In 1993 the Archaeological Institute of America awarded him its Gold Medal.

After retiring as director he became director emeritus and kept working. He joined the American School's board of trustees in 1997 and chaired it from 2002 to 2011, lending his architectural expertise to projects including the Blegen Library and Loring Hall. His last major project was the publication of the thousands of Roman fresco fragments he had excavated at Corinth in the 1980s, work he continued until a few months before his death.

He was also among the most generous patrons of archaeology of his generation, often anonymously. He endowed the Corinth Excavations and funded fellowships for dozens of students and scholars, as well as new storage and laboratory buildings at the site. He supported the Fitch Laboratory of the British School at Athens, where he served as a vice-president, and was a trustee of the American Academy in Rome. At the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a trustee from 1997, he led the Penn Museum's Campaign for the 21st Century, and his 16 million dollar gift was at the time the largest the museum had received. He was the lead supporter of the Gordion excavations for the last 15 years of his life and was still visiting the dig at 89.

Williams divided his time between Corinth, where he lived, and Philadelphia. He was an artist himself and assembled an important collection of early twentieth century American art. He was a trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which exhibited about 100 works from his collection in Adventures in Modern Art in 2009, and he gave a number of them to the museum in 2023. Colleagues described him as a modest man who tried to deflect attention from himself. No wife or children are named in his obituary.

Williams shaped modern understanding of Ancient Corinth through more than three decades of excavation and through the generations of archaeologists he trained there. C. Brian Rose of the University of Pennsylvania said he completely transformed understanding of the ancient city.

His gifts left lasting institutions: the excavation houses and laboratories at Corinth, fellowships at the American School and the British School, the Williams Directorship and the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials at the Penn Museum, and works in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Greece honoured him with the Order of the Phoenix and honorary citizenship, the American School's alumni gave him their Aristeia Award in 2016, and Corinth awarded him its Gold Medal in 2025.