Amanda Adams

by Ladies of the Field: Early Women Archaeologists

  THEORY: An idea of what happened, a possible explanation, a well-educated guess. Some people keep theories as “pets” (pet theories are ideas that get a lot of special attention). Archaeologists will craft a theory about what a certain site tells us about the past. Field excavations and site comparisons will prove that theory true or false. Here is a sample theory: North America was first populated by people who crossed the Bering Strait land bridge 15,000 years ago. True or false?

  ZIGGURAT: Like a terraced pyramid with a flat top, a temple or shrine.

  Often considered to be the dwelling places of gods, ziggurats are found in Iran and the Mesopotamian Valley; the earliest are approximately 6,000 years old.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: FIELD NOTES

  1 Mary Ann Levine, “Presenting the Past: A Review of Research on Women in Archaeology,” Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association (1994), 24.

  2 In 1870, Queen Victoria expressed her view on women’s rights as follows in a private letter to Sir Theodore Martin: “I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.”

  3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as cited in an excerpt by Albertine-Adrienne Necker de Saussure (1844), in Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States, eds. Erna Olafson Hellersten, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1981), 62.

  4 William Acton, M.R.C.S., The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, 8th American ed. (Philadelphia, 1894), 208–212.

  5 August Deboy, Hygiène et physiologie du mariage, 153 ed. (Paris, 1880), 17–18, 92, 94–95, 105–109.

  6 Elizabeth Missing Sewell, Principles of Education, Drawn from Nature and Revelation, and Applied to Female Education in the Upper Classes (New York, 1866), 396–397, 450–451.

  7 Quote from Gertrude Bell, in a letter home dated 1892.

  8 Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile: A woman’s journey among the treasures of ancient Egypt (Coventry, UK: Trotamundas Press Ltd., 2008), 13.

  CHAPTER 1: AMELIA EDWARDS

  1 Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile:A woman’s journey among the treasures of ancient Egypt (Coventry, UK: Trotamundas Press Ltd., 2008), 128–129.

  2 Ibid, 19.

  3 Ibid, 140.

  4 Digital copy of A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. Available at www.touregypt.net/amelia/chapter18.html

  5 Brenda Moon, More Usefully Employed:Amelia B. Edwards, Writer, Traveller and Campaigner for Ancient Egypt (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 2006), 10.

  6 Ibid, 11.

  7 Ibid, 7.

  8 Ibid, 1.

  9 Ibid, 14.

  10 Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, 293.

  11 Joan Rees, Writings on the Nile: Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, Amelia Edwards (London: Rubicon, 1995).

  12 Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, 225.

  13 Ibid, 18.

  14 Ibid, 240.

  15 Ibid, 31.

  16 Ibid, 294.

  17 Ibid, 191.

  18 Ibid, 122.

  19 Ibid, 30.

  20 Ibid, 85.

  21 Today the site of Abu Simbel has been relocated. In the 1960s, the temple was raised, transported, and rebuilt to protect it from the flooding of Lake Nasser.

  22 Julia Keay, With Passport and Parasol: The Adventures of Seven Victorian Ladies (London: BBC Books, 1989).

  23 Digital copy of original 1891 edition of A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. Available at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/edwards/nile/nile.html.

  24 Ibid.

  25 Ibid.

  26 Excerpt from a letter written by Amelia Edwards to Edward Abbot in 1881, as cited in Brenda Moon, More Usefully Employed, 153–154.

  27 Today, it’s known as the Egypt Exploration Society.

  28 Moon, More Usefully Employed, 203.

  29 Ibid, 224.

  30 Barbara S. Lesko, “Amelia Blanford Edwards, 1831–1892,” www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Edwards_Amelia%20Blanford.pdf

  CHAPTER 2: JANE DIEULAFOY

  1 Eve Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy, 1851–1916,” Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 56.

  2New York Times obituary for Madame Dieulafoy, May 28, 1916.

  3 Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy, 1851–1916,” 60.

  4 Ibid, 36.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Jane Dieulafoy, “The Excavations at Susa,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 75, no. 445 (June 1887), 1.

  7 “Uses Hubby’s Wardrobe,” New York Morning Journal, excerpted in Margot Irvine, “Jane Dieulafoy’s Gender Transgressive Behaviour and Conformist Writing,” in Gender and Identities in France, eds. Brigitte Rollet and Emily Salines (Portsmouth, UK: University of Portsmouth, School of Languages and Area Studies, 1999).

  8 Dieulafoy, “The Excavations at Susa,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 7.

  9 Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy, 1851–1916,” 42.

  10 Dieulafoy, “The Excavations at Susa,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 6.

  11 Ibid, 4.

  12 Ibid, 10.

  13 Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy, 1851–1916,” 46.

  14 Dieulafoy, “The Excavations at Susa,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 10.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Ibid, 12.

  17 Ibid, 17.

  18 Ibid, 18.

  19 Ibid.

  20 Ibid.

  21 Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy, 1851–1916,” 50.

  22 Ibid, 51.

  23 Photo in the archives of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre Museum, Paris.

  24 Irvine, “Jane Dieulafoy’s Gender Transgressive Behaviour and Conformist Writing.” Translation courtesy of Catherine Stevenson and Margaret Dubin, 14.

  25New York Times obituary for Madame Dieulafoy dated May 28, 1916.

  26 Irvine, “Jane Dieulafoy’s Gender Transgressive Behaviour and Conformist Writing.” Translation courtesy of Catherine Stevenson and Margaret Dubin, 17.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Ibid.

  29 Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy, 1851–1916,” 67.

  30 Professor Margot Irvine, personal communication, November 2009.

  31 Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy, 1851–1916,” 59.

  32 Ibid, 63.

  33 Irvine, “Jane Dieulafoy’s Gender Transgressive Behaviour and Conformist Writing,” 15.

  34 She could also be a mother. According to the 1916 New York Times obituary for Dieulafoy, “Mme. Dieulafoy was the mother of a son and daughter.” Oddly enough, this fact is not mentioned in other sources. Perhaps Dieulafoy kept motherhood quiet (or relied intensely on wet nurses and nannies) so as to keep her career unhindered.

  CHAPTER 3: ZELIA NUTTALL

  1 D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (Ware, Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1995), 25.

  2 Ibid, 32.

  3 Ibid, 33.

  4 Ibid, 25.

  5 Nancy O. Lurie, “Women in Early Anthropology,” Pioneers of American Anthropology, ed. June Helm (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 29–83. Italics are author’s own.

  6 Alfred M. Tozzer, “Zelia Nuttall, Obituary.” American Anthropologist 35(1933): 475–482.

  7 The crystal skull now resides in the Musée du quai Branly; the other was proven to be a fake.

  8 Letter on file at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  9 Today, the museum houses a collection of 3.8 million objects.

  10 Ross Parmenter, “Glimpses of a Friendship: Zelia Nuttall
and Franz Boas. (Based on their Correspondence in the Library of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia),” in Pioneers of American Anthropology, ed. June Helm (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 88.

  11 “The World’s Columbian Exposition: Idea, Experience, Aftermath,” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma96/WCE/title.html.

  12 Parmenter, “Glimpses of a Friendship,” 88–91.

  13 It was eventually examined, very much so. Native American burial sites were excavated in high volume with little concern given to the living descendants of those whose graves were being unearthed.

  14 A letter from Zelia to Boas dated 1909, cited in Ross Parmenter article detailed above.

  15 And still does. Nobel Prize–winning author Octavio Paz later lived there. Today the house is a cutting-edge center for new music technology called Fonoteca Nacional.

  16 Tozzer, “Zelia Nuttall, Obituary,” 475–482; also in “Zelia Nuttall,” Women Anthropologists: A Biographical Dictionary, eds., Ute Gacs, Aisha Khan, Ruth Weinberg, and Jerrie McIntyre (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 269–274.

  17 Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, 24.

  18 Tozzer, “Zelia Nuttall, Obituary,” 475–482.

  19 Lurie, “Women in Early Anthropology,” 29–83.

  20 Zelia Nuttall, ed., The Codex Nuttall: A Picture Manuscript From Ancient Mexico (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1975). Introduction by Arthur G. Miller.

  21 Zelia Nuttall’s “New Light on Drake: a collection of documents relating to his voyage of circumnavigation 1577–1580,” Hakluyt Society series 2, no. 34, 1914.

  22 Ibid.

  23 Zelia Nuttall, “The Island of Sacrificios,” American Anthropologist, New Series 12, no. 2 (1910), 257.

  24 Ibid, 273.

  25 Ibid, 257–258.

  26 Ibid.

  27 Ibid, 267.

  28 Parmenter, “Glimpses of a Friendship,” 125.

  29 Nuttall, “The Island of Sacrificios,” 280.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Tozzer, “Zelia Nuttall, Obituary,” 475–482.

  32 “Zelia Nuttall,” Women Anthropologists, 272.

  33 Zelia Nuttall, “The New Year of the Tropical Indigenes: The New Year Festival of the Ancient Inhabitants of Tropical America and its Revival” Bulletin, The Pan American Union, 1928, 62, Washington, 71.

  34 Ibid, 73.

  CHAPTER 4: GERTRUDE BELL

  1 As cited in Dorothy Van Ess Book Review of Gertrude Bell: From Her Personal Papers, 1914–1926 by Elizabeth Burgoyne in Middle East Journal 16, no. 1 (1962), 93.

  2The Letters of Gertrude Bell: selected and edited by Lady Bell, D.B.E. Vol. 1 (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927). Also available online at: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400341h.html

  3 Unless otherwise noted, all Gertrude Bell letter excerpts quoted throughout the chapter are from the digital archives of The Gertrude Bell Project, Newcastle University in Tyne, www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letters.php.

  4 Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown (London: W. Heinemann, 1907).

  5 Ibid, 198.

  6The Letters of Gertrude Bell: selected and edited by Lady Bell, online.

  7 The Gertrude Bell Project, online.

  8 Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 37.

  9The Letters of Gertrude Bell: selected and edited by Lady Bell, online.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Julia M. Asher-Greve, “Gertrude L. Bell, 1868–1926,” in Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 142–197.

  13The Letters of Gertrude Bell: Selected and Edited by Lady Bell, online.

  14 In Memoriam notice of Bell, written by Colonel E. L. Strutt, editor of the Alpine Journal, November 1926.

  15 The Gertrude Bell Project, online.

  16 Bell, The Desert and the Sown, 12.

  17 The Gertrude Bell Project, online.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Ibid.

  20 Asher-Greve, “Gertrude L. Bell, 1868–1926,” 168.

  21 Vita Sackville-West, Passenger to Tehran (New York: George H. Doran, 1927), 57–62.

  22 The Gertrude Bell Project, www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/.

  23 Ibid.

  24 That protection was tragically compromised when looting of the museum began in April 2003 during the U.S. invasion of Iraq; over 15,000 objects were taken. To date, approximately half of those have been reclaimed.

  25 Max Mallowan, Mallowan’s Memoirs (London: Collins, 1977), 42.

  26 The Gertrude Bell Project, online.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Bell’s finest biographer, Georgina Howell, depicts a rare moment of intimacy between Bell and Doughty-Wylie. It took place in Bell’s bedroom: “Her happiness was an intoxication . . . He pressed her to him, full of affection, and they lay down. Folded in his arms Gertrude told him that she was a virgin. His warmth and attentiveness were boundless, but when he kissed her and moved closer, put his hands on her, she stiffened, panicked whispered ‘No.’ He stopped at once, assuring her that it didn’t matter, and when tears came into her eyes he comforted her for a few minutes and told her nothing had changed. The he slipped away out the door.” The next day Bell received a “let’s be friends” letter from Dick. Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, 137.

  29 A letter to Horace Marshall dated June 18, 1892, written by Bell from Gulahek (now Kulhek), a village situated approximately 60 miles outside of Teheran.

  30 Bell, The Desert and the Sown.

  31 Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations provides excellent detail of the event.

  32 Ibid, 417.

  CHAPTER 5: HARRIET BOYD HAWES

  1 Mary Allsebrook, Born to Rebel: The Life of Harriet Boyd Hawes (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1992), 186.

  2 Ibid, 215.

  3 Vasso Fotou and Ann Brown, “Harriet Boyd Hawes, 1871–1945” in Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 200.

  4 Allsebrook, Born to Rebel, 4.

  5 Ibid, 14.

  6 Ibid, chapters VI and VII.

  7 Ibid, 15–16.

  8 Letter dated April 28, 1900, on file at Smith College archives.

  9 Boyd Hawes’s own reference to the Homeric quote made in her Annual Report. Homer, Odyssey, XIX, Butchers and Lang’s Translation (London: MacMillan, 1879), 172.

  10 Fotou and Brown, “Harriet Boyd Hawes, 1871–1945.”

  11 Ibid, 214.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Cheryl Claassen, ed., Women in Archaeology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 45.

  14 Harriet Boyd, “Excavations at Gournia, Crete” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution Showing the Operations, Expenditures and Condition of the Institution for the Year Ending June 30, 1904 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905), 562; also in Fotou and Brown, “Harriet Boyd Hawes, 1871–1945,” 217.

  15 Allsebrook, Born to Rebel, 99.

  16 Harriet Boyd, “Excavations at Gournia, Crete,” Annual Report, 1904, 563.

  17 Allsebrook, Born to Rebel, 102.

  18 Harriet Boyd, “Excavations at Gournia, Crete,” Annual Report, 1904, 563.

  19 The young archaeologist Edith Hall, another Smith graduate, assisted Boyd Hawes on site. She later created her own successful career as an archaeologist.

  20 Allsebrook, Born to Rebel, 10 21 Boyd, “Excavations at Gournia, Crete,” Annual Report, 1904.

  22 Allyson McCreery, “Digging for Equality: Women in Archaeology in the Victorian Era” (Unpublished Honors History Thesis, Temple University, Philadelphia, 2007).

  23 Fotou and Brown, “Harriet Boyd Hawes, 1871–1945,” 224.

  24 Allsebrook, Born to Rebel, 230.

  25 Ibid, 230.

  26 Ibid, 131.

  27 U.S. Bureau of the Census (2003), www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/tabMS-2.p
df.

  28 Allsebrook, Born to Rebel, 228.

  29 Ibid, 228.

  30The New York Times, February 26, 1901, as cited in Born to Rebel, 135.

  31 Fotou and Brown, “Harriet Boyd Hawes, 1871–1945,” 235.

  CHAPTER 6: AGATHA CHRISTIE

  1 Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie:An Autobiography (Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, 1977), 372.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Ibid, 9.

  4 Ibid, 11.

  5 Ibid, 14.

  6 Ibid, 95.

  7 Ibid, 134.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Ibid, 172–175.

  10 Ibid, 274.

  11 Janet Morgan, Agatha Christie: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), 81.

  12 Ibid, 115.

  13 Christie, An Autobiography, 357.

  14 Ibid, 362.

  15 Ibid, 389.

  16 Morgan, Agatha Christie, 179.

  17 Christie, An Autobiography, 406.

  18 Ibid, 410.

  19 Morgan, Agatha Christie, 185.

  20 Agatha Christie, Come, Tell Me How You Live (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1946), 50.

  21 Ibid, 85–88.

  22 Charlotte Trümpler, ed., Agatha Christie and Archaeology, (London: The British Museum Press, 2001), 189.

  23 Christie. An Autobiography, 472.

  24 Ibid, 483.

  25 Christie, Come, Tell Me How You Live, 57.

  26 Trümpler, Agatha Christie and Archaeology, 229.

  27 Ibid, 233; also Christie, Come, Tell Me How You Live, 117.

  28 Christie, Come, Tell Me How You Live, 119.

  29 Trümpler, Agatha Christie and Archaeology, 45.

  30 Ibid, 45–47.

  31 Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), 204.

  32 Morgan, Agatha Christie, 208.

  CHAPTER 7: DOROTHY GARROD

  1 Dorothy Garrod, et al., “Excavation of a Mousterian Rock-shelter at Devil’s Tower, Gibraltar,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 58 (1928): 91–113.

  2 Gertrude Caton-Thompson, “Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod, 1892–1968 (obituary),” Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1969), 339–361, 340.