Archaeologica.org Web Portal Co-Founder Michelle Hilling Has Passed Away

Michelle Hilling, the co-founder of Archaeologica.org, has been a great friend of ArchaeologyinBulgariacom. Photo: Archaeologica.org

Michelle Hilling, the co-founder and publisher of Archaeologica.org, one of the world’s top online portals about archaeology news, has passed away.

Michelle Hilling has been a long-time friend of ArchaeologyinBulgaria.com ever since we started actively publishing current archaeology news stories at the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015.

It is thanks to Michelle, who as publisher would regularly feature news stories from ArchaeologyinBulgaria.com, that the countless readers of Archaeologica.org from around the world have been learning about astonishing archaeological discoveries from Bulgaria and Bulgaria’s little known but remarkably rich archaeological, historical, and cultural heritage.

“We’ve been extremely saddened to learn about Michelle’s passing. Her dedication and welcoming attitude were heart-warming and truly touching,” ArchaeologyinBulgaria.com’s founder and publisher Ivan Dikov has said.

“The impact of her hard and inspired work on promoting archaeological news insight to a global mass audience from around the world literally since the dawn of the Internet era will be with archaeology lovers from the around the world for good,” he has added.

“We feel like it is very important to recognize what Michelle and her co-founder have been able to accomplish with the Archaeologica.org web portal to promote worldwide archaeology knowledge, awareness, and interest long before there were social media,” he says.

“We at ArchaeologyinBulgaria.com will remain forever grateful to Michelle since she saw the potential of our endeavor from its very inception, and was willing to present us to her own global readership as a trustworthy source of exciting archaeological discovery stories even though our website was very young at the time. Our success would been much harder to achieve without her support,” Ivan Dikov elaborates.

Archaeologica was first started as a topic on a bulletin board in 1998. The Archaeologica.org website was launched by co-founders Michelle Hilling and Claire Britton-Warren on April 23, 2000.

It has been providing daily or weekly selections of the world’s most intriguing archaeological discovery stories ever since.

Michelle passed away on October 9, 2019, from a brief illness, as we have learned from the October 19, 2019, audio news podcast of The Archaeology Channel, a partner of Archaeologica.org through the Archaeological Legacy Institute.

“I first learned about Archaeologica.org some time in 2009 or 2010 when I was running Novinite (Sofia News Agency), Bulgaria’s largest English-language media at the time. Whereas over there we would cover all kinds of Bulgaria-related topics for an international readership, it was Archaeologica.org’s occasional posting of some of our archaeology news at the time that made me realize that archaeology is the single most sought-after topic about Bulgaria among international readers. Archaeology would beat politics, business, finance, culture, etc., as far as a global readership’s interest in Bulgaria is concerned,” Ivan Dikov explains.

“My decision to found ArchaeologyinBulgaria.com later was very much based on this particular conclusion that I had reached largely thanks to Archaeologica.org, and when I approached Michelle to tell her about our initiative, she was unbelievably welcoming and supportive. This is something we would never forget,” Ivan concludes.

The team of ArchaeologyinBulgaria.com would like to express our eternal admiration and appreciation of Michelle Hilling and her dedicated work through Archaeologica.org. May she rest in peace!