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#RaisingHorizons Crowdfund is GO!
PROJECT UPDATE: We’re doing something amazing-- and you can be part of it.
Help us reset imaginations with our biggest project ever!
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/raising-horizons-200-years-of-trowelblazing-women-photography--2#/
Christian Maclagan: Sensation of Scotland
Christian Maclagan (1811–1901), arguably Scotland’s first female archaeologist, was born at Underwood, near Denny, Stirlingshire, in 1811. She was the daughter of George Maclagan, distiller and chemist, and his wife Janet, herself the daughter of Thomas Colville, printer, of Dundee. Her family’s wealth ensured she had independent means to pursue her own interests and transcend society’s barriers. She spent much of her life engaged in researching and recording the prehistoric archaeology of Scotland. In later life she resided at Ravenscroft, near Denny, and devoted much time and money to the removal of slums in Stirling, providing houses for the working-classes outside the burgh. Her archaeological researches into prehistoric Scotland remain important to this day, although she tended to over-domesticise sites, arguing, for example, that stone circles were robbed out brochs. However, she was amongst the first archaeologists to consider archaeological stratigraphy, with her section drawings of Coldoch broch being published five years before Pitt Rivers – generally credited with the introduction of this field method to British archaeology – began his excavations at Cranborne Chase.
Book Review! Agatha: our first graphic novel review
Martinetti, A., Lebeau, G., and Franc, A. 2016. Agatha. London: Self Made Hero. 119 pages, £12.99 (UK).
All images copyright Hachette Livre (Paris) 2014.
So, in an ideal world, how would you bring to light some of the ways women contributed to the Trowel Wielding Sciences in the past?
Add a touch of celebrity.
Make the story accessible - not dumbed down, but easy to grasp.
Make it a life, not an anecdote.
Make it pretty.
Make it a TrowelToon!
Team TrowelBlazers was very excited when a big brown envelope turned up in the post -- wrappings torn off, we revealed a brand new graphic novel from Self Made Hero: Agatha, by Anne Martinetti, Guilaume Lebeua and Alexandre Franc. There has of course been a lot written about the Agatha of the title -- she is Agatha Christie, Queen of the Murdery Mystery, who had a surprising secret life as TrowelBlazer. Christie's life is certainly worthy of recounting, traipsing as it did from an idyllic pre-war England to the edges of crumbling colonial world; her privileged position in this changing world did not fully protect her from either personal tragedy or the those of the wider 20th century world. Agatha recounts the key moments of Christie's life, sketching in a series of bande dessine (think TinTin) style vignettes of the child, woman, and celebrity.
Illustration is a rather different approach to biography, of course; alongside private moments from her early life that are clearly drawn from an emotional interpretation of her character, we see discussions between the lady and her famous fictional detectives, and the characters inner thoughts appear solidly materialised in the traditional thought bubble. While many of the scenes pictured are clearly the work of interpretation by the authors, none ring overly false --each episode from Christie's life, whether a memory of her father, or even our particular favorite, getting stuck in a sandstorm with Hercule Poirot, takes a real event in her life and imagines it distilled into a few set pieces. Each little episode carries a sense of a very human Christie, disappointed in love, complaining to her imaginary friends (and frenemies, in the case of a certain egg-shaped mustachioed detective), and of course a graphic novel is better suited to these flights of fancy than traditional print biographies. That said, there is quite a bit of life packed in -- a timeline in the back gives key dates for the disoriented.
This is not a book for those looking for the exacting details of Christie's life; the what-where-when-how of her trials, tribulations, and triumphs. It is rather a graphic novel for those happy to immerse themselves in the imagined world of a woman who did things, who lived a very full life and created imaginary worlds for millions of people around the world. Her TrowelBlazing activities do not make too much of a splash when set against her literary career, or even the drama of her personal relationships, but that is in its way very fitting; sometimes we have to remind ourselves that the TrowelBlazers we celebrate today were women too, in their time.
Short Version:
Go find someone with a sense of adventure to give this to.
Review by Brenna
#HappyBirthdayMaryAnning - and Happy Birthday Team TrowelBlazers!
Wow. Three years. THREE. That's longer than most academic contracts these days... (Joke! Kinda. Weep. Move on.) It has been three incredible years for women in the Trowel Wielding sciences. On the home front, your fearless anarchic collective have gotten pretty dang busy with life achievements of their own - several babies, some tenure track, and some super exciting new TV programmes - it's been a whirlwind! But even more impressive are all the things we've had the chance to learn, to do, and to see because of the unwavering awesomeness of the TrowelBlazer community, including kicking it at the US Ambassador's place in London and actually Walking Through Time. Hopefully we're now getting to a point where we're going to be able to really give back to the community, with enormous dream projects in the pipeline AS I TYPE. We're talking bursaries for fieldwork. We're talking funded training days. We're talking the incredible generosity of institutions from all over the place allowing us to reset those imaginations.
So, yeah, we've done amazing stuff this year:
YOU wrote the posts that brought overshadowed lives back into the light!
Posts from 2015 and 2016
YOU inspired us to create #RealFossilHunterLottie - a top ten buy in 2015!
(and a top ten member of Brenna's field team too)
Next up: world domination! We will be at WAC 8 in Kyoto in August/September of 2016, and hopefully in a museum near you with our new exciting collaboration with Prospect Union and the artist Leonora Saunders. There's tons of other cool TrowelBlazing stuff happening too - like the very exciting new fundraising campaign by Lyme Regis Museum to build their new Mary Anning Wing! You could even reserve your place for their gala black tie dinner where Tracey Chevalier will discuss the inspiration for her fossil-hunting heroine in the award winning Remarkable Creatures - just email Margaret of the Museum Friends for details! ([email protected])
The planned Mary Anning Wing for the Lyme Regis Museum
More details to come, but for now, BIG LOVE from your Team - Brenna, Tori, Suzie, and Becky.
Tilly Edinger: Rocks for Brains!
The process of fossilization is not kind to the brain. Nor indeed to any soft tissues, the anatomy of which are usually not preserved in the fossil record. How then to go about examining and unravelling the evolutionary history of the vertebrate brain? Nowadays we might first think to tackle this problem using 3D imaging techniques to virtually reconstruct the endocast of a fossil to capture the external features of the brain that have been imprinted on the internal surface of the cranium. But how accurately does a fossil brain endocast reflect the anatomy of the unpreserved tissue, and to what extent can features of an endocast be used to make palaeobiological inferences about its extinct owner? Answers to these and other questions are possible through the pioneering work of the German palaeontologist Tilly Edinger (1897-1967), who founded modern paleoneurology (the study of fossil brains) in the 1920s, tackling for the first time issues that still form the basis of research today.
Maud Cunnington “Digging Women of Power”
New post!
Image of Maud Cunnington courtesy Wiltshire Museum and reproduced here with permission.
The prehistoric galleries at the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes hold a stunning collection of artefacts including finely crafted pieces of gold, amber and human bone from burials in the area around Stonehenge, including a number from the graves of what the museum display calls ‘Women of Power’. The woman of power behind many of the finest collections in the Museum was Maud Cunnington.
Read more at http://trowelblazers.com/maud-cunnington/
Winfield House Dialogues #IWD2016
A #PledgeForParity Event at the US Ambassador's Residence in London
It's always and forever International Women's Day here at TrowelBlazer Towers. One of the things we've been trying to do a little bit more of is to use the amazing platform we've got here to push the world more towards the shape we'd like to see it in.* That means talking about the lessons we've picked up from our own experiences, and those that people have shared with us, to make big giant bullet points that we repeat ad nauseum until people stop telling kids what they can and can't be when they grow up based on their biological phenotype.
For #IWD2016 this year, I won the raffle to accompany the fantastic Suw Charman-Anderson of the Finding Ada Project to the official residence of the US Ambassador to the UK.
Suw Charman-Anderson and Brenna chilling with a fern and a portrait of George Washington.
Ambassador Matthew Barzun and his wife Brooke do immense amounts of work to promote women in leadership, in science, and regularly host events at Winfield House, in swank-tastic Regent's Park, that bring together some very impressive people.
Winfield House/ Scenes from Winfield House - of course there is a skateboard ramp #USA /Brenna's personal favorite thing: dress made of 10,000 adamantine dressing pins in the Green Room
Over the course of the day, I met women with a lot of letters before and after their names; women representing their countries, their companies, universities, themselves -- the guest list was a roll call of achievement (and me). Ambassador Barzun led a fascinating dialogue that allowed each of us to reflect our own experiences, before refereeing a wide ranging discussion of how the hell you get to equality from here.
Key Things:
Get a mentor. Be a mentor. Networks matter.
The women we spoke to were pretty unanimous in affirming what we here at TrowelBlazers have said for a long time. It takes support to infiltrate a foreign culture, be it the Academy or a Fortune 500 company; mentors are critical to getting you that internship / training / interview. So start a conversation, ask for a 15 minute coffee, find a mentor. And when that bright eyed undergraduate comes knocking at your door, don't just turn off the overhead lights and hope to god no one saw you come in -- she may not have anyone else to help her out.
Role models reset imaginations.
This is such a TB obsession...for a reason. So many of the women at Winfield House talked about how important it was to see and be seen, just to let the next generation know what can be possible. It's critical to support (read- don't make fun of or generally denigrate the time spent on outreach) staff/employees who are willing to go that extra mile to widen participation because IT AINT HAPPENING OTHERWISE OK? And don't forget you can't just expect someone to want to do outreach, or to make a *deal* about being a woman / minority / under-represented group. Support those who do, but remember that's an extra burden.
In the spirit of advice recounted from President Obama, sometimes you need to 'just listen'; so here's some of the things we heard:
Solidarity is key - bringing together different disadvantaged sectors can make any one group more of an ally of the others.
Hearts and minds can be changed, and the dinosaurs are dying out; it's too shameful to be seen as a misogynist these days...and that's a good thing.
Unconscious bias training is absolutely critical to reshaping attitudes
Finally, the Embassy staff asked participants 'What would you tell your 20 year old self?'.
Apparently my answer? Let your hair grow long ;)
Reportagery by Brenna.
*Essentially, the shape of a woman in a fancy hat wielding a mattock sliding down a pyramid.
International Women’s Day 2016: Superstars in Sepia
It’s March 8th! Which means it’s International Women’s Day. We here at TrowelBlazer Towers have made a point of celebrating women’s achievements EVERY DAY, but sometimes it’s nice to sit back and look at the big picture.
So here’s a big picture:
It’s lovely, isn’t it? As are each and everyone of you. For International Women’s Day we’d like to celebrate the amazing experience of looking out into the void that is the internet and seeing so many dedicated, engaged, and generous people who are willing to take the time and energy to contribute to our little project. So thank you. Thank you to the archivists who find treasure in bad handwriting and worse typography. Thank you to the museums and collections who have gone out of their way and down into the stores to bring forgotten stories back to life. Thank you to the researchers and writers who have uncovered secret histories and mislaid lives. Thank you to the few, the proud, the inspired — the members of the Order of the Blazing Trowel, and everyone who has taken the time to write for us.
Mostly, we just want to thank you. Thank you for being a part of our community. Thank you for caring about equality, about historic inequity, and resetting imaginations. Thank you for providing a better future for the next generation, and giving a voice back to the generations before. It may not seem like much, but, in the words of Margaret Mead:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Keep on TrowelBlazing!
with much love from @brenna, @suzie, @becky, and @tori
Margaret Hems: Discoverer of Britain’s Best Mammoth
On the 12th of December 1990, the weather forecast threatened high winds and potential flooding along the North Norfolk coast. For many locals this would not be a cause for celebration, but for Margaret and her husband Harold it meant only one thing: an early start for some fossil hunting.
Born and brought up in Derbyshire, Margaret moved to the North Norfolk coast in the early 1960s, where her love of palaeontology began. She has always had a passion for natural history, and in her adult life this translated into knowledge about many groups including birds and fungi, which she was more than happy to share. The move to North Norfolk brought Margaret and Harold close to the coast and the fossil rich West Runton riverbed, and sparked the enjoyment in fossils. The couple would often stroll along the beach near their West Runton home searching for fossils.
On the morning of the 13th of December, Margaret and Harold were up early with tools and heading down to the beach. The storm had exposed more of the fossil riverbed, and when Margaret spotted a bone sticking out of the cliff she knew she had found something special. It took 4 days of secret digging to unearth the pelvis, with the help of the curator of Cromer museum. The presence of an anklebone next to the impressive pelvis hinted to the true extent of the find, but it was not until more bones were unearthed after a further storm eroded the cliff that an explorative excavation was carried out in January 1992. A three-month excavation in 1995 followed this, and after the first six weeks of digging Margaret joined the excavation, eager to learn more about the find.
The excavation revealed the most complete specimen of the largest mammoth species, a steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii), ever found, with around 85% of the skeleton surviving. This individual was a 40 year old male, standing an impressive 4 metres high and weighing about 10 tonnes. The fate of this animal is told through the bones; an injury to the right femur suggests that the already injured animal fell into the river and could not stand up, leaving it at the mercy of other trampling mammoths and hungry hyenas.
The mammoth was found in the West Runton freshwater bed, a layer of dark mud which was deposited by a river 6-700,000 years ago. The excavation was thorough; with soil samples containing pollen and bones of small animals such as frogs and birds, and coprolites of the hyenas scavenging on the dead mammoth provide a detailed picture of how the landscape would have looked at the time of the mammoth.
Before they retired both Margaret and Harold Hems worked in education, and were passionate about communicating natural history. After the discovery of the mammoth they were eager to share their knowledge of the history of the North Norfolk coast and the story of the West Runton mammoth, talking to locals and tourists visiting the dig site and to school children from the area. The importance of engaging children in the history of their local area is something that drives Margaret to this day, and she still hopes that one day the whole mammoth can be displayed for everyone to enjoy. Currently some of the bones are displayed at Norwich Castle Museum and Cromer Museum, but the majority of the skeleton is still in storage at Gressenhall.
The significance of the mammoth for palaeontologists is easy to see, but for Margaret the most wonderful part of the discovery is its ability to inspire another generation of Natural History enthusiasts. As she said ‘children love dinosaurs, but the children here have their own treasure’.
Written by Hannah Norman, Margaret's granddaughter! (@Norman_Han)
Edited by Tori
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You can see TrowelBlazers' own Tori Herridge interviewing Margaret Hems about her mammoth discovery in Channel 4's Walking Through Time, Saturday 6th Feb, 8pm.
The full scientific findings on the West Runton Mammoth are published in this special issue of Quaternary International. Sadly most are stuck behind a paywall, but if you have access it's a wonderfully complete study!
Editor's note: A full-sized replica of the West Runton Mammoth is part of the Norfolk Museums 5-year plan, and so - funding permitting- the Britain's best mammoth may soon be on display to be enjoyed by children and adults alike.
Elizabeth Baldwin Garland: Teacher, Digger, Inspiration
Betsy received a B.S. in geology from Wellesley, an M.A. in Anthropology from Radcliffe, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in anthropology in 1967, under Stephen Williams. She was Alfred Romer's assistant at the Museum of Comparative Zoology when it was announced that Australopithecines were bipedal. Betsy's dissertation, The Obion Site: An Early Mississippian Center in Western Tennessee, was one of the first dissertations written by a women base upon original fieldwork and done by Harvard in the early twentieth century. She became the first archaeologist on the faculty of Western Michigan University, founded a chapter of the Michigan Archaeological Society, edited the Michigan Archaeologist from 1970-1975, was president of the Conference on Michigan Archaeology from 1976 - 1980, and was the author of numerous publications. Betsy retired from Western Michigan in 1992 and is currently living in Florida.
I was one of her early students at Western and she was the reason that I, and many others became archaeologists.
Photographs courtesy of West Michigan University Library and Archives.
Post by Bill Mangold
Did you know? Betsy was Betsy was named the second-ever West Michigan University's Outstanding Emiritus Scholar!
Read more:
https://www.wmich.edu/wmu/news/2000/0002/9900-179.html
edited by Brenna
Mary Ann Woodhouse Mantell: Iguanayougonna do about it?
Mary Ann Woodhouse, better known as Mrs Gideon Mantell, was born on April 9, 1795. In 1816, she married surgeon-geologist Gideon Mantell.
In the summer of 1822, during a walk while her husband was visiting a patient, Mary found the first Iguanodon tooth. In her book "The Dinosaur Hunters", Deborah Cadbury described Mary's unusual finding:
“As she walked, her eyes were irresistibly drawn to a strange shape in a pile of stones that had been heaped by the side of the road. Picking up the stone, she brushed away the white dust, gently removing any loose rock with her fingers. Gradually a shape emerged never previously seen by human eye. It was very smooth, worn and dark brown, rather like a flattened fragment of a giant tooth.”
Gideon Mantell sent the teeth to Georges Cuvier, who first suggested that the remains were from a rhinoceros, but in a letter from 1824 admitted his mistake and determined that the remains were reptilian and quite possibly belonged to a giant herbivore. A year later, Mantell described them and named them Iguanodon (“iguana tooth”) because their resemblance with those of living iguanas. The tooth turned out to be around 130 million years old and incredible scientific discovery.
Fossil Iguanodon Tooth, maker unknown. Gift of the Mantell Family, 1930. CC BY-NC-ND licence. Te Papa (GH004839)
Zelia Nuttall: La Reina de Archaeologia
Image courtesy Bancroft Library
D.H Lawrence portrayed Zelia Nuttall as Mrs. Norris in his novel The Plumed Serpent: a great socialite living in a house full of archaeological and painted ceramic figurines in Mexico City, often surrounded by visitors who sat around her listening with admiration to her scholarly stories. This fictional image, somewhat romantic but definitely based on real aspects has been transferred to the academic literature where Zelia Nuttall appears as the “Queen” of Mexican archaeology. But her place in the history of archaeology is still full of silences and ambiguity.
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.
Maria Antonina Czaplicka: Smashing stereotypes in sub-zero Siberia!
Images courtesy of the Pitt-Rivers Photo Collection.
Special Exhibition on until 2016 at the Pitt Rivers Museum - My Year in Siberia!
While the first battles of World War I were being fought, Maria Czaplicka was travelling the Yenisei Province of Siberia to study ways of life north of the Arctic Circle. Maria spent much of 1914-15 in this little-studied region, recording the lives and languages of the people she met.
Veronica Seton-Williams: Breaking New Ground
Image courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society
At her memorial service in 1992 she was remembered as a redoubtable woman who made archaeology in the Middle East very much her own. And she had to. Veronica Seton-Williams faced considerable prejudice throughout her career.
Dr Veronica Seton-Williams (1910-1992) devoted her life to teaching and excavation. She was born and educated in Australia, choosing to study the closest subject to archaeology that she could at Melbourne University: history and political science. In 1934 she moved to London where she enrolled at the Institute of Archaeology, giving her the opportunity to work under Tessa and Mortimer Wheeler at their famous Maiden Castle dig. It was thanks to Tessa Wheeler and another mentor of Seton-Williams, Margaret Murray, that she was chosen by the British School of Archaeology to join Flinders Petrie on his dig at Sheikh Zuweyed in Sinai (where Hilda Petrie was also working). Many more excavations were to follow: Jericho, Mersin (Turkey), Tell el-Duweir (Palestine) and in Ireland. She completed a PhD on second millennium BC sites in Syria in 1957, but was disappointed not to be able to gain an academic foothold, narrowly missing being appointed to succeed Max Mallowan (husband of Agatha Christie) at the Institute of Archaeology.
Lucy Allen: Curator and Librarian
Lucy Allen was born in 1877 and set out to become a librarian when she began her studies at The Ohio State University in 1894, but along the way she became the first woman to serve as a curator at the Ohio History Connection (then the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society). She took up the post for several months in 1898, while working on her Master's degree in Library Science. She would be the only female curator of archaeology until Martha Potter Otto, who held the post from 1974-2009.
The first curator of archaeology there, Warren K. Moorehead, wrote that he was "particularly indebted to Miss Lucy Allen for her cooperation in the preparation of the state map for publication in this report and for her constant assistance in the museum," and later recommended her for the final review of the map after his resignation in 1897, stating that she knew the data "better than any other person – next to myself."
Patty Jo Watson: Across the Frontier!
A pioneer in cave archaeology, archaeological theory, the origins of agriculture, and more, Patty Jo Watson almost missed the boat on her own archaeological career-literally. As a young grad student set to embark as part of Robert Braidwood’s famed interdisciplinary Iraq-Jarmo expedition in 1954, she and Vivian Browman arrived at the dock in New York City just in time (due to bad traffic) to see their ship sailing out of the harbor. Hopping aboard a tugboat, they were able to catch up with the departing ship. Never again was her future as an archaeologist in doubt. With her only dig experience a field school in Arizona, she was put in charge of the site of Banahilk in Iraq: “Braidwood took me up there with a sort of caravan, a couple of cars with all the gear we needed...I was turned loose on this site up in North Iraq with just [dig supervisor] Abdullah and some workmen to keep me on the straight and narrow…I probably wouldn’t have survived without them.”