Amelia Edwards remarked in 1842, archaeology is that subject where “the interest never flags—the subject never stales—the mine is never exhausted.”8 Archaeology never stales because it keeps reinventing the big story of us.
The archaeological field is a centerpiece to each pioneer’s story. Each woman found her way to some very out of the way places, circa 1900, in the name of her research and study: Iraq, Iran, Crete, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Gibraltar, Mexico. Often the field called to her with its own type of siren’s song, a tune mingling mysteries of earth and history on a breeze. Today the field continues to beckon adventurous souls curious about where we’ve been and where we’re going. The study of the past is nearly universal, and although each culture has a unique way of embracing and explaining its own history, archaeologists are a self-selecting crowd. They have their own particular, even peculiar toolkit and a strong desire to dig for history’s precious leftovers.
LEFT: Necklace, bracelets, and fragment of decorated pottery
RIGHT: Earthenware vessel and stone artifacts
Before the skies were filled with airplanes that could get you there and back, archaeology meant going off into strange places with only what a team could carry. Archaeologists would leave in search of something that might lie hidden beneath piles of dirt. Shovel in hand, they would chase that dream of discovery, becoming crazed and toilsome if it wasn’t found, brilliant and celebrated if it was. Despite its glamorous image, archaeology is hard work: dirty, muddy, sand-in-your-eyes, exhausting, inconvenient, and on occasion boring work. Not everyone’s cup of tea, especially in the days of Victorian England when sipping tea was exactly what a lady was supposed to be doing.
Yet when they returned from the field, it was beyond dispute that the first women archaeologists had held their own physically and intellectually in what was then a man’s world. They had traveled, dug, scrutinized sites, managed, and made it. Impressive. So impressive that these women are sometimes in danger of being transformed into myth. Although I have boundless admiration for each of the women chronicled here, I try to avoid giving in to pure romanticism. The greatest honor is in keeping it honest. When you are working in the field you want your notes to be as accurate as possible, your maps as precise as can be, so that your reconstructions and interpretations are reliable. I aim for the same here. Legends can become the stuff of make-believe, overshadowing the realities and nuances of a true life.
These early archaeologists were never camelback saints (and they would be dull if they were). They were products of their time and made choices that by today’s standards would elicit criticism and might even be judged as politically incorrect. In some cases they chose to play very much in a man’s world and occasionally viewed other women, in popular patriarchal fashion, as dithering inferiors instead of comrades. They present sometimes frustrating contradictions that both support and undermine a feminist view. Complex individuals, they challenge us, as they once challenged their own peers and colleagues, to take them as they are.
With that in mind I ceremoniously opened an old archaeological field-journal of mine one breezy bayside day in northern California and invited the ladies in. Come on down, drink coffee with me, spread your old maps out on my desk, and let’s make a book together. I asked them into my small studio, encouraged them to kick their dusty boots up onto the kitchen table. Remind me of your crazy lives and courage. I asked each of them to look over my shoulder as I wrote their respective chapters, and if that didn’t make the writing any better, it did make my own journey through their stories richer.
Archaeology’s essence is to uncover the origins of things, the epicenters of change, the evolution of style, technology, and everything else that makes us human. It makes sense that these pioneering women would take such a field of study as their own. As they challenged ideas about what a woman could accomplish, transformed styles of clothing through cross-dressing, cut their hair boyishly short, and broke into a scientific field previously denied them, little did the ladies know to what extent they were making history themselves.
ABOVE : Amelia Edwards, the revered godmother of Egyptology
Sailing on the Nile, Amelia Edwards described her travels in a rented dahabeeyah (boathouse) as a “Noah’s Ark life.” It was a journey where the “sacred hawk” circling overhead uttered the “same sweet, piercing, melancholy note that the Pharaohs listened to of old,” and it was to this accompaniment that her thoughts were swept up by the grandeur of bygone times. Other dahabeeyahs passed by hers, garlanded with crocodile skins and tourists, but Edwards remained aloof to other travelers and kept to her boat and crew, a team that exhibited “every shade of complexion from fair to dark, from tawny to copper-colour, from deepest bronze to bluest black.”1
Her journeys through Egypt were mingled with history’s ghosts and crowded with ancient ruins and temples, with the hieroglyphics inscribed on crushed potsherds and a quality of light that made the pyramids look like “piles of massy gold” at sunset. Drifting along the Nile, Edwards was in search of travel’s pleasure as well as historical understanding. Yet what she ultimately found was to become her life’s consuming passion: archaeology. This is the woman who would one day be heralded as the godmother of Egyptology.
Edwards was independent and financially secure from her career as a journalist and novelist. In her thirties, she packed her bags, left her English home, and let her sails fill with the breath of wandering. When she departed there was no one left in her life to advise against it; her parents had both recently died, and her only constant companion was a woman she referred to merely as “L.”
By her own account, her later arrival in Egypt was almost by accident: “. . . without definite plans, outfit or any kind of Oriental experience, behold us arrive in Cairo on the 29th of November 1873, literally and most prosaically in search of fine weather.”2 Whether this is pure truth or a stylized start to her tale of discovery, the Egyptian Delta made its way firmly into her heart.
In all of her expeditions, Amelia was there to write. Tiptoeing on slopes “strewn with . . . fragments of mummy, shreds of mummy cloth, and human bones all whitening and withering in the sun,”3 she recorded what she found and sketched the people she met. She was a travel writer, a tourist, a grand dame of the Nile, and she longed to make her own archaeological discovery.
One baking-hot afternoon a servant ran in with a penciled note, interrupting her lunch. It read: “Pray come immediately—I have found the entrance to a tomb.” Breathless, Edwards ran to the scene of action. Dropping to her hands and knees, pushing her big skirts over her knees, shoveling sand with her bare hands, “heedless of possible sunstroke, unconscious of fatigue,” she worked to excavate her first archaeological find. Pausing in her fast digging for just a moment, the Victorian lady pushed her hat back, sat on her heels, and turning to her companions asked, “If those at home could see us, what would they say!”4
BORN IN LONDON ON JUNE 7, 1831, Amelia Edwards—Amy to family and friends—was the only child in a family with modest means. Her mother, Alicia, was a “brilliant-complexioned, bright-eyed, large featured little Irish woman”5 who home-schooled her daughter until the
