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History of Badass Women in Archaeology Pt II - Episode 46
360 Plays6 years ago
On this episode, the hosts return to one of their favorite topics - the amazing women who have helped make archaeology the field it is. We'll talk about some of our personal heroes, women who definitely don't get enough credit, and how archaeological drawing is super hard and becoming somewhat of a lost art.
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Transcript
Introduction to Women in Archaeology Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hi, and welcome to the Women in Archaeology Podcast, a podcast about for and by women in the field. On this episode, we will be revisiting our roots. That's right. It's time for another round of historical women in archaeology. Yay!
Discussion on Historical Women in Archaeology
00:00:23
Speaker
I'm Chelsea Slotten, and joining me for this episode are Emily Long, Deirdre Black, and Jenny McNiven. Ladies, thank you so much for jumping on today. I really appreciate it. Happy to be here. Absolutely. Excellent.
00:00:38
Speaker
So as previously mentioned, this is our second episode of Amazing Historical Women in Archaeology. We'll be discussing a different group of women on tonight's episode than we did in our first episode. So be sure to listen to episode 20 of our podcast if you want to learn about the 15, 20 or so women that we discussed the first time around.
00:01:06
Speaker
That podcast was pretty organized. We had broken things down by date of these historical women. This is not that podcast. This is the podcast where we talk about all of the women that we didn't get to talk about last time because they didn't fit. Or unsurprisingly, there were way too many women in the last 150 years and a lot fewer women that we know about from 5,000 years ago because we know a few were named people from 5,000 years ago.
00:01:37
Speaker
So who wants to kick us off? Like, who is someone that they're just dying to share information about?
Anna Shepherd and Petrographic Analysis
00:01:42
Speaker
Well, I have someone who rocks. Go for it. I want to hear about her. All right. Anna Shepherd, she's an archaeologist starting around the 1930s. And she was a pioneer of petrographic analysis, so description and classification of rock. Ooh. And sexy rocks.
00:02:05
Speaker
She came to archaeology from the rock sciences, and she did optical crystallography, and she was a specialist in Mesoamerican and Southwestern archaeology and ceramics. And so she was able to use her specialization in
00:02:24
Speaker
rocks and how they form. And looking at her pottery, she got our first of our really hardcore focus on shared paste, paint, temper, not just, this is a pretty pot that looks like this, and this is a pretty pot in this shape. It's like, let's crack it open and see what all the beauty parts are inside.
00:02:42
Speaker
And another part that makes her really cool is that she didn't do a lot of field work. And I know a lot of our early folks were like, field work, field work, field work. And everyone's like, aha, we go to the field and we do this thing. But she actually did mostly lab work.
00:02:55
Speaker
Oh, lab nerd. And even, you know, in the thirties and forties, she was, you know, one of the most widely published, you know, photographers and, uh, pot shard analysts and started a standard of work called ceramics for the archeologist. Oh, nice.
00:03:16
Speaker
That's crazy to think that's where I that all came from because I have have definite memories in grad school time to break open shirts and looking at temper and paste analysis like huh do you think that's where it all came from shame on me for not knowing her.
00:03:31
Speaker
Well, it's not like we were taught that Miss Shepherd. Yeah, I started it. We learned the big fella's names, but we don't learn the lady's names unless they discovered a fish on a rock. And she is not actually the only amazing female archaeologist who did work with our rocks, because one of the women I looked at also worked with rocks.
Porter: Roman Trading Stones
00:03:53
Speaker
What? I know. Great minds, right, DJ? How's that?
00:04:00
Speaker
I am probably going to get this middle name pronunciation wrong, but Mary Wynn Earls Porter, who was born in 1886 and died in 1980, so she was almost a centurion. It was crazy.
00:04:19
Speaker
So she spent time in Rome in her teens. Her father was stationed there. And she was really, really interested in the decorative stones that she was seeing everywhere. And it was a huge part of
00:04:38
Speaker
the Roman trading network was trading decorative stones. So she was talking to some of the locals and realized that a lot of what they were saying
00:04:51
Speaker
didn't make a lot of sense. And the geologists at the time were describing the stones based on properties, not necessarily where they were from or what type of stone they were, but like, this is blue. Or this one is, you know, has large bits of clear stone in it or quartz or, you know, whatever. So in a like layered analysis in time, like that kind of thing they weren't doing? Exactly. So she
00:05:21
Speaker
was upset about that and decided to do something about it. So she actually taught herself the basics of geology to try and identify the place of origin for a lot of these rocks, which included her compiling her own collection of fragments from exhumations. And I think she was like 15 at the time. So fast forward six, seven years.
00:05:51
Speaker
Not even kidding. Fast forward six or so years when she was 21. So in 1907, she published a book that was titled What Rome Was Built With, a description of the stones employed in ancient times for its building and decoration. 21 years old.
00:06:14
Speaker
published a book that is still used. She continued to travel around. She did a brief stint at the Smithsonian, actually, working with their stone collection. She finally got a doctor of science from Somerville College in Oxford in 1932, despite the fact that her father didn't believe women should be educated, but doctorate.
00:06:44
Speaker
And the collection that she started putting together when she was 15 was used to write the definitive text on the field, which was published in the 1970s by a dude. I have questions about why this other text that was published 70 years later than her earlier text is the definitive text. There's a whole other rant. That is really awesome.
00:07:06
Speaker
That's awesome. So other women who rock and work with frogs. I stole your pun. Sorry, Deidre.
00:07:16
Speaker
So yeah, Mary Porter. Okay, well, if you guys want to move on, I can talk about a very special woman that I did some research on.
Kenyon's Excavation Methods and Stratigraphy
00:07:24
Speaker
Extremely well-known archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon. Yes, yes. Considered one of the foremost women archaeologists of the 20th century. Actually, just archaeologist period because she's the bomb. She's pretty awesome.
00:07:38
Speaker
So she was born in 1906. She just passed away a little while ago in 1978, but she had an extremely prolific career, extremely influential. Yeah, for sure. So, okay, so imagine if you will,
00:07:55
Speaker
a young Eevee from The Mummy. This is basically how Kathleen King had started out. Is there any evidence that that character is based on her? You know what there might be. I wouldn't be surprised at all if in the beginning of the first Mummy movie they were like, oh, remember that famous archaeologist who lived in the British Museum because her dad ran it? Let's just base Eevee off of her because that sounds like a pretty bomb way to get started as an archaeologist.
00:08:21
Speaker
or a librarian, whichever you prefer. So yeah, Captain Kenyon actually basically lived attached to the British Museum when she was young. Her father was the director. He was a biblical scholar, Sir Frederick Kenyon, and this is how she got into the field. So
00:08:40
Speaker
She went to Oxford. She was the first female president of the Oxford Archaeological Society. Wow, that's amazing. Oh my gosh, yeah. She actually, she studied in school and then she went directly out into the field under Gertrude Cayton-Thompson, who is another famous female archaeologist from Britain. So she was in the field by 1929. In the 30s, she starts working with Mortimer Wheeler, another very famous, yes.
00:09:10
Speaker
And Tessa, right. So yeah, she's basically working with like some huge major players in the scene in British archaeology during that period. So the Wheelers and Gertrude Keaton-Thompson.
00:09:25
Speaker
She starts working on a lot of Romano-British sites actually in England. And so that's kind of where she begins academically. And then she eventually moves on to work in the Levant. And the majority of her career is spent working in a lot of Neolithic Fertile Crescent sites.
00:09:48
Speaker
especially the site of Jericho, extremely famous biblical archaeology site. And so she becomes basically the foremost scholar of Neolithic Jericho. So some of them.
00:10:04
Speaker
Yes, yes. Some of the most important stuff that she does for archaeology comes from her meticulous approach to excavation methodology, which as you guys know, like in the early 20th century, not always so much a thing with a lot of... Is she the one that's read the idea of stratigraphy? Yeah, basically, exactly. Her in-depth stratigraphic interpretation is like her thing. That is what
00:10:34
Speaker
what basically makes her one of the most respected archeologists because of her methodology. And so she's working in the Levant. She works on a lot of Roman settlements, but then she also starts working on Neolithic period stuff. And that's when she kind of just blows up.
00:10:53
Speaker
She does a lot of work on establishing the timeline of ancient Jericho. She does excavations in Jerusalem. She's working with the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. And eventually, actually, the British School of Archaeology there renames itself the Kenyan Institute after Kathleen Kenyon, herself.
00:11:18
Speaker
because of the amazing amount of influence she had there and the amount of work she's done. So, you know, she went on to have an illustrious career to teach. She taught at University College London. She was the principal of St. Hughes College, Oxford. She was granted the Order of the British Empire, which, yes, does make her Dame Kathleen Kenyon. So if anybody's the boss, I have to say it would be the Dame.
00:11:47
Speaker
the Dame Kathleen Kenyon. So yeah, she has always been a big name as far as I remember since I started studying archaeology and especially being interested in the women who paved the way in the field. She's one of the big ones. So Kathleen Kenyon, she's awesome.
00:12:04
Speaker
That's so cool. And to, I guess, round off our last five minutes, I should talk about one of my folks because she studied under Kenyan.
Sassoon and Contributions to African Archaeology
00:12:14
Speaker
Hey. So she's a student. So just keep moving it along.
00:12:20
Speaker
And that's Jean Sassoon. And she studied under Gordon Child, Mortimer Wheeler, and of course Kathleen Kenyon. So, so cool. And she's in her either late 80s, early 90s, and she's still working. I was reading up about her on the Trial Blazers website, which everybody should check out.
00:12:46
Speaker
It's such an amazing website and has tons of articles on amazing women in archaeology in general. And so I was reading up about her and the fact that she's still working just astounds me at that age and it's like, yes, keep rolling.
00:13:02
Speaker
So she worked as an ethnographer, she worked in archaeology, she worked in Great Britain to East Africa. So the breadth of the things that she studied is quite wide. She worked at Olduvai Gorge.
00:13:19
Speaker
With the Leakey's, she became an honorable ethnographer at the Kenyan National Museum. She did ethnographic work with Mary Leakey on the manufacture and use of stone, hollows and bowls and how that type of material culture wasn't really being brought forth as much.
00:13:40
Speaker
And then on top of all of this amazing work she did and the work that she did for Kenya, for just being an amazing ethnographer, she also became a consultant for the United Nations. So she was consulting on Kenya and the Southern Sudan.
00:14:03
Speaker
I unfortunately couldn't tell you much more about her specific work that she did, but except that she was just a really unique individual that continued the work of Catherine Kenyon. She continued that work, continued work under the Leakeys, and just kept pushing the field forward, especially with ethnography.
Princess-Kova's Influence in Russian Science
00:14:24
Speaker
She was just a really amazing individual.
00:14:27
Speaker
That's awesome. I mean, she worked with like the rock stars. Pretty much. It's like you can't get a stronger background than that unless it's like every big archaeologist today. And I was like, I studied under Benford Hodder and Trigger and Fagin and Renfrew as well. Oh, yes. Every single one of them. Sure.
00:14:50
Speaker
There's somebody out there who can say that. Exactly. So just I think we've already got a good start on some amazing women that are still working today and some amazing women in history. Excellent. This could be a good point to stop.
00:15:07
Speaker
Are you interested in hosting your own show on the Archaeology Podcast Network? If you're passionate about a topic and can come up with at least 10 episodes right now, I'll wait. Then contact me at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com. We'll go over your options and what we can do for you. That's chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com. Don't let your passions sit in a file cabinet or on a dusty bookshelf. Broadcast them to the world with a podcast today. Back to the show.
00:15:31
Speaker
Hi, and welcome back to the Women in Archaeology podcast. In the last 20 minutes, we talked about some of our favorite female role models. We're going to continue that pattern in this second segment. I actually would like to start us off with Princess-Kova, who's a little bit older than some of the women we've talked about so far, and is like, ah!
00:15:56
Speaker
pseudo-archaeologist, maybe? She's a scientist, though, which is really cool. I'm already intrigued. He sounds awesome. So, let me tell. So, she was born in 1734 as a countess.
00:16:13
Speaker
from a Russian family. And then she married a prince and became princess-kova. She, right, casual. She apparently was Catherine I, but the two of them often had bloodheads politically. So when she applied for a request to leave the country, it was granted because they were better friends when they were not free to speak.
00:16:38
Speaker
So she was married when she was 15 and became a princess. Her husband died like five-ish years later, I believe from pneumonia, but she still had like all of his money and status. And as someone with money and status and time, she went and got a degree in mathematics. Then like I mentioned previously, she and Catherine first
00:17:04
Speaker
you know, best friends, but also didn't necessarily love hanging out with each other. And so she traveled away. She met Ben Franklin when she was 37, who was so impressed with her, right, that he invited her to be the first woman member of the American Philosophical Society. Great. Oh, shoot. That is impressive.
00:17:32
Speaker
He found a woman perspective. Also, I was literally just at their headquarters two days ago in Philly. Yeah. So she, she was their first member and she was the sole female member for I think it was close to 80 years.
00:17:52
Speaker
Was she a member for 80 years? No, she was not, she did not live to be quite that old. You'd only, you'd hope. Right? One can- She looked like 115. Right. One can dream. So anyways, on her return to Russia, she was named the Director of the Imperial Academy of Arts and Science.
00:18:20
Speaker
Nice. And the major thing that happened in that organization while she was director of it was that she made Russian science professional. Right. What? Concept. How so? Just like better standards of documentation and mysticism and just like, you know, this is what's a profession.
00:18:49
Speaker
And then less alchemy, more science. Exactly, exactly. And also on her travels, she collected a lot of things. So, you know, from the late 1700s, early 1800s, kind of one of those, you know, cabinet of curiosities and natural history kind of thing. And she donated that to the Moscow University in 1807. But one of the coolest things that was in her cabinet was actually
00:19:17
Speaker
bone from a, at the time, unknown rhino species, right? Which is the elasmotherium sibericum.
00:19:32
Speaker
which is a, that one, right? It's the largest rhino that ever lived. And one of the reasons that I really loved this woman and wanted to bring her up, this rhino had a giant horn that was as much as two meters long, right? Which is like the size of an adult human person. So it's like a very large courier. So yeah, unicorn rhino.
00:20:02
Speaker
It's the unicorn rhino. I know this rhino. So she was responsible for the discovery of said unicorn rhino.
Architectural Drawings & Hieroglyphs
00:20:18
Speaker
In addition to professionalizing science and traveling and being respected by Ben Franklin and doing all these other really cool things like the unicorn rhino.
00:20:28
Speaker
That's the archaeological connection, right? It's the archaeology. It's fine. It's close enough. It lived alongside people, we think. It did, yeah. It went extinct, I think it was 40,000 or 50,000 years ago. Although some people think that it may have lived longer than that, although as of right now, I don't think we've got scientific proof of that.
00:20:56
Speaker
and that potentially that's where part of the unicorn myth comes from, although narwhals are also a strong contender for where the unicorn myth comes from. But how do you go from essentially a giant fish to a horse with a horn? How do you go from a sea cow to a mermaid? Good point. And some very lonely sailors. Lonely sailors explain a lot of things.
00:21:28
Speaker
And a lot of the narwhal tusks that I think were originally made their way to European courts were not necessarily attached to skulls anymore. So if you- To add a context. Right. And the base of them may look like the base of reindeer antlers or deer antlers or something, but if there's only one of them,
00:21:58
Speaker
antlers go on top of animals' heads. Clearly, this belongs on the top of an animal's head, rather than coming out from its mouth. Yes. The first lion pelts made it to medieval England long before what a lion is supposed to look like made it there. The taxidermy is interesting. It's the goofiest looking lion you've ever seen.
00:22:28
Speaker
It's like you had a general idea of what a cat looks like. Mine just going, hey, guys. But anyway, speaking of Russia and Siberia, are you done with our princess? I am done with our princess.
00:22:49
Speaker
So then I would like to bring up Tatyana Prashkaryakov. Okay. Say that again. I don't know if I can. That was great. Tatyana Avinirovna Prashkaryakov.
00:23:03
Speaker
I'm clapping. I'm clapping. In 1909, and as you mentioned before, the professionalization of the sciences, her parents were, her father was a chemist to the Czar and her mother was a physician in Tomsk, Siberia. But they traveled to the United States to live in Ohio in 1915, whilst doing research for the Czar Nicholas II.
00:23:34
Speaker
And they just sort of stayed there. There was the timing on their part. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ohio versus the Russian Revolution. It's pretty good choice. But she was a bit of a wunderkind. She was, you know, reading at age three, speaking in multiple languages, already receiving lessons in art and watercolor.
00:24:03
Speaker
And she really showed a knack for architecture and architectural drawings. And this was a time that you actually start getting architectural drawings that
00:24:12
Speaker
are detailed out that show, here's where all the little bricks are, here's where all the corners are. This is what it's actually going to look like, or this is what that building actually looks like, and here's the bits and pieces. And so that really helped her when she went to Piedras Negras. She was originally brought in as much as for her architectural drawing as for her historical studies. But she gives us our first real scientific
00:24:42
Speaker
drawings of a lot of these Mayan pyramids and structures and whatnot. And some of these things, we only know what they looked like before they were ravaged by various things because she was drawing them in the 40s. Yeah, she started her work in 1936. And it's also through her that we have a lot of the Mayan hieroglyphs preserved and preserved accurately.
00:25:11
Speaker
That's a big asterisk right there. And, uh, cause people had been sort of drawing them before, but leaving a little bit up to their own interpretation. But she, she would, uh, she would record them, you know, pretty faithfully. And she, she's really the, so she did, uh, there's Negras, Copan and all over the Yucatan.
00:25:32
Speaker
all over the place. I bet she had a butterfly at least once, but her biographies talk about that.
00:25:44
Speaker
The only time she ever went back to Russia was to talk to Mayan iconographer Yuri Norozov, who had theorized that some of these things had to deal with birth and accession dates of Mayan rulers. And so she started getting it together and it was through her work that later Linda Schell and Peter Matthews
00:26:14
Speaker
were able to bounce off of her work and in the 70s actually decipher the hieroglyphs so we can read them. Or they can read them. I can't read them. Right. Some people can read them. But the amazing thing is, is there, you know, here's this Russo-American woman
00:26:36
Speaker
you know, multilingual, working alone in the Yucatan in the 30s and 40s. She's just like, you know, bugger off guys. I'm going to sit here and draw my pictures. Oh, you want to do the big giant calendar drawing? That's great. I'm going to go draw what someone ate for lunch.
00:26:57
Speaker
So yeah, she really gets, she's the only reason we have a lot of the early Mayan sites preserved in detail because they're not detailed anymore. Isn't that due to looting for the most part? Looting, uncovering, removing where the jungle had taken them over and not doing anything to preserve them. I see. Some more looting.
00:27:26
Speaker
Um, uncovering them and then hurricanes going over a few, uh, banana Republic wars, few things. They've had some issues. Yes.
00:27:39
Speaker
So I know she's not, I actually also researched an artist because apparently Deidre, you and I were just on the same wavelength, like rocks, artists. Yeah, but was yours buried at her first excavation site? She was not. Mine has a little bit of a sad ending, potentially. Oh, no. So it's more her name is M.
Baker's Archaeological Art
00:28:07
Speaker
Louise Baker.
00:28:08
Speaker
She was born in 1872 when she died in 1962, and she was an archaeological artist. She primarily worked with ink and watercolors. She actually started out as a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse, but ended up, because of her drawing skills, as being, to start with, the part-time artist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
00:28:35
Speaker
where she worked on illustrating Mayan collections as well, and some other collections. I think Tatiana Proskurikoff worked there too. Yeah.
00:28:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I think that she did some of her illustrations through them. OK, so maybe some of her trips don't matter. Yeah, probably. And then she was hired to do a gig at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, casual. She spent time in New Orleans, Mexico, Guatemala, England, Iraq. Her travels to go see the collections.
00:29:18
Speaker
at these museums all over the place as well as go do some kind of in-situ drawings. So going to the excavations and drawing there were funded jointly by the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the Carnegie Institute because she was a big deal.
00:29:36
Speaker
Nice. One of her other skills that she was super lauded for was being a skilled pictorial conservationist. So she kind of knew the motifs from the areas that she worked in really well. And if you gave her a broken piece of something that was carved, she could often figure out what was supposed to be in the broken off bit.
00:30:01
Speaker
Oh, that's cool. Which is really impressive. And then the kind of sad thing is that she ended up having to retire in 1936 because she was having trouble with her eyesight. And this woman who is this incredible artist and made these amazing, amazing illustrations was completely blind by 1949.
00:30:28
Speaker
I said it was a sad story, I'm sorry. That's so bad. But at least she has an amazing endearing art for us to look at and that she made such a contribution to the field. Oh yeah, and so many of her drawings ended up in important early monographs and volumes about sites, field reports.
00:30:53
Speaker
And again, sites that no longer exist, or if they do, are in a much worse state of repair than they were 100 years ago. Wow. That's so great. I am just in awe, especially, of people who do archaeological illustrations. If you guys have never, I'm speaking to the larger you guys out there, have never had the chance to look into and explore some of these really awesome
00:31:23
Speaker
original illustrations of sites way back in the day when they were first being discovered. These things just blow my mind. I'm not an artist, so even though I love map recording and all that stuff, I can't even imagine having the talent to not only interpret those sites in these ruins and contexts, but to put them so faithfully down on paper.
00:31:47
Speaker
looked at, you know, some of the drawings that these women have made, they are just absolutely insane. They're gorgeous. And it just blows my mind a little bit. Well, and so many of them are even better than photographs, because little details that you can't necessarily tell the photograph, like this is an important detail for you to really pick up on and focus on for the lens to, you know, do what the lens is supposed to do to capture an image. You don't have that problem with someone who's doing an illustration.
00:32:19
Speaker
They can focus on the object and capture things that the camera might not. The light doesn't matter as much for how crisp your details are going to be. I was lucky enough at a field school that I went to, there was a girl who actually did
00:32:37
Speaker
archaeological drawings and they had us dig up. They had buried plastic skeletons and then we had to excavate the graves with the plastic skeletons in them.
00:32:49
Speaker
I love doing the drawings. Oh, me too. I do think that's something a lot of people don't realize that is still a really important skill, but it's definitely slowly, I think, being lost unless you really make an effort to learn it. A lot of folks don't realize that with rock art,
00:33:09
Speaker
just like what you were saying about the need for detail, you need to draw it as well as photograph it, or stone tools. There are certain patterns that you can't really see, wear patterns to flake scars that you can't see very well in a photograph, but you can see in a drawing. It's a lost art, and I think sometimes it looks so easy, and then you try to do it, and it's like, oh my God, this is really hard.
00:33:38
Speaker
Well, my drawing is absolutely terrible. Yeah. Yeah. I remember just getting really excited when I figured out how to draw bricks really well. Because I did a lot of like 19th century sites and I'm like, man, I got to figure out how to draw these bricks better because they are pathetic right now. I was very proud of my bricks eventually. Yeah. And they keep me so accurate. I mean, the woman that I worked with at the field school, we also had a
00:34:05
Speaker
GPS device. So we took GPS measurements at different points on the bone and then built a really good
00:34:13
Speaker
3D model of the skeleton, the plastic skeleton we dug up. And they overlaid her drawing that she'd done just by, you know, eyeing it just by using her own, you know, artist eye. And they matched like perfectly. It was insane. And hers looked a thousand times better than the GPS digital image that we had. Yeah. I cut my teeth on a burned rock mid drawings.
00:34:41
Speaker
You want to talk about a maddening assortment of amorphous rocks. How do I show this one tilts this way? Just some extra dots here and there. You want me to put an arrow on every single rock in the degrees it's tilted? Okay.
00:35:05
Speaker
I think this skill comes in super handy nowadays as in maritime archaeology.
Importance of Drawing in Maritime Archaeology
00:35:14
Speaker
We can use pictures in terrestrial archaeology all day long. Yeah, I think drawings can be better, but there's not a lot of ways in many underwater sites where you can capture it in the amount of detail that you would like.
00:35:27
Speaker
So, I know doing drawings from underwater stuff for me has been challenging from the very, very little bit that I've done, but it's really cool to see how they come out comparatively to some of the just sort of really bad quality imagery you get under the water. So, yeah, I think that's a really important skill for in the maritime world as well.
00:35:48
Speaker
I used to even on my thesis with stone tools because I had a picture and then digitally I had to draw over it because I was highlighting the parts that were re-sharpened versus the original chipping. Then I would go, this percentage on this one and this percentage on this one and here's some stats in bleh. They were significant stats. It was very important.
00:36:18
Speaker
Moral of the second 20 minutes of this podcast is archaeological drawing is a skill that you should learn. And we have amazing women to thank for their early archaeological drawings. And we're going to head to a quick commercial break. And when we come back, we will discuss some more amazing women that we love.
00:36:43
Speaker
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Speaker
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00:37:45
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00:38:11
Speaker
And concierge is C-O-N-C-I-E-R-G-E to get going and go digital today. Call us before you make any decisions. We've been there before. Hi, and welcome back to the Women in Archaeology podcast.
Crowfoot's Textile Preservation Work
00:38:28
Speaker
So far on today's episode, we've been discussing amazing historical women who are also archaeologists or archaeology adjacent. Last segment, we talked a bit about women who have done some amazing illustration work.
00:38:44
Speaker
And I know Deidre, there was someone you really wanted to talk about who was local to you, so I believe Texas? That's correct. You know, it's not a podcast without me talking about Texas, right? Of course.
00:38:59
Speaker
So I want to talk about Miss Ellen Sue Turner. Ellen Sue, I actually got to meet her quite a few times at the state archaeological conferences. She was born in 1924 in Michigan, lived through the Depression. Her dad would bring her to local historic sites, archaeological sites throughout the Southwest. But she grew up, got married, had some kids. And then in her 50s, she went, you know what?
00:39:28
Speaker
I really like that archaeology stuff. I'm gonna go back to school. And so that's one of the things that I really love. So in the 70s, she went back to school as a non-traditional student. And she graduated in 79 at 55 years old with her degree. And it's so awesome. I love that kind of stuff. And she's amazing. She didn't have a
00:39:54
Speaker
you know, coarse bone in her body. She was always so pleasant. But I would keep finding her name in sites that I was revisiting, sites that are now underwater because she was around when they were doing all the reservoir projects. And the thing that she was really, really good at was
00:40:16
Speaker
recording and illustrating stone tools, not just projectile points, but certainly projectile points and starting to group them by time period and region and all that stuff. And her book that came out of her, I can't remember if it was her dissertation or her thesis, but it was the stone tools of Texas Indians is what it was called. And it still is called that. And you can still buy this book. It's in its third edition now. Wow.
00:40:44
Speaker
And it is still the definitive book. There is a feller, Dr. Hester, who was one of my professors at school, has helped her do some of the groupings. And as new data came up, I would make sure she got that in there. But it was her lifelong goal to get it right. So she was continuing to work on it
00:41:10
Speaker
up until the last year of her life. I know she was still talking to people the year before she died. She was at the state archeological conference signing books and telling what was coming up in the new edition and everything else. And I was just like, wow. You know, the woman 88 years old got into it after her kids was grown and was meticulously detailed and just had a zest for the field. I mean, the field of archeology, not necessarily field work,
00:41:40
Speaker
That's great. I get a lot of questions from people on, am I too old to go into archaeology? Give me some advice here. I really love it, but I've been working a survival job for the last 20 years, and now I'm really unhappy, and can I go into this? This is just proof. It's testament. You're not too old. It's never too late if it's something you want to do.
00:42:03
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, she was a woman that found professional work in her sixties in the 1980s. So that's really cool. Go girl. Plus everyone had to call her Dr. Ellen Sue. That's amazing. So that's, yeah, that's my local girl. I just, that makes me happy.
00:42:30
Speaker
So if you all indulge me in moving into a very much not local girl, I would like to talk for a minute about Grace Mary Crowfoot, who all of her friends called her Molly. She was born in 1879 and she died in 1957.
00:42:54
Speaker
She was really well known for her work with textiles, but she also did some amazing work with botany. So she married John Winter Crowfoot in 1909, and he worked in the Sudan. So she moved to Cairo with him. And while there, she took a lot of photographs of the local flora plants.
00:43:22
Speaker
Then decided that, as mentioned last segment, photographs just weren't that great. They didn't really represent accurately enough or clearly enough the detail of the plants. So she decided that she was going to draw them. And many of her field drawings are now in the Kew Gardens in London.
00:43:43
Speaker
Oh, neat. She was great at it. But she also became really, really interested in textiles of North Africa, Middle East, and Europe. The two things that she's probably most known for are she wrote a paper on the tunic of Tutankhamen. So she worked with his textiles. Sweet as you do. Right, casual. But she also worked that.
00:44:12
Speaker
Right? What is? And then she also worked with textiles from suit and who in England. Oh, wow. No, two major, major sites. I think there were textiles from who. Neither did I, but apparently she worked with them. So she
00:44:38
Speaker
ended up back in the UK training a whole new generation of archaeologists who were going to care about textiles because prior to that textiles, they would find and literally remove from bone or metal or whatever and just discard. They didn't keep it. They didn't analyze it. It wasn't considered to be important. So she was a major driving force in, hey, maybe we should not get rid of the textiles.
00:45:09
Speaker
Which is crazy. She also did what we probably today called ethnographic archaeology, which is really cool. When she was living in the Sudan, she wanted to befriend a lot of the local women, so she took up spinning and weaving and actually became proficient at weaving herself.
Crowfoot's Social Contributions
00:45:33
Speaker
And then she compared the methods that the women were using and that they had taught her to the models of ancient Egyptian methods of spinning and weaving.
00:45:49
Speaker
And she found that, unsurprisingly, the techniques and equipment had not changed that much in over a thousand years. And then a really cool aspect of her that has absolutely nothing to do with archaeology
00:46:06
Speaker
when she was working with these women and learning how to spin and weave, she talked to the women and learned about their lives. And through the conversations with them, she learned that female genital mutilation was a really common local tradition, and it was the most severe form of it. So she was horrified and upset. And
00:46:30
Speaker
She decided to set up the midwives training school which was set up in the early 1920s and it trained local midwives to help improve conditions of childbirth as well as address
00:46:46
Speaker
issues surrounding the practice of female genital mutilation. So she wanted to empower the local women to take care of their own bodies and be in control of them. So that's just a really cool thing that she did that has absolutely nothing to do with archaeology. But it's still awesome. Yeah, it's amazing.
00:47:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's absolutely amazing. That's so cool, especially considering it's still such a major issue today that as early as, did you say the 1920s? So she set up this group in the 1920s.
00:47:20
Speaker
That's truly impressive that early on there were efforts to try to stop that practice or at least address the practice in general. And for listeners who are not familiar with it, it's a pretty brutal practice that is still practiced today in some areas. And a lot of anthropological associations do try to address the situation, but it's a really severe form of
Women's Role in Highlighting Overlooked Aspects
00:47:51
Speaker
It's mutilation of one's parts. I mean, it's exactly how it sounds. And so for an archaeologist to kind of turn anthropologist is pretty awesome. Yeah. Well, and I don't think that she had like real archaeological training. Her grandfather collected Egyptian antiquities.
00:48:21
Speaker
But, you know, whether archaeological, anthropological, just like a concerned, caring human being who wanted to make the world better. Yeah. And she herself was a professional midwife. Oh, okay. Wow. So she's a very well rounded individual.
00:48:42
Speaker
I think it's very common, especially in the 20th century, for females working in anthropology and archaeology to sort of champion women in the study of history and also in ethnography.
00:48:59
Speaker
it's kind of a part of society that when anthropology and archaeology was a bit more male, led and biased, that it was definitely overlooked. And I think it was amazing that these women, these trailblazers, sort of trailblazers, either way, came in and started saying, okay, well, there's another half of society that you really aren't
00:49:20
Speaker
you know, focusing on no one is giving them the type of in-depth study that they deserve. And so you do see that a lot when you talk about female anthropologists and archeologists. So it's an awesome thing to reflect on. Exactly. Are you saying that representation matters? I have so little bet. What a concept you have there. What a novel concept.
00:49:51
Speaker
Going in a very different direction, this particular archaeologist – well, not even archaeologist, this individual I looked at – really enjoyed archaeology and helped her husband a lot.
Agatha Christie's Archaeological Influence
00:50:05
Speaker
Her work was far reaching in many other ways, not necessarily in a humanitarian way. I was looking at Agatha Christie and what's fun about her is that we all know she's a famous author. She wrote fantastic murder mysteries. I love her books and I think the movie adaptations are a lot of fun. And one thing I didn't know too much about her was that she was incredibly interested in
00:50:32
Speaker
history. And you can see that reflected in a lot of her books and she had a lot of interest in musicians and artifacts and ancient things. And apparently she was a very well traveled individual as well. But later in life, she ended up marrying an archaeologist named Max Malwin.
00:50:50
Speaker
And she ended up being involved in a lot of his work. And so she would help excavate, she would help clean artifacts, she would help analyze artifacts anywhere they went. And so she was incredibly active in the field and she further popularized the field of archaeology through her books and through different publications and the things she would talk about.
00:51:15
Speaker
And there's a great quote from her that's on trial blazers. And I will not attempt an English accent because that would be pitiful. I'm like, many years ago. Many years ago. Oh, that was really good. Just keep doing that more.
00:51:37
Speaker
So when I was once saying sadly to Max, it was a pity I couldn't have taken up archaeology when I was a girl, so as to be more knowledgeable on the subject. He said, don't you realize that at this moment you know more about prehistoric pottery than any woman in England?
00:51:55
Speaker
And so, even though she didn't have formal training in archaeology, she learned so much about the field just by being part of these excavations, by being interested in being active in it and putting herself forward as, like, I'm going to analyze this stuff and I'm going to learn about it and I'm going to write about it, deal with it, type of thing. And so I just, I think that's...
00:52:20
Speaker
amazing. Just not only was she this fantastic writer, she also had this archaeological side of her that a lot of people don't know about. I think there's a lot of spouses who share kind of in the mission of what they're, if they're married to an archaeologist of what they do.
00:52:37
Speaker
And a lot of them do it in the darkness, but she's a really famous example of a spouse who was there. She was a part of the process and her husband's work and she was invested in it, but she just happened to be also a famous writer. So you hear about her, but you don't hear about a lot of other spouses that do kind of the same thing.
00:52:58
Speaker
And there are other issues. I mean, there's a woman, Mary Garstrong, who was born in France sometime around 1880 to a not particularly well-off family. So it wasn't until she got married when she was 12.
00:53:14
Speaker
mid-20s that she discovered archaeology because her husband was an archaeologist and she traveled and worked with him. She became well known for her pottery analysis and repair. She ran the camp and the lab at one of the dig sites at Jericho. Wow.
00:53:36
Speaker
Wow, everybody ended up at Jericho. Right. I mean, she also worked in Turkey. But it's been noted that even though her husband mentioned in acknowledgments and introductions that, yes, my wife was there. And she helped with some of the administrative running of labs and camps and things. Her role is downplayed. But we have a lot of photographs of her. And it's very, very clear from the photographs that she was heavily involved
00:54:05
Speaker
in the work that was happening. But it's really hard to say exactly what she was involved with because her role didn't necessarily get written down. So she's kind of an invisible spouse who isn't invisible because we have all these photographs. But there are so many women in archaeology whose names we will never know. There's an entire group of women called the Women of the Palestine Exploration Fund between the 1890s and the 1910s.
00:54:35
Speaker
who were policing women who worked at digs because it was thought that women's delicate touch, sarcasm, would make them better at sieving dirt for small finds.
00:54:49
Speaker
I mean, you have pictures that have so many women in them and the men slept at camp, but the women had to trek six miles to and from town because they couldn't sleep out at the campsite because it was not proper. So after working a 10, 11 hour day, 12 miles round trip on top of that by foot,
00:55:15
Speaker
And we have a couple of names, Huda and Fatmi are names of two women.
Unacknowledged Women in Archaeology
00:55:22
Speaker
Huda was apparently very feisty. And Fatmi was her friend, and also there was a relationship issue that was remarked upon by one of the men, so we have their names. But most of these women did amazing work and will probably never know their names.
00:55:42
Speaker
It's just a cork that we have like Tessa Wheeler, who may have had more to do with the stratigraphy than Mr. Wheeler wanted to let on. But she died of a pulmonary embolism in the 30s.
00:56:04
Speaker
So he got to keep publishing their work. And then we have Mary Leakey. Oh, yeah. Most of her work goes towards her husband.
00:56:15
Speaker
But, you know, where she worked, she was always known as the cigar smoking, whiskey drinking, British archaeologist. My kind of lady. And Chelsea, you've got a really good point. So, what hope is there for lesser known archaeologists when even the famous ones aren't really given their due, even
00:56:37
Speaker
Just to briefly mention, there's a movie that came out not too long ago by Werner Herzog called Queen of the Desert. It was purported to be based on Gertrude Bell, who we talked about in the last episode of badass women in archaeology. She's this amazing individual. This movie is based on her diaries.
00:57:01
Speaker
and works on her. And she did amazing work in Jordan and Iraq and an incredibly influential human being. And she was known as like the female Lawrence of Arabia and so on and so forth. But this movie primarily focused on her love life. So her the loves that were not to be
00:57:20
Speaker
and only briefly at the end did it kind of mention like, yeah, she did some really important stuff for the British government. But the majority of the movie was her just kind of wandering around the desert and never really went into her major contributions, which is very
Media Portrayal of Female Archaeologists
00:57:34
Speaker
frustrating. To define her by the minute in her life, even though the movie was about her. It's very frustrating. We have these amazing women that regardless, sometimes they'll always be overshadowed by other things.
00:57:49
Speaker
Right. Ooh, but that's what we're doing. More badass women to come, we promise. Truth to power. We are actually approaching the end of the episode. So if anyone has any final thoughts that they desperately want to make known, now is your opportunity, at least until the next time that we record a badass woman in archaeology podcast.
00:58:17
Speaker
If you have suggestions, let us know. Listeners, if you believe there are women we should be talking more about, let us know and we'll get their name out there and we'll educate the public about these amazing women, so let us know. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. And if you want to be an amazing woman in archaeology,
00:58:42
Speaker
You can, it doesn't matter, you know, your age or your place. You can, there's, there's always a way that you can contribute. For sure. For sure.
Conclusion and Call for Suggestions
00:58:53
Speaker
Well, I think that is an excellent note to end on. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode. Emily Deidre Jenny, as always, it is amazing to have the opportunity to talk to and learn from you. And you can always reach out to us at womeninarchaeologyatgmail.com or on Twitter at womenarchies. So, ladies, thanks so much. And I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye.
00:59:24
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Women in Archaeology podcast. Links to the items mentioned on the show are in the show notes. You can contact us at womeninarchaeology at gmail.com or at womenarchies on Twitter. Please like, share, and subscribe to the show. You can find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play. Support the show in the APN at www.arcpodnet.com slash members. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
00:59:53
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.