#trowelblazer

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Agnes Newhall Stillwell (1906-1957) was an American archaeologist at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and remained in Greece until 1935.

Happy Women’s History Month!

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The Tenacity of Zella Nuttall. - Women In Archaeology

Something I find a little curious is the lack of actual quotes *from* early female archaeologists, but there’s a plethora of quotes *about* them. I can imagine this is probably true about any early minority group in a field. I’ll do more digging as the year goes on to find quotes by female archaeologists about... Continue Reading →

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Agnes Newhall Stillwell (1906-1957) was an American archaeologist at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and remained in Greece until 1935.

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Women In Archaeology Podcast - All About Sally Binford with Liz Quinlan

We are joined by Liz Quinlan to learn about the extraordinary life of trowelblazer Sally Binford- archaeologist, feminist, free spirit.

Latest episode of the Women in Archaeology Podcast!

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Olga Tufnell: Exploring Egypt and Palestine

"We live in a very comfortable tomb on the side of the cliff with nothing behind us but the desert until you reach the Red Sea."--Olga Tufnell to her mother, in a letter dated 24th Nov 1927, from Qau el-Kebir, Egypt.

Olga Tufnell was one of the many trowelblazers who came to archaeology by a sideways route, but fell in love with fieldwork in the Near East. She was from a very well-off background, and the wide cultural interests of  her mother, Blanche, which included travel, music and the arts, may have given her a head start. She had an elite education, including a semi-finishing school experience in Italy, where she took art classes, and in fact her considerable skills as a draftsperson became part of her archaeological career.

Olga's mother also happened to be a close friend of (and related by marriage to) trowelblazer Hilda Petrie. At Hilda’s suggestion, a young Olga was taken on by the Petries - huge figures in Near Eastern and Egyptian archaeology- as the grand-sounding 'Assistant Secretary to the British School of Archaeology in Egypt'. Her main role was fundraising, and helping with the annual exhibition of finds at UCL, but she sometimes also got to work on mending and illustrating pottery. Olga's career-changing moment came in 1927 at the age of twenty two, when she was invited to join the final Petrie excavations at Qau el-Kebir in Egypt. She seems to have bitten by the archaeology bug, and stayed on to dig Tell Fara in Palestine, where she supervised excavations, and then the following two seasons at Tell Ajjul (until 1932), where she found an amazing burial complete with entire horse skeleton.

Equid burial at Tell Ajjul that Olga Tufnell excavated. Image courtesy of UCL Institute of Archaeology Collections (thanks to Rachel Sparks).

These experiences were the seminal years in Olga’s training, and she took pride in being one of the 'Petrie Pups', along with others of her generation, some forming close personal and professional friendships – including the respected Egyptologist Margaret Murray.

Just after working at Tell Ajjul, Olga joined James Starkey (another of the Petrie crew) digging at Tell ed-Duweir, identified as the Biblical city of Lachish. Olga's letters show she was given significant responsibility on site, and was part of the team that over six seasons discovered the famous Lachish Letters, although eventually the project ended just after Starkey was killed.

During WWII, Olga worked in diverse roles including with the BBC. After the war she began to publish on the results from Tell ed-Duweir along with other project members, which she continued for another 20 years. Her contested challenge to the accepted Iron Age chronology of the region was finally proven correct by later excavations.

Olga Tufnell at Tell ed-Duweir (the ancient city of Lachish). Used with the kind permission of the Palestine Exploration Fund, All rights reserved.

Olga continued to work in Near Eastern archaeology, especially pottery, and in the late 1950s she dug at Nimrud, where she likely met yet another trowelblazer, Agatha Christie, who worked there alongside her husband Max Mallowan. She also developed an interest in more recent Near Eastern culture, and collaborated with Violet Barbour in the development of the Palestine Folk Museum. Her interest in ornament seems to have led directly to what became the final major project of her life. From 1962, she undertook an exhaustive and meticulous collaborative study on scarab seals in Palestine, which used her early training in pottery chronology to show how scarab seals could be used for the same purpose.

As with many early trowelblazers, she took an interest in young students and researchers and was much loved and respected by her colleagues. The Tufnell archive is housed at the Palestine Exploration Fund, and the Lachish archive and collection are at the British Museum.

Letter: Ref. PEF-DA-TUF-0093

Written by John MacDermot, Palestine Exploration Fund. All images were provided with permission of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Editing and additional content by Becky, posted by Suzie.

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Zonia Baber: The Fearless Firsts of a Scientific Suffragette

Mary Arizona ‘Zonia’ Baber (1862-1955) is recognized as a pioneer in geography education, and an important figure in promoting equal rights of women and minorities. She emphasized the importance of practical fieldwork and laboratory work in geography teaching, and the importance of applying geographic concepts rather than just memorizing names and places, pedagogic approaches that are still praised and encouraged today.

She earned her teaching credential in 1885 from Cook County Normal School (which later became Chicago State University. ‘Normal schools’ prepared school teachers and later became known as state teacher’s colleges). In 1887 she was recruited as a staff member at Cook County Normal and became their Head of Geography from 1889 - 1901. Following this she held a position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago (Teacher of Geology and Geography, 1901-1921). While teaching, she also began taking classes, including the first geology class that allowed women, and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in 1904. Multi-tasking Trowelblazer extraordinaire, she also co-founded the Geographic Society of Chicago in 1898, at the same time as teaching, running a department and earning her degree. She remained involved with the Society throughout her life, serving as its president from 1900-1904. In 1948 she received the society's Gold Medal lifetime achievement award. Like Florence Bascom, she was listed as one of the few women in the American Men of Science.

Reproduced from open access article : Geography by Zonia Baber, published in 'The Course of Study' Vol. 1, No. 8 (Apr., 1901), pp. 704-706

 Her efforts to promote women in geography are lessons that we can learn from today and mirror the efforts of the Trowelblazers website to highlight their important contributions. She rrecognized that women were often excluded as speakers at events due to both prejudice and lack of knowledge of their existence, and deliberately sought recommendation for female speakers for the Chicago Geographical Society from fellow Trowelblazer Harriet Chalmers Adams (first president for the Society of Women Geographers). In 1927 Baber herself became president of the SWG. Outside of geography she was also actively involved in suffrage and promoting women’s rights. Baber traveled extensively around the world from Europe to the Middle East, East Asia to the Pacific Islands and the Caribbean, both professionally attending conferences, but also related to her political work. She worked to address racism and the threat of imperialism as well as women’s issues, arguing for racial integration as a priority within then Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She was a tireless advocate for women's suffrage, and in addition to serving on the Race Relations Committee of the Chicago Women’s Club and the Executive Committee of the Chicago Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she also served on thee Board of Mangers of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and as representative for Puerto Rico for the National Women's Party, the Asociación Puertoriqueña de Mujeres Sufragistas, and the Liga Social Sufragistas.

Post submitted by Lisa-Marie Shillito

Edited by Brenna

Read more: Zonia herself, on

Geography: http://www.jstor.org/stable/992015 Scientific American Blogs: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/rosetta-stones/2013/03/28/zonia-baber-the-public-may-be-brought-to-understand-the-importance-of-geography/

More on women in geography and their important role in education: http://www.iswg.org/news-events/practically-all-the-geographers-were-women/

Main Image: Zonia Baber gathering fossils at Mazon Creek, Illinois, 1895. The summer class in Geology, taught by Thomas C. Chamberlin, was the first field class at the University of Chicago to which women were admitted.

Image courtesy University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-00303], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library Landscape Image: Reproduced from open access article : Geography by Zonia Baber, published in 'The Course of Study' Vol. 1, No. 8 (Apr., 1901), pp. 704-706. University of Chicago Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/992015  

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Katharine Woolley: Dangerous, Demanding, and Digging

Katharine Woolley and Sheikh Hamoudi Ibn Ibrahim, the excavation’s foreman, sorting finds (1928­–29 season). © Trustees of the British Museum

Ur was an important city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, perhaps best known for the ziggurat monument and Royal Tombs. One of the main periods of excavations from 1922 to 1934 were jointly funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, and the story of these early  excavations is often told with reference to director Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, and his assistant Max Mallowan, who would go on to became an important archaeologist in his own right. There is another character however whose role in these excavations was equally important, and that is Katharine Woolley (nee Menke). Katharine was described by fellow trowelblazers  Gertrude Bell as “dangerous” and Agatha Christie as “an extraordinary character” and it is rumoured that Christie based a murder victim in one of her novels on her. Woolley was certainly a woman who made an impression, and her story has more than a little mystery and drama, and also unfortunately tragedy. Katharine was as a student at Oxford, however she left before finishing her degree and worked as a British military nurse. She married her first husband, Lieutenant Colonel Bertram Keeling, in 1919 and travelled with him to Egypt, but after only 6 months of marriage, he committed suicide in the Giza desert. The details surrounding his death are unclear, but this obviously had an impact on Katharine. She resumed her nursing career and ended up visiting the Ur excavations whilst on duty in Baghdad. She attracted the attention of the excavators with her illustration skills, and was invited to join the team. She began working as a field assistant for the project in 1924. Many texts allude incorrectly to the fact that she was present on the Ur excavations solely to accompany her husband, Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, when in fact she found herself there entirely through her own talents. She ended up marrying Leonard for convenience as it was her only option to remain on the dig after the funders expressed discomfort at the thought of an attractive young widow working in the field alone with a team of men. She quickly became ‘second in command’ at the dig, and she was also responsible for the reconstruction of the famous headdress of Queen Pu-abi amongst others. She would go on to lead excavations in the final year of the dig, and played an important role in fundraising and producing press materials for the project. In 1929, Katharine published a book, Adventure Calls, about a woman who pretends to be a man so that she can have a life of excitement and adventure, including joining an archaeological team! Katharine interviewed the young Max Mallowan for his place on the team, and it was also due to Katharine that Agatha Christie was allowed to visit the excavations. Initially the two became good friends, but suffered a falling out when Christie became romantically involved with Mallowan (they would later get married). Although Katharine was married to Leonard, it is suggested that she enjoyed the attention of being the only woman on site and wasn’t pleased when Mallowan directed his attention elsewhere. Christie was not welcome back and Mallowan left the team shortly after. It is these aspects of the story that may be responsible for Katharine’s reputation as being difficult to work with! Sadly her work was overshadowed by this reputation and with speculations about her sexuality/gender, which is rumoured to have been linked to the suicide of her first husband (for a discussion of this see this blog about an unpublished paper on Woolley). More important than the details (confusing as they are) of her personal life, were Katharine's archaeological illustrations and reconstructions which were critical to publicising and promoting the discoveries at Ur. Without her contributions the importance of the Ur excavations would not have been recognised, and the success of her husband’s career was in no small part due to her work. Of course, there are those among us who prefer to judge her character but what we can see for ourselves - active fieldwork and a fondness for felines, which surely can't be a bad thing...! [caption id="attachment_1617" align="alignnone" width="580"] Courtesy of the Penn Museum, image no. 191365

More Information:

More Deadly than the Male - Blogpost

Ur of the Chaldees - British Museum Blogpost

Murder in Mesopotamia - Expedition U Penn

Post submitted by Lisa-Marie Shillito

Edited by Brenna

Image: Katharine Woolley and Sheikh Hamoudi Ibn Ibrahim, the excavation’s foreman, sorting finds (1928­–29 season). © Trustees of the British Museum; Second Image:Expedition house and staff, 1928-29. Max Mallowan (third from left), Hamoudi, C. Leonard Wolley, Katherine Wolley, Father Eric R. Burrows. Courtesy of the Penn Museum, image no. 191365.  

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Shahina Farid: Lady of the Höyük

Shahina Farid

Although most people associate the famous Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey with James Mellaart and Ian Hodder, there is one person who is arguably the most important in the history of excavations at this World Heritage Site:  Shahina Farid. Shahina was born in London to parents who migrated from Pakistan, and attended school in Camden. Her first exposure to archaeology was a school visit to the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum, and by age 15 she has already decided she was going to be and archaeologist, and was spent her time volunteering on local excavations. She studied archaeology at the University of Liverpool, but her true passion was to be out in the field, and following graduation she spent several years as a professional in commercial archaeology in London and on projects in Turkey, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Many would agree that she is the best field archaeologist in the business. She was invited to join the Çatalhöyük project as field director in the 1990s, where she worked for almost 20 years.  Although she does not consider herself an academic, her expertise has been the driving force behind the iconic excavation and her impact on the wider discipline cannot be overstated. Her work in constructing the Çatalhöyük stratigraphic sequence is the cornerstone of countless archaeological and scientific studies, reflected in her publication record of over 40 articles and reports, and without her input, reflexive methodology would only be a theory. Managing the communication and interaction of an international team of over 200 academics and students is no mean feat, and despite her firm, no nonsense attitude to work in the field, Shahina has also been a mentor to a generation of archaeologists who have worked at the site, and an inspiration to all. She left Çatalhöyük in 2012, but will always be thought of as the Lady of the Höyük. She now works for English Heritage on the Scientific Dating Team. But we’re sure she’ll be getting the trowel back out before too long…

Post submitted by Lisa-Marie Shillito ( @ArchaeologyLisa)

edited by Brenna

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