This unique collection of pioneering women’s biographies
includes not only field archaeologists, but also those who have
been deeply involved in the discipline of archaeology: philologists,
epigraphers, writers, artists, museum curators, professors, and
fund raisers. Not surprisingly, most of these women were right in
the middle of the archaeological process. This web project provides
a broad view of how these women became major contributors to the
field, at the same time crafting their own identities. The life
stories of these women, their extraordinary intellectual and archaeological
accomplishments, are provocative, for they transcended the cultures
they lived in and, despite the struggles they faced, achieved much
of enduring importance.
This project originated in 1994 as the inspiration of Professor
Getzel M. Cohen of the University of Cincinnati and Professor
Martha Sharp Joukowsky of Brown University. Volume I of Breaking
Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists, published by the
University of Michigan Presss in 2004, contains biographies of
Jane Dieulafoy, Margaret Alice Murray, Gertrude Bell, Harriet
Boyd Hawes, Edith Hall Dohan, Hetty Goldman, Gertrude Caton-Thompson,
Dorothy Garrod, Winifred Lamb, Theresa Goell, Kathleen Kenyon,
Esther Van Deman.
impression may have been given that we have covered in full
women active in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology. This
misconception could not be further from the truth, and that
is why this web project is devoted to additional pioneering
women and their lives. This was to become a dictionary and second
volume of Breaking Ground, but it inevitably grew into a volume
of encyclopedic proportions.
In 2003, Martha S. Joukowsky and Barbara S. Lesko, also of Brown
University, decided that the stories of these many women should
become a web-based project so that it could be accessed on the
web and be available to worldwide readers. Taking each biography
in turn, we edited them, created abstracts for each woman and
keywords so that subject searches could be made. The contributions
of French, German and Italian colleagues have been left in their
original language, but their abstracts are presented in English.
Surely we wish for more information on each subject and we invite
you the browser or reader to add your comments and suggestions,
perhaps supply photos, and correct any infelicities that may have
crept into these portraits.
This web project was created in part because of our frustration
with traditional publishing limitations of space, and we wanted
this project to complement the book Breaking Ground by presenting
the stories of additional archaeological women. We
welcome future submissions. Our desire is also to have
this database added to with additional biographies in future years.
To attempt a book length manuscript would have burst the bounds
of publication. It seemed sensible to create a web-based project
also for more broad and detailed coverage, not only of each woman’s
life, but also to give world wide viewers a glimpse of how these
professionals looked in their time and place. The bibliography of
each woman is presented without which, of course, her work would
not be complete.