Inspired
Abidemi Babatunde Babalola Wins Dan David Prize for Groundbreaking African Archaeology
Abidemi Babatunde Babalola wins the $300,000 Dan David Prize for his trailblazing work uncovering Africa’s scientific and technological past.
Photo Credit: Dan David Prize
Abidemi Babatunde Babalola, a research archaeologist at the British Museum, has been named one of the winners of this year’s prestigious Dan David Prize. The award, which recognises groundbreaking work on the human past, will see nine historians, archaeologists, and filmmakers from around the world each receive $300,000 to support their research.
The Dan David Prize, based at Tel Aviv University, is widely regarded as the world’s largest history award. It honours early- and mid-career scholars whose innovative work is reshaping our understanding of history. This year’s winners are exploring a wide range of subjects, from the notebook of Isaac Newton’s roommate to the history and traditions of Ethiopian Jews.
Reflecting on this year’s selection, Ariel David, son of the prize’s founder Dan David, said: “By making groundbreaking discoveries or applying new methods to historical research, our winners constantly challenge us to think about the past while rethinking how we shed light on it.”
Babalola is a leading voice in African archaeology. He currently serves as the lead archaeologist on the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) Archaeology Project in Benin City, Nigeria, and works within the British Museum’s Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. His research focuses on the archaeology of pyrotechnologies and the history of science and invention in pre-modern West Africa.
Through his work, Babalola has challenged long-standing Eurocentric narratives by uncovering the sophistication of indigenous technologies. His studies on early glass production in Ile-Ife have offered a new lens through which to view West Africa’s scientific legacy. He explores themes of creativity, resilience, experimentation, political economy, and indigenous knowledge systems that thrived long before colonial contact.
Babalola also leads the Archaeology of Glass project in Ile-Ife and was a principal investigator on a British Museum-funded project documenting the significance of glass and bead-making traditions in Nigeria. He is currently curating a mobile exhibition titled “Science, Technology, and Invention in the Empire of Ile–Ife,” which will tour major cities across Southwest Nigeria.
His contributions to historical scholarship have earned him several accolades, including the Shanghai Archaeology Forum Discovery Award in 2019, the World Archaeology Congress Blaze O’Connor Award in 2022, and the Archaeological Institute of America’s Conservation and Heritage Site Award in 2025.
Among the other Dan David Prize winners are Mackenzie Cooley of Hamilton College, Bar Kribus of Tel Aviv University, Hannah Marcus of Harvard University, Beth Lew–Williams of Princeton University, and Caroline Sturdy Colls of the University of Huddersfield. The list also includes filmmaker Fred Kudjo Kuwornu, known for his work on Black identity, Alina Șerban, founder of Untold Stories, which focuses on marginalised narratives in Romanian history, and Dmitri Levitin of the University of Utrecht and All Souls College, Oxford,
All nine winners are recognised for their innovative contributions to understanding the human past, and for bringing new methods, voices, and stories to historical research.
