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Authors: Ladies of the Field: Early Women Archaeologists,Their Search for Adventure

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SOIL
: Earth—the rich mixture of organic compounds and debris that buries an archaeology site and holds it close.

STRATIGRAPHY
: The natural and cultural layers of an archaeological site.

Each “stratum” contains soil and artifacts related to each other. The overall stratigraphy of a site is what allows an archaeologist to say, “We have strata representing the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and up through the Hellenistic (Greek) period.” Yippee!

SUBJECTIVE
: All of us are subjective creatures. We see the world through our own lens of personal experience, beliefs, culture, feelings, and instincts. Subjectivity is an emotional response to life, its events, and the artifacts left behind. A subjective interpretation of the archaeological record relies on gut instinct and is colored by personal experience.

TELL
: A large mound, normally found in the Middle East, containing the remains of numerous settlements and/or civilizations all stacked up on top of each other. A tell looks like a very strange hill.

THEORY
: An idea of what happened, a possible explanation, a well-educated guess. Some people keep theories as “pets” (pet theories are ideas that get a lot of special attention). Archaeologists will craft a theory about what a certain site tells us about the past. Field excavations and site comparisons will prove that theory true or false. Here is a sample theory: North America was first populated by people who crossed the Bering Strait land bridge
15
,
000
years ago. True or false?

ZIGGURAT
: Like a terraced pyramid with a flat top, a temple or shrine.

Often considered to be the dwelling places of gods, ziggurats are found in Iran and the Mesopotamian Valley; the earliest are approximately
6
,
000
years old.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: FIELD NOTES

1
Mary Ann Levine, “Presenting the Past: A Review of Research on Women in Archaeology,”
Archaeological Papers of the American
Anthropological Association
(
1994
),
24
.

2
In
1870
, Queen Victoria expressed her view on women’s rights as follows in a private letter to Sir Theodore Martin: “I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.”

3
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as cited in an excerpt by Albertine-Adrienne Necker de Saussure (
1844
), in
Victorian Women: A Documentary Account
of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United
States,
eds. Erna Olafson Hellersten, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen (Stanford,
CA
: Stanford University,
1981
),
62
.

4
William Acton, M.R.C.S.,
The Functions and Disorders of the
Reproductive Organs
,
8
th American ed. (Philadelphia,
1894
),
208

212
.

5
August Deboy,
Hygiène et physiologie du mariage,
153
ed. (Paris,
1880
),
17

18
,
92
,
94

95
,
105

109
.

6
Elizabeth Missing Sewell,
Principles of Education, Drawn from Nature
and Revelation, and Applied to Female Education in the Upper Classes
(New York,
1866
),
396

397
,
450

451
.

7
Quote from Gertrude Bell, in a letter home dated
1892
.

8
Amelia Edwards,
A Thousand Miles Up the Nile:
A woman’s journey among the treasures of ancient Egypt
(Coventry,
UK
: Trotamundas Press Ltd.,
2008
),
13
.

CHAPTER 1: AMELIA EDWARDS

1
Amelia Edwards,
A Thousand Miles Up the Nile:
A woman’s journey among the treasures of ancient Egypt
(Coventry,
UK
: Trotamundas Press Ltd.,
2008
),
128

129
.

2
Ibid,
19
.

3
Ibid,
140
.

4
Digital copy of
A Thousand Miles Up the Nile.
Available at
www.touregypt.net/amelia/chapter
18
.html

5
Brenda Moon,
More Usefully Employed:
Amelia B. Edwards, Writer, Traveller and Campaigner for Ancient Egypt
(London: Egypt Exploration Society,
2006
),
10
.

6
Ibid,
11
.

7
Ibid,
7
.

8
Ibid,
1
.

9
Ibid,
14
.

10
Edwards,
A Thousand Miles Up the Nile,
293
.

11
Joan Rees,
Writings on the Nile: Harriet Martineau,
Florence Nightingale, Amelia Edwards
(London: Rubicon,
1995
).

12
Edwards,
A Thousand Miles Up the Nile,
225
.

13
Ibid,
18
.

14
Ibid,
240
.

15
Ibid,
31
.

16
Ibid,
294
.

17
Ibid,
191
.

18
Ibid,
122
.

19
Ibid,
30
.

20
Ibid,
85
.

21
Today the site of Abu Simbel has been relocated. In the
1960
s, the temple was raised, transported, and rebuilt to protect it from the flooding of Lake Nasser.

22
Julia Keay,
With Passport and Parasol: The Adventures of Seven Victorian
Ladies
(London:
BBC
Books,
1989
).

23
Digital copy of original
1891
edition of
A Thousand Miles Up the Nile.
Available at
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/edwards/nile/nile.html
.

24
Ibid.

25
Ibid.

26
Excerpt from a letter written by Amelia Edwards to Edward Abbot in
1881
, as cited in Brenda Moon,
More Usefully Employed,
153

154
.

27
Today, it’s known as the Egypt Exploration Society.

28
Moon,
More Usefully Employed
,
203
.

29
Ibid,
224
.

30
Barbara S. Lesko, “Amelia Blanford Edwards,
1831

1892
,”
www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Edwards_Amelia%
20
Blanford.pdf

CHAPTER 2: JANE
DIEULAFOY

1
Eve Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy,
1851

1916
,”
Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists
(Ann Arbor,
MI
: University of Michigan Press,
2004
),
56
.

2
New York Times
obituary for Madame Dieulafoy, May
28
,
1916
.

3
Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy,
1851

1916
,”
60
.

4
Ibid,
36
.

5
Ibid.

6
Jane Dieulafoy, “The Excavations at Susa,”
Harper’s Monthly Magazine
75
, no.
445
(June
1887
),
1
.

7
“Uses Hubby’s Wardrobe,”
New York Morning Journal,
excerpted in Margot Irvine, “Jane Dieulafoy’s Gender Transgressive Behaviour and Conformist Writing,” in
Gender and Identities in France,
eds. Brigitte Rollet and Emily Salines (Portsmouth,
UK
: University of Portsmouth, School of Languages and Area Studies,
1999
).

8
Dieulafoy, “The Excavations at Susa,”
Harper’s Monthly Magazine
,
7
.

9
Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy,
1851

1916
,”
42
.

10
Dieulafoy, “The Excavations at Susa,”
Harper’s Monthly Magazine,
6
.

11
Ibid,
4
.

12
Ibid,
10
.

13
Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy,
1851

1916
,”
46
.

14
Dieulafoy, “The Excavations at Susa,”
Harper’s Monthly Magazine
,
10
.

15
Ibid.

16
Ibid,
12
.

17
Ibid,
17
.

18
Ibid,
18
.

19
Ibid.

20
Ibid.

21
Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy,
1851

1916
,”
50
.

22
Ibid,
51
.

23
Photo in the archives of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre Museum, Paris.

24
Irvine, “Jane Dieulafoy’s Gender Transgressive Behaviour and Conformist Writing.” Translation courtesy of Catherine Stevenson and Margaret Dubin,
14
.

25
New York Times
obituary for Madame Dieulafoy dated May
28
,
1916
.

26
Irvine, “Jane Dieulafoy’s Gender Transgressive Behaviour and Conformist Writing.” Translation courtesy of Catherine Stevenson and Margaret Dubin,
17
.

27
Ibid.

28
Ibid.

29
Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy,
1851

1916
,”
67
.

30
Professor Margot Irvine, personal communication, November
2009
.

31
Gran-Aymerich, “Jane Dieulafoy,
1851

1916
,”
59
.

32
Ibid,
63
.

33
Irvine, “Jane Dieulafoy’s Gender Transgressive Behaviour and Conformist Writing,”
15
.

34
She could also be a mother. According to the
1916
New York Times
obituary for Dieulafoy, “Mme. Dieulafoy was the mother of a son and daughter.” Oddly enough, this fact is not mentioned in other sources. Perhaps Dieulafoy kept motherhood quiet (or relied intensely on wet nurses and nannies) so as to keep her career unhindered.

CHAPTER 3:
ZELIA
NUTTALL

1
D.H. Lawrence,
The Plumed Serpent
(Ware, Hertfordshire,
UK
: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.,
1995
),
25
.

2
Ibid,
32
.

3
Ibid,
33
.

4
Ibid,
25
.

5
Nancy O. Lurie, “Women in Early Anthropology,”
Pioneers of American
Anthropology,
ed. June Helm (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1966
),
29

83
. Italics are author’s own.

6
Alfred M. Tozzer, “Zelia Nuttall, Obituary.”
American Anthropologist
35
(
1933
):
475

482
.

7
The crystal skull now resides in the Musée du quai Branly; the other was proven to be a fake.

8
Letter on file at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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