Soon after, Jane Dieulafoy burst onto the scene with her archaeologist husband, Marcel. The two of them traveled thousands of miles on pounding horseback through what is now Iran. They set their sights on the ruins of Susa, and Dieulafoy became one of the most celebrated women in Europe, not just because of her archaeological prowess, but because she was a French lady who preferred to wear men’s clothing. She even requested and obtained an official permit from the government authorities to do so.
The strong-minded Zelia Nuttall was born in San Francisco and schooled in Europe and eventually made her permanent home in Mexico City, where she became a prominent scholar in Mexican archaeology, a cultural icon in black lace shawl, and master gardener of ancient seeds. She played host to celebrities such as D.H. Lawrence and was a firm believer in modern scientific methods. Nuttall was also famous for finding ancient papers and objects the rest of the world had presumed lost.
Gertrude Bell deserves her own book, and luckily several have been written about her. A legendary lady, she was an insatiable traveler, brilliant intellectual, photographer, diplomat, strategist, and all-around “Queen of the Desert.” In Bell’s heyday, she was the most powerful woman in the British Empire. Her life soars with supreme adventure, and no matter where she was, she always wished “to gaze upon the ruins.” The pursuit of archaeology is what structured Bell’s expansive wanderings.
In her mid-twenties Harriet Boyd decided she could learn far more about ancient Greece by living there—under its blue sky and white colonnades—than by studying its history in the pages of a library book. By 1900, she was crossing the wine-dark sea to begin ground-breaking excavations at the site of Gournia on the island of Crete. Before leaving Athens she had also developed a reputation as a girl bicycle rider. Newspapers chronicled her daily exploits (even if she was just doing errands); she shocked passersby by touring through Athenian streets in a long dress on a bike with a basket.
Not long after, the world’s future best-selling novelist Agatha Christie was sitting at her rickety desk in a humble London flat typing out the draft of one of her first detective stories, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Little did Christie know that she would soon be divorced, onboard the Orient Express alone, happier than she’d ever been, and en route to meet her second husband, Max Mallowan. Together they would spend thirty years inside the trenches of archaeological fieldwork.
Last, there is the enigmatic Dorothy Garrod, a ferociously good scholar who methodically tore down what final barriers still stood that prevented women from joining the ranks of archaeology. Garrod’s quest was to discover the very origins of who we are and where we come from. Having lost three brothers to World War I, she dedicated herself to proving her own life worthy not just of one man’s accomplishments but rather of three.
All seven women were headstrong, smart, and brave. They had a taste for adventure, a kind of adventure that no longer exists today. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, massive swaths of desert remained unmapped, communication moved no faster than a horse’s gallop (at least in those deserts where they roamed; the first transatlantic telegraph wasn’t sent until the mid-1860s), and to travel at all as a woman—especially as a woman alone—elicited most people’s disapproval. Yet here were these seven women who risked everything just so they could dig in the dirt. This book sets out to discover who these extraordinary women were, what made them tick, and why they chose archaeology—a career grounded in mud, bugs, leaky tents, and toil—as their life’s consuming passion.
THE VICTORIAN ERA (1837–1901) PROVIDES THE backdrop for all seven women: each was born in or worked during that time. To be a woman archaeologist today requires some sure navigation through a boy’s club, but back then, the boy’s club was bolted shut. In Victorian times, opportunities for women outside the home were no larger than the tiny embroidery stitches the girls worked on each day. Women could and often needed to work to help support their families, but that labor typically consisted of sewing, washing, domestic service, shoemaking, and factory jobs. The upper echelons of intellectual careers and politics were largely off-limits.
Queen Victoria was in reign, and it is ironic that one of history’s most debilitating times for women, socially speaking, was when a queen ruled the Empire.2 Victorian influence on the private and public spheres of life was felt not only in England but also in France and across the Atlantic in North America. Industrialization was dramatically transforming society: the divide between rich and poor widened, and suddenly, the home and the workplace became two very different and separate spheres. Women were shooed into a domestic role, expected to become chaste “angels of the house,” cheerfully on hand to meet the needs of their husbands and children (think of a full-time domestic goddess without an exit strategy or a cocktail hour) while men engaged in the world and its affairs. Rousseau’s view on the expectations and education for a woman sum it up:
All the education of women should bear a relation to men— to please, to be useful to them—to possess their love and esteem, to educate them in childhood, to nurse them when grown up—to counsel, to console, to make their lives pleasant and sweet; such are the duties of women and should be taught to them from infancy.3
His eighteenth-century views continued to inform the next century and were frequently cited as the way to go. Females were creatures of service. Their minds should never be taxed because their brainpower was delicate and feeble. Girls were praised for their passivity and obedience, and throughout Queen Victoria’s reign (and to some extent after) women’s lives were made highly interior, almost invisible, while men assumed a greater public persona and place in the work force. It was a polarizing time of public versus private, male roles versus female roles.
Science didn’t help. Scholars gave credence to theories that women were “weak in brain and body.” They needed a man’s protection from the world. Doctors proclaimed that “love of home, of children, and of domestic duties are the only passions they [women] feel,”4 that “a reasonable woman should always be contented with what her husband is able to do and should never demand more,”5 and perhaps most damning, that “any strain upon a girl’s intellect is to be dreaded, and any attempt to bring women into competition with men can scarcely escape failure.”6 How the first women archaeologists defied the times! With dirt under their fingernails, living in tents, managing large crews of male workmen, attending universities, smoking men’s pipes, wearing trousers, some never married, some never mothers—all were deliciously defiant of the social roles pressed upon them.
These seven foremothers of “inappropriate” behavior blazed a trail that helped other women enter the world and the work of science, but these pioneers also reached even further. Newspaper articles and monthly magazines carried stories of their adventures and accomplishments. Public speaking tours brought thousands to hear them. Slowly, but most surely, they reconfigured the public impression of a woman’s worth and dismantled the building blocks of unchecked chauvinism. It was through the seemingly “masculine” work of archaeology—the physical labor, discomforts of the field, the dirt and discovery—that these women helped to revolutionize the very nature of womanhood, or, perhaps more accurately, our understanding of woman’s nature. Although actions to address gender inequality had already been stirred in the mid-nineteenth century—rumblings of Britain’s women’s suffrage movement began in 1866—it was the first women archaeologists who chipped away at the foundations and rationalizations of Victorian age thinking with real tools: steel shovels and excavation picks.
Each woman described here made a significant contribution to archaeology when it was just a fledgling science, but they also illuminate the myriad facets of a woman’s world. Some sought adventure and made the world feel bigger; others were drawn to mystery. One worked within a life-long partnership, and another in pure solitude with stingingly clear fast winds at her back. In a letter home to her father, Gertude Bell once exclaimed while traveling alone on horseback through the desert, “How big the world is, how big and how wonderful.”7 The world is big and wonderful, and these women embody the very best of its possibility.
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