Yet when they returned from the field, it was beyond dispute that the first women archaeologists had held their own physically and intellectually in what was then a man’s world. They had traveled, dug, scrutinized sites, managed, and made it. Impressive. So impressive that these women are sometimes in danger of being transformed into myth. Although I have boundless admiration for each of the women chronicled here, I try to avoid giving in to pure romanticism. The greatest honor is in keeping it honest. When you are working in the field you want your notes to be as accurate as possible, your maps as precise as can be, so that your reconstructions and interpretations are reliable. I aim for the same here. Legends can become the stuff of make-believe, overshadowing the realities and nuances of a true life.
These early archaeologists were never camelback saints (and they would be dull if they were). They were products of their time and made choices that by today’s standards would elicit criticism and might even be judged as politically incorrect. In some cases they chose to play very much in a man’s world and occasionally viewed other women, in popular patriarchal fashion, as dithering inferiors instead of comrades. They present sometimes frustrating contradictions that both support and undermine a feminist view. Complex individuals, they challenge us, as they once challenged their own peers and colleagues, to take them as they are.
With that in mind I ceremoniously opened an old archaeological field-journal of mine one breezy bayside day in northern California and invited the ladies in. Come on down, drink coffee with me, spread your old maps out on my desk, and let’s make a book together. I asked them into my small studio, encouraged them to kick their dusty boots up onto the kitchen table. Remind me of your crazy lives and courage. I asked each of them to look over my shoulder as I wrote their respective chapters, and if that didn’t make the writing any better, it did make my own journey through their stories richer.
Archaeology’s essence is to uncover the origins of things, the epicenters of change, the evolution of style, technology, and everything else that makes us human. It makes sense that these pioneering women would take such a field of study as their own. As they challenged ideas about what a woman could accomplish, transformed styles of clothing through cross-dressing, cut their hair boyishly short, and broke into a scientific field previously denied them, little did the ladies know to what extent they were making history themselves.
ABOVE : Amelia Edwards, the revered godmother of Egyptology
Sailing on the Nile, Amelia Edwards described her travels in a rented dahabeeyah (boathouse) as a “Noah’s Ark life.” It was a journey where the “sacred hawk” circling overhead uttered the “same sweet, piercing, melancholy note that the Pharaohs listened to of old,” and it was to this accompaniment that her thoughts were swept up by the grandeur of bygone times. Other dahabeeyahs passed by hers, garlanded with crocodile skins and tourists, but Edwards remained aloof to other travelers and kept to her boat and crew, a team that exhibited “every shade of complexion from fair to dark, from tawny to copper-colour, from deepest bronze to bluest black.”1
Her journeys through Egypt were mingled with history’s ghosts and crowded with ancient ruins and temples, with the hieroglyphics inscribed on crushed potsherds and a quality of light that made the pyramids look like “piles of massy gold” at sunset. Drifting along the Nile, Edwards was in search of travel’s pleasure as well as historical understanding. Yet what she ultimately found was to become her life’s consuming passion: archaeology. This is the woman who would one day be heralded as the godmother of Egyptology.
Edwards was independent and financially secure from her career as a journalist and novelist. In her thirties, she packed her bags, left her English home, and let her sails fill with the breath of wandering. When she departed there was no one left in her life to advise against it; her parents had both recently died, and her only constant companion was a woman she referred to merely as “L.”
By her own account, her later arrival in Egypt was almost by accident: “. . . without definite plans, outfit or any kind of Oriental experience, behold us arrive in Cairo on the 29th of November 1873, literally and most prosaically in search of fine weather.”2 Whether this is pure truth or a stylized start to her tale of discovery, the Egyptian Delta made its way firmly into her heart.
In all of her expeditions, Amelia was there to write. Tiptoeing on slopes “strewn with . . . fragments of mummy, shreds of mummy cloth, and human bones all whitening and withering in the sun,”3 she recorded what she found and sketched the people she met. She was a travel writer, a tourist, a grand dame of the Nile, and she longed to make her own archaeological discovery.
One baking-hot afternoon a servant ran in with a penciled note, interrupting her lunch. It read: “Pray come immediately—I have found the entrance to a tomb.” Breathless, Edwards ran to the scene of action. Dropping to her hands and knees, pushing her big skirts over her knees, shoveling sand with her bare hands, “heedless of possible sunstroke, unconscious of fatigue,” she worked to excavate her first archaeological find. Pausing in her fast digging for just a moment, the Victorian lady pushed her hat back, sat on her heels, and turning to her companions asked, “If those at home could see us, what would they say!”4
BORN IN LONDON ON JUNE 7, 1831, Amelia Edwards—Amy to family and friends—was the only child in a family with modest means. Her mother, Alicia, was a “brilliant-complexioned, bright-eyed, large featured little Irish woman”5 who home-schooled her daughter until the age of six and deliberately taught her nothing of domestic duty. Her mother must have thought lace patterns and buttons were a bore, and so she raised a daughter more comfortable in the library than near her mother’s skirts. Edwards was one of the few girls in her day busy reading a book instead of learning to thread a needle. Mother and daughter were an active duo, as Alicia took her little girl out to cultural events and on boat trips. They spent a summer abroad in Ireland when Edwards was ten (Dad stayed home). It was during that trip that young Edwards first became fascinated with finding some “old round tower or ruined castle” and writing stories from the old-fashioned days when all was “love & fighting.”6
Her father, Thomas Edwards, was a retired army officer and later a bank employee who, by the accounts available, seems to have been a little gloomy. A mildly depressed or absent figure— a slumpy silhouette reading in his study—he was quiet and removed in contrast to his vivacious wife and his daughter, who was already in possession of a fantastic imagination. Edwards’s cousin Matilda described Mr. Edwards as a man whose “fireside influence was not inspiring” and a creature of “quiet, almost pensive habits.”7 As for Edwards, she only made a note when recalling childhood memories that her father’s health was indifferent.8
As she grew up, Edwards made comic strips and books, combining her sketching skills with storytelling, and shared her work with family and friends, who encouraged her. Her first poem, “The Knights of Old,” was composed when she was only seven and published in a local paper. By twelve she had a full story to her name. She continued writing stories and poems, later noting that “I was always writing or drawing, when other children were playing with dolls or dolls’ houses.” She thought herself a little lonely but was nevertheless content and absorbed by the world of words and history on which she thrived. As she entered her teens she began achieving recognition as both an accomplished artist (pencil sketching and watercolor were her fortés) and a performing musician who composed