Seven women; surely there must have been more. Many woman worked along the margins of archaeology during the Victorian era and for the next decade or two afterwards. Some of these women, like Sophia Schliemann and Hilda Petrie, were the wives of famous archaeologists. They worked alongside their husbands in the field and no doubt knew their stuff, but the record they left behind is as faint as old carvings on weathered stone. They never published on their own (or not much), and their labor in the field lacked real ownership or autonomy. For better or worse, as those wedding vows pronounced, they were wives to their men, and those men authored the reports, led the teams, and took full credit for any discoveries of note. Wives in the field were viewed as extremely useful assistants. They could draw artifacts, keep the lab in order, inventory artifacts, and nurse the wounded field crew, but true scientists they were not. At least not as recorded.
ABOVE : Sophie Schliemann, wife of archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, wearing the jewels of Helen of Troy, 1876
Archaeology thus has several ghosts. For many of the first women who worked in the field, there was no afterlife—no legacy. Their work wasn’t registered in the pages of history. The earliest contributions of women in the field are in the style of the man behind the man, or more aptly put, the woman behind her husband, the mere whisper in an ear at night before bedtime.
There are also other women who contributed to archaeology but who are not included in this book for one of two reasons. First, Ladies of the Field is not intended to be an encyclopedic account of every female who in one form or another engaged with archaeology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That would be a different kind of book—more a compilation of names and dates than a series of inspiring stories. Women such as Margaret Murray (1863–1963) who taught archaeology in the classroom more than they excavated in the field are not included here. Some women archaeologists, such as Edith Hall, were students of other earlier women archaeologists—in Hall’s case, Harriet Boyd Hawes. Hence, some women’s careers and contributions are folded into relevant chapters.
Second, some exceptional women archaeologists, such as Kathleen Kenyon (1906–1978), famous for her excavations at Jericho and first woman president of the Oxford Archaeological Society; Russia-born Tatiana Avenirovna Proskouriakoff (1909–1985), who conducted breakthrough work on Mayan hieroglyphics; and even the German mathematician Maria Reiche (1903–1998), who spent her life surveying geoglyphs called the Nasca Lines in the Peruvian desert—all make their debuts just slightly after the period highlighted in this book: the Victorian era. Their lives and work are of great interest, but it was the earlier pioneers, the seven women discussed in chapters to follow, who paved their way.
The intent here is not to exclude (that has happened often enough to women’s work throughout history) but rather to sharpen focus on seven lives that reveal much about early archaeology and what it took for women, in general, to become a part of it. The women presented here may have not been the very first to kick a shovel into the ground, but they were the first pioneering and fearless women who set upon archaeological research forcefully, unconventionally, and most of all, on their own terms. They worked in the field, excavating by themselves or in the company of hired teams and other female colleagues. They supervised ground-breaking excavations and made lasting contributions to archaeology as a growing science. Jane Dieulafoy and Agatha Christie worked alongside their husbands, but both enjoyed an uncommon degree of latitude in pursuing their own scholarly interests and were given credit for their expertise. Instead of “assistants,” Dieulafoy and Christie were viewed by their spouses as true and equal partners.
Edwards, Bell, Christie, and Garrod were British; Dieulafoy, French; and Nuttall and Boyd Hawes, American. It’s a Western team. Not one of the women presented here heralds from Asia or India, Africa or South America. That is because archaeology was born of Western science. It moved with spreading colonialism, was a tool of the British Empire, and fascinated the Western mind with its growing toolkit of physical evidence, theories, documentation, accurate measurements, hypothesizing, and overall propensity for logical explanation. This was a new way to interpret the past. The founders of archaeology were all of a Western European, and by extension, American mindset. It would be some time before other parts of the world began to systematically excavate their own backyards for history’s buried remains.
In addition, the women chronicled here have all left handsome paper trails. Their journals, field notebooks, photographs, letters, diary entries, and publications allow a researcher to immerse herself in each woman’s own historical context and tap into her spirit. It’s the women who wrote enough to reveal themselves— their ambitions, frustrations, inspirations, and doubts—who made their way into this book. Based on the artifacts each woman left behind, could a pioneer and her legacy be brought into clear and compelling focus? Seven could, and these are the trendsetters who rode out into wide-open spaces, on horseback, donkey, or camel’s hump, without precedent and against all odds to find what they were looking for.
THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIELD—DESERT dunes, riverbanks, crumbling ruins, and buried tombs—still exudes magnetism today. The romance of archaeology persists, and one has only to hum the tune of Raiders of the Lost Ark (duh-duh-duh-DUH! da-da-da!) and a scene of sweaty, dangerous adventure and jungle glory is unleashed. Yet aside from popular caricatures of archaeology, the passion for understanding human history—and more to the point, the story of what makes us human—is a quest that continually fascinates.
Sunken ships littered with skeletons and chandeliers, the fossilized footprints of an ancient ancestor in Africa, a bone amulet—these are the kinds of things archaeologists may find. Drawn to the tantalizing possibility that an ancient city, a site, or an artifact might be discovered that could change everything we thought we knew, we wait to see what comes next. Could there be a lost library containing thousands of books in a language never seen before? Perhaps a new link in the evolutionary chain of our species, a link with a wing nub instead of a shoulder blade? What if we find a buried wooden boat preserved in a bog that dates so far back that all the theories of human migration to the New World will need to be rewritten? Archaeology is uniquely, and consistently, able to renew and sometimes redefine our understanding of ourselves.
As Amelia Edwards remarked in 1842, archaeology is that subject where “the interest never flags—the subject never stales—the mine is never exhausted.”8 Archaeology never stales because it keeps reinventing the big story of us.
The archaeological field is a centerpiece to each pioneer’s story. Each woman found her way to some very out of the way places, circa 1900, in the name of her research and study: Iraq, Iran, Crete, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Gibraltar, Mexico. Often the field called to her with its own type of siren’s song, a tune mingling mysteries of earth and history on a breeze. Today the field continues to beckon adventurous souls curious about where we’ve been and where we’re going. The study of the past is nearly universal, and although each culture has a unique way of embracing and explaining its own history, archaeologists are a self-selecting crowd. They have their own particular, even peculiar toolkit and a strong desire to dig for history’s precious leftovers.
LEFT: Necklace, bracelets, and fragment of decorated pottery
RIGHT: Earthenware vessel and stone artifacts
Before the skies were filled with airplanes that could get you there and back, archaeology meant going off into strange places with only what a team could carry. Archaeologists would leave in search of something that might lie hidden beneath piles of dirt. Shovel in hand, they would chase