Image reproduced here with the kind permission of the Gertrude Bell Archive Newcastle University (http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk, Image A_340), and may not be further reproduced without permission
It’s easy to imagine the academic
world at the turn of the 20th Century, right? A world
closed to all but the most privileged of men – whiskered gentlemen
in stiff suits, pipe smoke and port, explorers with a whiff of pith
helmet about them.
Imagine, then, arriving on the island
of Crete in 1904 to find not one bold, brave young woman researcher
digging up the past – but four: Harriet
Boyd, Blanche Wheeler, Edith Hall and Dorothea Bate.
Or the Arabian Desert in 1900, where
that striking figure riding towards you, headscarf billowing, at the
head of a caravan of camels is not Lawrence of Arabia – he
was barely out of short trousers then – but Gertrude
Bell.
Try archaeology* in the interwar years,
then. In our popular imaginations this is proper Indiana Jones
territory. But in 1929, on the far eastern edge of the Mediterranean
Sea, Dorothy
Garrod was leading an excavation
team of five women. Over the next five years, in
caves dotting the steep-sided cliffs of Mount Carmel, Garrod’s team
would uncover remarkable remains of Neandertals and some of earliest
evidence for modern humans outside of Africa.
There were many, many women
archaeologists, palaeontologist and geologists in the 19th
and early 20th Century who were well known and respected –
then – for their work and achievements. Now, however, they have
been forgotten. This isn’t totally surprising – after all, how
many men from those fields are household names? But it’s more than
just forgetting a name or six; we’ve failed to retain the idea that
women like these formed a significant – if under-represented and
often resented – part of the cultural and academic landscape. We’ve
allowed them to slip from our popular consciousness.
It’s a cautionary tale.
Fast forward to today. Women are a
significant, but under-represented, part of the cultural and academic
landscape (sound familiar?). Like our predecessors, we face
institutionalized prejudice and inequality, even if our individual
work is respected. In fifty or a hundred years time, will our
existence and contributions have made as small a dent on people’s
imaginations as the women of yesteryear?
Not if we can help it! On Friday
we launched the TrowelBlazers blog to carve out more space on the
Internet for the story of women’s contributions, past and present,
to the fields of archaeology, palaeontology and geology (authors
note: we aren’t above a spot of land grabbing, and given
field-boundaries are a tad blurry and multi-disciplinary study
common, we will also be featuring women geographers, explorers and
anthropologists).
By scouring the Internet and beyond for
images and videos, and posting them alongside short, readable
snippets of information, we want to reset people’s imaginations. As
the blog grows, we hope that the volume of entries – as much as the
individual stories – will be its own powerful testament to just how
significant these women were, and
continue to be.
Because it isn’t just the derring-do
of pioneer-era women we are interested in, we want to celebrate the
full diversity of trowel-blazing women working today, from all
backgrounds and from all parts of the world. On top of this, we want
to highlight the networks of women that have worked together over the
years – something often lost in heroic tales of success against the
odds, where women are inevitably framed by a world of men.
It’s quite an agenda we’ve set
ourselves, and we need help building up this picture. We aren’t
historians of science - we are learning too - and we know that we
haven’t even scraped the surface of the awesomeness of these
trowel-wielding women (even if we are quite proud of our spreadsheet
with nearly one hundred women on it already). Anyone can submit
a post to our blog, or join in the conversation on Twitter
and Facebook.
Together, we can showcase the aggregate contribution of these trowel
blazers.
One exception to the rule can be
dismissed, many exceptions cannot. In essence, that is the spirit of
TrowelBlazers, served up with a dash of ancient wonder, a sprinkling
of adventure and – of course - buckets of mud and sweat.
* Yes, archaeology is a science (some
bits more than others), but we are interested in women beyond the
realms of science as well.
The TrowelBlazers blog can be found
here: trowelblazers.tumblr.com
TrowelBlazers is run by Victoria
Herridge (@ToriHerridge), who provided this guest post, Suzanne Pilaar Birch (@suzie_birch),
Rebecca Wragg Sykes (@LeMoustier) and Brenna Hassett (@brennawalks).
They all also tweet at @trowelblazers.
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