Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists

Introduction: Women of the Field, Defining the Gendered Experience

Introduction women of the field, defining the gendered experience Margaret Cool Root Who Are These Women? the biographies assembled here characterize aspects of the professional and personal lives of selected women archaeologists of the pioneering era, primarily though not exclusively women from Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. Their dates of birth range from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twentieth century. In my introductory comments I shall approach these lives as representing two overlapping conceptual generations: the ‹rst encompassing people born from around the middle of the nineteenth century to about 1890; the second encompassing those born between about 1890 and 1910. The ‹rst-generation female pioneers of scienti‹c archaeology emerge out of the depths of Victorian ideologies about the subordinate position of women. It will be essential to understand them collectively as women within the restrictive framework of a very speci‹c social setting. Beyond that, each of these remarkable women was, of course, a distinct individual who must ultimately be understood on her own terms as an intellect and as a human being. The second generation (born between about 1890 and 1910) frames people who saw their twenty-‹rst birthdays before World War I (and the ensuing social and political shifts) as well as those who did not turn twenty-one until the Great Depression. This latter profound event had, in its own way, radically altered the lives of the upper- and middle-class families who were the breeders of women archaeologists at this time. Yet the cumulative cohort of this second (and two-part) generation has a certain symbolic cohesiveness of paradox. Women born around 1890 reached their twenty- ‹rst birthdays when women’s suffrage was still in the future. Those born in 1910 or a few years earlier reached maturity in an era during which suffrage was a nascent but still bitterly contested reality. In both cases, the young and aggressively patriarchal academic establishments into which these women now had to ‹t were perhaps more hostile in some ways to the success of women in archaeology than was the Victorian milieu of the ‹rst generation (in which archaeology itself still lay outside the bounds and conformities of conventional academe). The group of biographies published here does not pretend to be exhaustive . It focuses on a representative set of exemplary women who were great pioneers particularly of ‹eld archaeology. Fairly, I think it can be said, that despite inevitable selectivity, this volume contains a richly informative cross-section of those women who worked in Old World archaeology during its pioneer phase. The project does, by design, lean heavily on the notion of archaeology as site survey and excavation, but it also embraces some ‹gures whose primary scholarly contribution came in interpreting the material record once revealed through excavation. Others included here mainly contributed to the sphere of education in archaeology rather than to pathbreaking discoveries and publications. In gathering together a diverse range of lives representing various types of impact in the ‹eld, this project happily avoids the pitfall of many great-man biographies. All too often the great-man biographical narrative lionizes a small number of individuals at the expense of a much larger contextualizing experience, intellectual and political history, and supporting cast of characters. The Agenda The biographies presented here are not written according to any particular mandate of gender politics. Breaking Ground is not an explicitly feminist project in which the contributing biographers were identi‹ed according to their quali‹cations as feminist or gender theorists. Depending upon the Breaking Ground 2 types of sources available, the idiosyncratic pattern of the life of the given subject, and the particular mind-set of each author, the biographies vary in amount of personal detail, in interpretive text and subtext, and so on. Over all, the book has a documentary spirit, with the authorial voices emerging out of the substantive arenas of the ‹eld itself. That having been said, I hasten to suggest, however, that an interpretive biography of any female— even of the present day—must be political in the expansive sense of the term (viewing a life captured within spheres of competing social framings of power, collective social memory, and individual ambition). In particular, it seems quite simply impossible to contemplate the notion of an interpretive biography of a Victorian woman that is not political in that expansive sense. The very fact that a collection of biographies speci‹cally of the pioneer women of the ‹eld...