Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists

Preface

Preface the modern science of archaeology did not originate as a science. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries archaeology was essentially treasure hunting.1 Wealthy Europeans or their agents went out to Mediterranean lands and the Middle East in order to collect museum pieces and send them back home. Others made voyages of exploration to ‹nd biblical sites and in the process often collected artifacts as well. Among these travelers to the Middle East, incidentally, were a number of extraordinary women who may be seen as important predecessors of the ‹rst generation of pioneer women archaeologists. Generally, these European travelers— male and female—had no real interest in systematic excavation. Their objective was either exploration or the acquisition of antiquities. One may see examples of this European desire for antiquities throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Thus, in 1784 the Comte de Choiseul-Gouf‹er wrote to L. F. S. Fauvel, his agent in Athens, “Take everything you can. Do not neglect any opportunity for looting all that is lootable in Athens and the environs. Spare neither the living nor the dead.”2 Seventeen years later, in 1801, the Turkish government gave Lord Elgin permission to remove the sculptures from the Athenian acropolis and ship them to England. Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt 1798 “marked the beginning of a process of investigation and discovery in which the military authorities, scholars and art thieves of Europe would combine in unholy alliance to uncover the evidence of past civilizations.”3 Farther east, in the ‹rst two decades of the nineteenth century, Claudius James Rich, an agent of the East India Company in Baghdad, visited sites in Mesopotamia and wrote about them. He also collected antiquities that were subsequently sold to the British Museum. His activity was suf‹ciently well known to attract the attention of Lord Byron, who wrote in Don Juan, Claudius Rich, Esquire, some bricks has got And written lately two memoirs upon’t. In Egypt, according to Kent Weeks, Egyptologists, most of them philologists by training, considered archaeological data merely footnotes to the story told by the written word. Archaeology’s goal, it was argued, should simply be to ‹nd more texts. Archaeological context was ignored, and objects were saved only if they were deserving of display in the museums. Excavators felt perfectly justi‹ed in plowing through sites . . . saving only inscribed objects and pieces of aesthetic appeal and tossing the rest into the Nile. It was an exciting time: excavators plundered tombs, dynamited tombs, committed piracy and shot their competitors in order to assemble great collections.4 In the second half of the nineteenth century this “exciting time” gave way to more sedate pursuits! Archaeology began to change from the search for treasure to the systematic excavation and study of ancient sites and of the objects, both big and small, found there. Thus, in 1860 Giuseppe Fiorelli took over the excavation at Pompeii and began to record the results of his digging. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Heinrich Schliemann (for all his brutal excavation techniques) and Wilhelm Dörpfeld kept accurate records of their ‹eldwork at Troy, recorded debris layers and published timely and scholarly reports of their work. In Egypt and then in Palestine W. M. Flinders-Petrie was one of the ‹rst archaeologists to dig carefully, record his results, and provide contextual analysis. Among other things, he also developed techniques for the sequential dating of pottery. Modern, systematic archaeology began its existence as a new discipline, usually subordinated to another ‹eld. Classical archaeology, for example, was subordinate to philology within the ‹eld of classical studies. Egyptian archaeology had to emerge from under the wing of philologically oriented Egyptologists. And Near Eastern archaeology owed much of its rise to the European fascination with the Bible. Of course, as a new discipline, not yet fully integrated into university curricula and conducted far off from university campuses, archaeology Preface vi offered women unique professional opportunities. Some of the pioneering women archaeologists did not have university appointments; many had (some) independent means. But the same can be said, incidentally, of male archaeologists of this time. Schliemann and Arthur Evans, for example, were both quite wealthy. And Schliemann did not have a regular university position. In her introduction Margaret Root distinguishes two generations of early female archaeologists: those born from around the middle of the nineteenth century to about 1890 and those born between 1890 and 1940. This distinction is a useful one because, among other...