Reflections

    An earlier chapter mentioned Dame Rosemary Cramp, I included Cramp as she was the first female Professor at Durham and wanted to see if the gender split had improved in the years since. Particularly as the presence of a female lecturer can be a positive indicator to female students that they can continue onto a career in their chosen field of study. As this paper is being written, the latest Profiling the Profession survey by Landward Research Ltd. has just concluded. Sadly, compilation of data takes time, and the full dataset is not yet available. However, some statistics have started to be released. According to the latest survey 7000 people currently work in archaeology in the UK, 850 of these are in the academic sector. (Landward Research, 2021) I was therefore hoping to get the latest gender splits for academia in archaeology, but these are sadly not yet available, also it is to be noted that Landward have changed their methodology for this survey. Previously th...

   Women pioneers in archaeology.     Some of the women who have created or contributed to archaeology, how have their efforts been recognised and communicated to academia, students, and the public? Word count restraints mean I have had to severely limit the women discussed here and how much detail I can go into. However, I have attempted to select a few of the women who I believe have made pioneering changes to archaeology as it is conducted today, at least in my own personal field of experience, that being as someone who works in developer-led archaeology, with an interest in outreach, community archaeology, and its data dispersal to the wider public.   Dame Maud Cunnington was born in 1869, and by 1897 was engaging in ‘rescue archaeology’ in her local area of Wiltshire, where she had settled after marrying her husband, the then honorary curator of Devises Museum. She wrote up these excavations and her subsequent post excavation analysis, including ceram...