Recognising the impact of female archaeologists

As I am writing this it is International Women’s Day, and how appropriate to look back on the many contributions that women have made to understanding our human past.

As a teenager, I spent two happy and productive years studying at the Institute of Archaeology in London.

There, I met Dame Kathleen Kenyon, a redoubtable archaeologist of steely resolve, who began her archaeological career excavating at Great Zimbabwe in 1929 under the direction of Gertrude Caton-Thompson.

She brought her two dogs to the Institute daily, and a tense situation arose when one of them lapped up the Director’s tea one morning.

He banned dogs, so she resigned.

It was soon resolved however, and she continued her outstanding field work at Jericho, where she dug deep and identified one of the earliest instances of the pathway from hunting and gathering to farming.

Cambridge University was founded in 1209, and it took 730 years before Dorothy Garrod (1892-1968) was appointed its first female professor.

Unbelievably today, as a woman she was excluded from speaking or voting on University issues, but she did change the curriculum to make the University the first in Britain to offer an undergraduate degree in archaeology.

Her fieldwork, also in the Near East, involved several caves at Mount Carmel, where she documented a cultural sequence covering tens of thousands of years, all with an entirely female excavation team recruited from the local villages.

Here I can find a parallel with my own excavations.

For forty years in Thailand, I had the good fortune to have Rachanie Thosarat as my co-director, and thankfully my impatience to dig on was always tempered by her patient resolve to slow down.

Moreover, we too recruited women villagers who in my view, were simply the best excavators of all.

How about revealing a necklace made up of thousands of beads on a long-perished string without dislodging even one?

Closer to home, Helen Leach has made a highly significant contribution to our understanding of early horticulture through her research on the field systems along the Wairarapa coast, and her co-direction of the excavation of an extensive silcrete tool manufacturing site at Oturehua.

Janet Davidson, who came to Otago in 1980, has an unmatched record of fieldwork and research across the Pacific.

She was selected in 2017 as one of the women who had made a major contribution to knowledge in New Zealand.