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 ceramic assemblages in the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History magazine. Over time her and her husband’s work expanded to Knap Hill Neolithic causewayed enclosure and the late Bronze Age/early Iron Age site of All Cannings Cross. In the 1920s and 30s Cunnington and her husband excavated sites including West Kennet Long Barrow, Woodhenge and the Sanctuary. This timescale also placed her within the sphere of the women archaeologists writing public archaeology in the 1920’s. As noted by Pope (2020), the majority of ‘public archaeology’ articles was written by women, whilst the more academic papers were produced by men. Possibly this is more due to the almost exclusive male only membership of many early societies, such as the Society of Antiquaries. In essence, her work qualifies her as one of the first “community archaeologists”, in that she believed in the accessibility of public archaeology so that everyone could learn from what had been discovered. She was therefore devoted to writing up and publishing the results of her excavations.

I had not come across Maud Cunnington until I was looking at the Trowelblazers project, a few years ago, which is attempting to inform about women’s contributions in archaeology. It is accessible on the internet, but is primarily contained within the archaeological community, mentioned at conferences, presentations etc., and rarely outside the archaeology networks. I had heard of her husband in relation to the more famous UNESCO sites noted above, including on visits as an undergraduate with university. But Maud’s contributions seem to have been chiefly overlooked in terms of recognition and displaying these to the public. There is some limited information about the Cunningtons on the appropriate English heritage websites for the sites in question, but it is far from immediately obvious or available to the casual observer.

Cunnington showed a high level of detail in her work and was meticulous in her recording. Susan Greaney of English Heritage has stated “Maud was fairly ground-breaking in her techniques too. She recorded every single find from every single post hole.” Although this was not necessarily common in archaeology during the late 1800’s through to the 1920’s it does suggest Cunnington may have been advanced in her methodology for the time. The question becomes, were her male peers criticising her work, or picking fault at the different approach to their own practices. We now understand better the importance of stratigraphy and correct context recording and the current practice in field excavation is also the detailed recording of contexts for finds, including in some cases now a specific gps recording. At the time it transpires that Cunnington was criticized for both her methodology and some of her interpretation. There is a paper written by Julia Roberts (2002) which in the opening states its intent is to “attempt to reassess the life, work, and legacy of the Wiltshire archaeologist Maud Edith Cunnington (1869-1951).”  Roberts speculates here that Dame Cunnington's work has been dismissed based upon personal biases, and dislike by colleagues, chiefly men for reasons to do with her personality rather than any inherent faults in her archaeological analysis or her ability as an archaeologist.  Considering the constraints that women overall faced during the end of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, alongside the primarily male exclusivity of academic institutions and societies at the time it is understandable why Roberts leans towards this explanation of sexism. Personal correspondence from the time and afterwards show Cunnington to have been strong willed in stating her opinions and enforcing her, detailed and somewhat, compared to contemporary standards, particular approach to fieldwork methodology.

While it is true that society does have these double standards, whereby a woman acting is this fashion is seen as “nagging” or “overbearing” in some circles whilst the same traits in a man are viewed as showcasing “professional expertise” and possessing “leadership skills”. I took part in a panel during the CIfA conference of 2015 for the Archaeology Podcast Network (APN) alongside the since departed Theresa O’Mahoney, a dear friend who I worked with on the Enabled Archaeology Foundation, Marc Barkman, who runs the Archaeosoup podcasts and vlogs, and Tristan Boyle of the APN. We all recounted instances where the more degrading comments and attacks on ability and professionalism were made to the women. In Marc’s example a troll made threats against his wife, not against Marc himself. So, Roberts’ assumption is not without merit. However, I do note that within her paper her personal communications with those recalling Dame Cunnington, include not only the likes of Stuart Piggott but also Margaret Guido. Guido had faced her own share of sexism in the field, particularly running into issues with a landowner on her own dig at Latch Farm in Hampshire, and arguably even after passing away she is still facing them now in the fictionalized retelling of her work at Sutton Hoo. It is therefore unlikely that she would have been simply parroting the opinions of her male peers on Cunnington to keep in with the status quo.  

Tessa Verney Wheeler is one of the only pioneering female archaeologist, especially out of the husband-and-wife teams, where so often wives have been eclipsed by their husbands, or their work boundaries are unclear in terms of separating the two. That I have been able to find a book dedicated directly to. I purchased Breaking Ground and Ladies of the Field many years ago, but these publications and others group female archaeologists together, often dedicating a single chapter to each. The book by Lydia Carr, entitled ‘Tessa Verney Wheeler: Women and Archaeology Before World War Two’. is wholly dedicated to Wheeler, her scientific method, and her work in the creation of the Institute of Archaeology in London. Incorporating her mentoring and collaboration with other female archaeologists such as Kenyon but keeping the focus of the book on Wheeler herself as the main subject.

 Carr suggests that Verney Wheeler’s (she differentiates between Tessa and Mortimer by using the double barrel version of the name throughout her book) career progression was driven by the desire to do a job well. And by today’s standards it was a speedy progression path, she finished reading history at University College London (UCL) in 1914. By 1924 she was the Keeper of Archaeology at the National Museum in Wales. This timescale includes having the couple’s son, Mathew, and accompanying her husband on his postings until he went to France in 1917, for most women in modern academic archaeology this often leads to them developing their careers at a slower pace than their male counterparts, there is further information on this in a later chapter supplied by Dr Rachel Pope. Carr further postulates that Verney Wheeler had no issue with and indeed, may well have preferred staying in her husband’s shadow (Carr, 2012, pg.108) to focus more on the work at hand, and in Carr’s opinion, as Wheeler himself was the ultimate narcissist and a ‘media talent’, Verney Wheeler really had no alternative. Therefore, due to her continued commitment to detailed methodology and publication, less than 15 years from completing her undergraduate studies in History, in 1928 she became the second woman elected, not in an honorary fashion, but by the ordinary process, to a position as a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

 She was committed to careful excavation recording and taught this to a whole generation of students. Kenyon is quoted as saying that Verney Wheeler was the source of ‘what she had learned of dig management and field technique, notably the detailed control of stratigraphy and pottery recording’ (Carr, 2012, pg.247). This is also noted in separate publications about Kathleen Kenyon (Dever in Cohen, G., & Joukowsky, M., 2006, pg.529) At Lydney Park in 1927 Tessa had lined and graphed the alternate pages in her and her students field notebooks, an approach later adopted by Kenyon and all her future students.

Some of Tessa’s most famous work was that undertaken at Verulamium, in St Albans. Her work on mosaics, both here and previously at Lydney, won her vast acclaim. These she meticulously recorded in detail, including a highly detailed watercolour painting of Lydney that is still published today. But she took this further, and unfortunately there is no documented record as to how she did this. But she either sort out the education to, or self-taught herself via observation the ability to competently lift mosaics. What is interesting is how Tessa’s work at the time was presented to the wider public. Whether she had indeed learned it from the Italian mosaic specialists employed at Verulamium, or on family holidays when younger as one version goes. She managed to lift and have the mosaic relocated intact and in perfect condition. The Evening Standard presented her work to the public on 21^st October 1932 with the following headline. “ONLY ONE PERSON IN ENGLAND CAN DO IT AND THAT A WOMAN”

The article led “Mrs Mortimer Wheeler, the famous woman archaeologist, is feeling very pleased indeed with herself just now, for she has done something that nobody else in England can do. During the excavation of Verulamium . . . some magnificent mosaic pavements belonging to the spacious bathrooms of a Roman palace were found. They were richly coloured and in perfect preservation. Mrs Wheeler, who has been superintending these excavations for her husband [ . . . ] wanted these pavements taken up and removed to the little museum on the site. It was discovered that the only people who could do the job were a London fi rm of Italian mosaic specialists who for generations have lived and worked amongst mosaics [ . . . ] All the workmen are Italians and the craft of making and moving mosaics is in their blood, inherited from father to son [ . . . ] The work was difficult and costly. The expedition’s purse is thin. When the next floor was ready for removal, Mrs Wheeler decided to do it herself. Experts were horrified. They even whispered ‘ Vandalism! It will be ruined. ’ [ . . . ] And now she has taken up that floor successfully. It is just finished and not a bit is broken away. [Verney Wheeler explains the process she outlined in her Museums Journal article in more colloquial language.] [ . . . ] It sounds so easy. But no one else has done it before except the Italians.”

By modern day standards one would hope an article written in this fashion would not get beyond the editing process given its linguistic style. Whilst in today’s publications one will still see the association of history with public heritage and cultural identity. The wording at play here speaks more of nationalism and a sense of jingoism, Alongside the implication of surprise that, regardless of her lesser gender, an Englishwoman can still outdo the job of a traditionally trained throughout the generations Italian. Despite the refusal to use her own full name, as a celebrated archaeologist in her own right, the author (uncredited) still feels the need to emphasize it is a “woman archaeologist” who has undertaken this task in both the headline and the article itself. What is possibly slightly more refreshing is Tessa’s own take on public archaeology, the assumption that what she is doing is generally interesting to non-academic circles, and ought to be explained to the working-class people reading the Evening Standard on their way home from work. As discussed previously, the bulk of public archaeology writing in the more accessible magazines available to the average household was undertaken chiefly by women in the 1920s. Whilst their male peers tended to have a higher academic paper publishing rate. (Pope, 2021)

My current employment is with Archaeology South East, which developed out of the Institute of Archaeology (IoA) at UCL. Through that connection I have spent the past few years teaching fieldwork methodology to archaeology students from the UCL archaeology department and Brown University on their summer fieldwork projects in Greece. None of the students I have discussed this with knew of Verney Wheeler’s work in establishing the IoA, although many of them had heard of Mortimer Wheeler. This is despite the plaque dedicated to her at the UCL IoA in 1937, one year after her death, and the first year the IoA started accepting students.

Figure 2: Memorial plaque for Tessa Verney Wheeler, now on display inside IoA photo author's own.

Mortimer Wheeler, however, did have one of the national blue plaques erected by English Heritage in 1993 at their address 27 Whitcomb Street, Leicester Square, London.

Dame Kathleen Kenyon was one of Tessa Verney Wheeler’s students. As seen above she has credited Wheeler with her own meticulous detail and notetaking and is possibly best known for the improvements and further development of the grid system of excavation originally pioneered by the Wheelers themselves. Cohen, G., & Joukowsky, M. (Eds.). (2006).  This became known as the Wheeler-Kenyon method, although it is often in the modern day still shortened back to the Wheeler method, rather than ‘Wheelers’ plural, and therefore it is often assumed to be of Mortimer Wheeler’s sole creation to those unaware of the background.

Dever insinuates he had a personal friendship with Kenyon, that he knew her in social circles or the like, mentioned in the brief biography of her career he was invited to write in the Breaking Ground book, subtitled “Pioneering Women Archaeologists”, he also went on to pen several tributes in her memory. However, Kenyon had retired from her position as Principal at St Hugh’s College in Oxford in 1973. It appears the rest of her time was filled with Honorary Chair positions and publishing her findings from her earlier excavations. Dever appears to have been on one of his first excavations at Gezer, in 1964 to 1974, (from his online CV by the University of Arizona) and I have been unable to find any papers they co-authored together or suggestions that they either worked or spent any great amount of time together. I suspect instead that Dever studied Kenyon’s later work on Biblical Archaeology (after her shift from Romano-British) that became his specialism, and he knew of her via his mentor Ernest Wright who was active in the field the same time as Kenyon (King, 1983). That the pre-dinner drinks he refers to with her was likely either a solitary or occasional occurrence rather than a regular gathering of friends. Much like the “social events” that occur on the fringe of academic conferences and talks today. This assumed familiarity, if taken at face value, would have reinforced Dever’s statement in the preface of his chapter on Kenyon that she “needed neither imagined competition with men nor feminist rhetoric to reinforce her in reaching her goals” (Cohen, G., & Joukowsky, M. 2006).  Instead, it appears to solely be his opinion, formed from Kenyon’s initial reaction to a question, where Dever had asked if her father’s pursuit of Biblical archaeology had inspired Kenyon’s own career path, during a single conversation, before dinner. From personal conversations with current female identifying archaeologists, and simply by the fact that some authors feel there is a void in the market for such books about female pioneers of archaeology, I am inclined to believe that none of the competition from or with male peers is indeed, “imagined”.  

In his own book, Principles of archaeological stratigraphy, Edward Harris highlights the value of Kenyon’s contributions to stratigraphic recording in archaeology “Kathleen Kenyon, a student of Wheeler, later insisted that the idea of stratification must be taken to include things like pits, ditches and other types of interfaces, which were not strata or layers in the strict sense” (Harris, 1979, pg.26). Harris’s 1973 created and now universally used matrix therefore incorporates the traditional geology, deposits, and features, that pulled together can provide the chronological narrative of an archaeological site.

Dame Rosemary Cramp has been selected due to her position in academic archaeology at a teaching institution. Although she was not the first female professor of Archaeology. Which was instead, Dorothy Garrod, however, Garrod’s appointment as Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, in 1939, failed to put her on an equal footing with her male peers. As a woman she was not entitled to be a full member of the University and was therefore unable to speak or vote on university matters. Cramp however, as the first female professor appointed at Durham University, was Professor of Archaeology from 1971-1990 and, in theory at least, held the same rights as her male co-workers.

Cramp retired from Durham in 1990 and took up a visiting fellowship at Oxford in 1992, continuing with several voluntary positions she had held alongside and following her academic employment. Over the years she had held positions in the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. As a trustee of the British Museum, she was a member of the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England (now known as Historic England). She served as Chairwoman of the Archaeology Data Service from 1996 to 2001(Cramp, 2021)

Cramp has also held several senior appointments within academic organisations. She was President of the Council for British Archaeology from 1989 to 1992 and has been an Honorary Vice-President since 1992.  President of the Society for Church Archaeology from 1996 to 2000. From 1992 to 1997, she was Vice-President of the Royal Archaeological Institute (Cramp, 2021)

 In 2001 she became president of the Society of Antiquaries of London for three years. An institution which had only started admitting women in 1920. One would wonder if this extensive service to the discipline would have opened more pathways and recognition of female contributions to archaeology for those who follow her. However, in a recent Keynote speech, Rachel Pope noted that there were in 1998 two female archaeology professors in Britain. Eight years after Cramp’s retirement from Durham, although she has remained committed to the industry.

In terms of accolades to Cramp that are within the public view, Cramp was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1987 (Cramp, 2021) During the Queen's Birthday Honours of 2011, she was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) 'for services to scholarship'.