#trowelblazer

Mary Arizona ‘Zonia’ Baber (1862-1955) is recognized as a pioneer in geography education, and an important figure in promoting equal rights of women and minorities. She emphasized the importance of practical fieldwork and laboratory work in geography teaching, and the importance of applying geographic concepts rather than just memorizing names and places, pedagogic approaches that are still praised and encouraged today.

She earned her teaching credential in 1885 from Cook County Normal School (which later became Chicago State University. ‘Normal schools’ prepared school teachers and later became known as state teacher’s colleges). In 1887 she was recruited as a staff member at Cook County Normal and became their Head of Geography from 1889 - 1901. Following this she held a position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago (Teacher of Geology and Geography, 1901-1921). While teaching, she also began taking classes, including the first geology class that allowed women, and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in 1904. Multi-tasking Trowelblazer extraordinaire, she also co-founded the Geographic Society of Chicago in 1898, at the same time as teaching, running a department and earning her degree. She remained involved with the Society throughout her life, serving as its president from 1900-1904. In 1948 she received the society’s Gold Medal lifetime achievement award. Like Florence Bascom, she was listed as one of the few women in the American Men of Science.

Reproduced from open access article : Geography by
Zonia Baber, published in ‘The Course of Study’ Vol. 1, No. 8 (Apr., 1901), pp. 704-706

 Her efforts to promote women in geography are lessons that we can learn from today and mirror the efforts of the Trowelblazers website to highlight their important contributions. She rrecognized that women were often excluded as speakers at events due to both prejudice and lack of knowledge of their existence, and deliberately sought recommendation for female speakers for the Chicago Geographical Society from fellow Trowelblazer Harriet Chalmers Adams (first president for the Society of Women Geographers). In 1927 Baber herself became president of the SWG. Outside of geography she was also actively involved in suffrage and promoting women’s rights. Baber traveled extensively around the world from Europe to the Middle East, East Asia to the Pacific Islands and the Caribbean, both professionally attending conferences, but also related to her political work. She worked to address racism and the threat of imperialism as well as women’s issues, arguing for racial integration as a priority within then Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She was a tireless advocate for women’s suffrage, and in addition to serving on the Race Relations Committee of the Chicago Women’s Club and the Executive Committee of the Chicago Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she also served on thee Board of Mangers of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and as representative for Puerto Rico for the National Women’s Party, the Asociación Puertoriqueña de Mujeres Sufragistas, and the Liga Social Sufragistas.

Post submitted by Lisa-Marie Shillito

Edited by Brenna

Read more: Zonia herself, on

Geography: http://www.jstor.org/stable/992015 Scientific American Blogs:http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/rosetta-stones/2013/03/28/zonia-baber-the-public-may-be-brought-to-understand-the-importance-of-geography/

More on women in geography and their important role in education: http://www.iswg.org/news-events/practically-all-the-geographers-were-women/

Main Image: Zonia Baber gathering fossils at Mazon Creek, Illinois, 1895. The summer class in Geology, taught by Thomas C. Chamberlin, was the first field class at the University of Chicago to which women were admitted.

Image courtesy University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-00303], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago LibraryLandscape Image: Reproduced from open access article : Geography by Zonia Baber, published in 'The Course of Study’ Vol. 1, No. 8 (Apr., 1901), pp. 704-706. University of Chicago Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/992015 

Ur was an important city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, perhaps best known for the ziggurat monument and Royal Tombs. One of the main periods of excavations from 1922 to 1934 were jointly funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, and the story of these early  excavations is often told with reference to director Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, and his assistant Max Mallowan, who would go on to became an important archaeologist in his own right. There is another character however whose role in these excavations was equally important, and that is Katharine Woolley (nee Menke). Katharine was described by fellow trowelblazers  Gertrude Bell as “dangerous” and Agatha Christie as “an extraordinary character” and it is rumoured that Christie based a murder victim in one of her novels on her. Woolley was certainly a woman who made an impression, and her story has more than a little mystery and drama, and also unfortunately tragedy. Katharine was as a student at Oxford, however she left before finishing her degree and worked as a British military nurse. She married her first husband, Lieutenant Colonel Bertram Keeling, in 1919 and travelled with him to Egypt, but after only 6 months of marriage, he committed suicide in the Giza desert. The details surrounding his death are unclear, but this obviously had an impact on Katharine. She resumed her nursing career and ended up visiting the Ur excavations whilst on duty in Baghdad. She attracted the attention of the excavators with her illustration skills, and was invited to join the team. She began working as a field assistant for the project in 1924. Many texts allude incorrectly to the fact that she was present on the Ur excavations solely to accompany her husband, Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, when in fact she found herself there entirely through her own talents. She ended up marrying Leonard for convenience as it was her only option to remain on the dig after the funders expressed discomfort at the thought of an attractive young widow working in the field alone with a team of men. She quickly became ‘second in command’ at the dig, and she was also responsible for the reconstruction of the famous headdress of Queen Pu-abi amongst others. She would go on to lead excavations in the final year of the dig, and played an important role in fundraising and producing press materials for the project. In 1929, Katharine published a book, Adventure Calls, about a woman who pretends to be a man so that she can have a life of excitement and adventure, including joining an archaeological team! Katharine interviewed the young Max Mallowan for his place on the team, and it was also due to Katharine that Agatha Christie was allowed to visit the excavations. Initially the two became good friends, but suffered a falling out when Christie became romantically involved with Mallowan (they would later get married). Although Katharine was married to Leonard, it is suggested that she enjoyed the attention of being the only woman on site and wasn’t pleased when Mallowan directed his attention elsewhere. Christie was not welcome back and Mallowan left the team shortly after. It is these aspects of the story that may be responsible for Katharine’s reputation as being difficult to work with! Sadly her work was overshadowed by this reputation and with speculations about her sexuality/gender, which is rumoured to have been linked to the suicide of her first husband (for a discussion of this see this blog about an unpublished paper on Woolley). More important than the details (confusing as they are) of her personal life, were Katharine’s archaeological illustrations and reconstructions which were critical to publicising and promoting the discoveries at Ur. Without her contributions the importance of the Ur excavations would not have been recognised, and the success of her husband’s career was in no small part due to her work. Of course, there are those among us who prefer to judge her character but what we can see for ourselves - active fieldwork and a fondness for felines, which surely can’t be a bad thing…! [caption id=“attachment_1617” align=“alignnone” width=“580”]Courtesy of the Penn Museum, image no. 191365

More Information:

More Deadly than the Male - Blogpost

Ur of the Chaldees - British Museum Blogpost

Murder in Mesopotamia - Expedition U Penn

Post submitted by Lisa-Marie Shillito

Edited by Brenna

Image: Katharine Woolley and Sheikh Hamoudi Ibn Ibrahim, the excavation’s foreman, sorting finds (1928­–29 season). © Trustees of the British Museum; Second Image:Expedition house and staff, 1928-29. Max Mallowan (third from left), Hamoudi, C. Leonard Wolley, Katherine Wolley, Father Eric R. Burrows. Courtesy of the Penn Museum, image no. 191365. 

Betsy received a B.S. in geology from Wellesley, an M.A. in Anthropology from Radcliffe, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in anthropology in 1967, under Stephen Williams. She was Alfred Romer’s assistant at the Museum of Comparative Zoology when it was announced that Australopithecines were bipedal. Betsy’s dissertation, The Obion Site: An Early Mississippian Center in Western Tennessee, was one of the first dissertations written by a women base upon original fieldwork and done by Harvard in the early twentieth century. She became the first archaeologist on the faculty of Western Michigan University, founded a chapter of the Michigan Archaeological Society, edited the Michigan Archaeologist from 1970-1975, was president of the Conference on Michigan Archaeology from 1976 - 1980, and was the author of numerous publications. Betsy retired from Western Michigan in 1992 and is currently living in Florida.

I was one of her early students at Western and she was the reason that I, and many others became archaeologists.

Photographs courtesy of West Michigan University Library and Archives.

Post by Bill Mangold

Did you know? Betsy was Betsy was named the second-ever West Michigan University’s Outstanding Emiritus Scholar!

Read more:

https://www.wmich.edu/wmu/news/2000/0002/9900-179.html

edited by Brenna

Mary Ann Woodhouse, better known as Mrs Gideon Mantell, was born on April 9, 1795. In 1816, she married  surgeon-geologist Gideon Mantell.

In the summer of 1822, during a walk while her husband was visiting a patient, Mary found the first Iguanodon tooth. In her book “The Dinosaur Hunters”, Deborah Cadbury described Mary’s unusual finding:

“As she walked, her eyes were irresistibly drawn to a strange shape in a pile of stones that had been heaped by the side of the road. Picking up the stone, she brushed away the white dust, gently removing any loose rock with her fingers. Gradually a shape emerged never previously seen by human eye. It was very smooth, worn and dark brown, rather like a flattened fragment of a giant tooth.”

Gideon Mantell sent the teeth to Georges Cuvier, who first suggested that the remains were from a rhinoceros, but in a letter from 1824 admitted his mistake and determined that the remains were reptilian and quite possibly belonged to a giant herbivore. A year later, Mantell described them and named them Iguanodon (“iguana tooth”) because their resemblance with  those of living iguanas. The tooth turned out to be around 130 million years old and incredible scientific discovery.

Fossil Iguanodon Tooth, maker unknown. Gift of the Mantell Family, 1930. CC BY-NC-ND licence. Te Papa (GH004839)

Mary helped Mantell illustrating his book on The Fossils of the South Downs (1822). She made over 364 fine lithographs from her husband’s drawings. Etheldred Benett commented to Mantell that with a little practice Mary’s sketching would be ‘stronger and bolder … all that is wanting to make them a great ornament to your work’. Unfortunately, it seems that Mary didn’t contribute to Mantell’s second book of Tilgate Forest fossils.

In  1839, she left her husband and the children remained with their father as was customary at the time.

Gideon Mantell died in 1852 from an opium overdose. Mary died 16 years later.

Sources:

BUREK, C. V. & HIGGS, B. (eds) The Role of Women in the History of Geology. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 281, 1–8. DOI: 10.1144/SP281.1.

by Holder of the Order of the Blazing Trowel Fernanda Castano

edits by Brenna

Read more on Fernanda’s blog about Mary Ann’s other TrowelBlazing connections!

Image courtesy Bancroft Library

D.H Lawrence portrayed Zelia Nuttall as Mrs. Norris in his novel The Plumed Serpent: a great socialite living in a house full of archaeological and painted ceramic figurines in Mexico City, often surrounded by visitors who sat around her listening with admiration to her scholarly stories. This fictional image, somewhat romantic but definitely based on real aspects has been transferred to the academic literature where Zelia Nuttall appears as the “Queen” of Mexican archaeology. But her place in the history of archaeology is still full of silences and ambiguity.

Zelia Nuttall was born in 1857 in San Francisco and died in Mexico City in 1932. She divorced from French linguist Alphonse Pinart and had a daughter Nadine that accompanied her during most of her travels. She visited archives and libraries in Europe, North America and the United States, and presented the results of her archaeological interpretations of pre-Hispanic codices in international conferences.  Archaeological material she studied was exhibited at two international fairs of great scientific relevance at that time (Madrid 1892 and Chicago, 1893). Between 1886 and 1932 she published more than forty articles in the most prestigious journals in an emerging context of professionalization of archaeology. Despite her extensive experience and knowledge, Nuttall location in the history of the discipline is somehow poorly understood, probably because she was an “outsider within” and situated always “inbetween.” She was forever caught between Mexico and the United States, between the domestic space she managed as a well known society hostess and the museum where she pursued her scientific interests, and even between a national and an international context of science. In addition, Zelia set a different pattern than other pioneer women archaeologists who  travelled to distant places to explore or excavate, but returned to their home countries; she established herself in Mexico in 1904 and made it her country, the land of her research and a place to build a home, and she lived in the Casa Alvarada in Coyoacan, Mexico (now a museum) until her death in 1932.

As a foreign woman in Mexico she was acquainted with the Mexican archaeological community, and was committed with a type of knowledge that talked about and to the nation. Zelia Nuttall was a passionate advocate of the idea that the current inhabitants of Mexico were descendants of the Aztecs, and oriented her archaeological work to contest prevailing evolutionist prejudices that defined the Prehispanic cultures as savages and barbarians. Thus, while some scientists considered sacrifice as a widespread activity among ancient Mexicans, Nuttall said that this overshadowing discourse was harmful for the education of children and youth in Mexico. Instead, Nuttall used archaeological and historical knowledge about ancient Mexicans to promote ideas about a shared humanity among different peoples and communities in the world.

Despite being in a mostly male environment, Zelia Nuttall was able to do archaeology on her own terms. In a moment when archaeologists in Mexico and the United States became associated with institutions and fieldwork came to be seen as the primary method to acquire information about the past, Zelia remained at home. However, this was not a marginalized position for her, from that space she was also able to participate in various scientific communities with national and internationally scope, and she was involved in major archaeological research.

She was even so inspirational she’s made the list of ‘Disney’s Rejected Princesses’!

Zelia Nuttal as imagined as one of 'Disney’s Rejected Princesses’ by Jason Porath

Apen Ruiz (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain)

edited by Brenna

Read more:

Biography by A. Tozzer

From the Society for American Archaeology’s History of Arch Interest Group

From Amanda Adam’s book Ladies of the Field

“Welive in a very comfortable tomb on the side of the cliff with nothing behind us but the desert until you reach the Red Sea.”–Olga Tufnell to her mother, in a letter dated 24th Nov 1927, from Qau el-Kebir, Egypt.

Olga Tufnell was one of the many trowelblazers who came to archaeology by a sideways route, but fell in love with fieldwork in the Near East. She was from a very well-off background, and the wide cultural interests of  her mother, Blanche, which included travel, music and the arts, may have given her a head start. She had an elite education, including a semi-finishing school experience in Italy, where she took art classes, and in fact her considerable skills as a draftsperson became part of her archaeological career.

Olga’s mother also happened to be a close friend of (and related by marriage to) trowelblazer Hilda Petrie. At Hilda’s suggestion, a young Olga was taken on by the Petries - huge figures in Near Eastern and Egyptian archaeology- as the grand-sounding ‘Assistant Secretary to the British School of Archaeology in Egypt’. Her main role was fundraising, and helping with the annual exhibition of finds at UCL, but she sometimes also got to work on mending and illustrating pottery. Olga’s career-changing moment came in 1927 at the age of twenty two, when she was invited to join the final Petrie excavations at Qau el-Kebir in Egypt. She seems to have bitten by the archaeology bug, and stayed on to dig Tell Fara in Palestine, where she supervised excavations, and then the following two seasons at Tell Ajjul (until 1932), where she found an amazing burial complete with entire horse skeleton.

Equid burial at Tell Ajjul that Olga Tufnell excavated. Image courtesy of UCL Institute of Archaeology Collections (thanks to Rachel Sparks).

These experiences were the seminal years in Olga’s training, and she took pride in being one of the 'Petrie Pups’, along with others of her generation, some forming close personal and professional friendships – including the respected Egyptologist Margaret Murray.

Just after working at Tell Ajjul, Olga joined James Starkey (another of the Petrie crew) digging at Tell ed-Duweir, identified as the Biblical city of Lachish. Olga’s letters show she was given significant responsibility on site, and was part of the team that over six seasons discovered the famous Lachish Letters, although eventually the project ended just after Starkey was killed.

During WWII, Olga worked in diverse roles including with the BBC. After the war she began to publish on the results from Tell ed-Duweir along with other project members, which she continued for another 20 years. Her contested challenge to the accepted Iron Age chronology of the region was finally proven correct by later excavations.

Olga Tufnell at Tell ed-Duweir (the ancient city of Lachish). Used with the kind permission of the Palestine Exploration Fund, All rights reserved.

Olga continued to work in Near Eastern archaeology, especially pottery, and in the late 1950s she dug at Nimrud, where she likely met yet another trowelblazer, Agatha Christie, who worked there alongside her husband Max Mallowan. She also developed an interest in more recent Near Eastern culture, and collaborated with Violet Barbour in the development of the Palestine Folk Museum. Her interest in ornament seems to have led directly to what became the final major project of her life. From 1962, she undertook an exhaustive and meticulous collaborative study on scarab seals in Palestine, which used her early training in pottery chronology to show how scarab seals could be used for the same purpose.

As with many early trowelblazers, she took an interest in young students and researchers and was much loved and respected by her colleagues. The Tufnell archive is housed at the Palestine Exploration Fund, and the Lachish archive and collection are at the British Museum.

Letter: Ref. PEF-DA-TUF-0093

Written by John MacDermot, Palestine Exploration Fund. All images were provided with permission of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
Editing and additional content by Becky, posted by Suzie.

Images courtesy of the Pitt-Rivers Photo Collection.

Special Exhibition on until 2016 at the Pitt Rivers Museum - My Year in Siberia!

While the first battles of World War I were being fought, Maria Czaplicka was travelling the Yenisei Province of Siberia to study ways of life north of the Arctic Circle.   Maria spent much of 1914-15 in this little-studied region, recording the lives and languages of the people she met.

Born in 1884 in Russian-dominated Warsaw, Maria was one of the young Poles to study with the “Flying University”, an underground organisation which between 1885 and 1905 secretly provided education for men and women alike.   In 1910 she was awarded a Mianowski Fund scholarship.  This enabled her to travel to England to study at Bedford Women’s College, London; and then at the University of Oxford as a member of Somerville College.  She was awarded the Oxford Diploma in Anthropology in 1912.

In Oxford, where she was a contemporary of O.G.S. Crawford, she studied under Robert Marett, who encouraged her to review the available literature on the indigenous populations of Siberia.   This work was published in 1914 as Aboriginal Siberia: a Study in Social Anthropology.   In his forward to the book, Marett identified its importance as making accessible for the first time in English the Russian language work on the subject.   The book became the major reference work on these communities of Asian Russia.

This region was little understood especially by contemporary British anthropologists who tended to focus their research on parts of the British Empire.  Maria’s pioneering expedition to north-west Siberia began in May 1914.   Maud Haviland (ornithologist), Dora Curtis (artist), and Henry Usher Hall (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) met Maria in Moscow.  They travelled by train to Krasnoyarsk, the regional administrative capital.  From there, a three week journey by paddle-steamer north up the River Yenisei took them 1,500 miles to Golchika.  It was late June, but the boat had to negotiate ice floes on the river.  They spent the short Summer above latitude 70ºN in the tundra around the Yenisei estuary, exploring the people and the archaeology of the area.  Maria collected objects from the people they met, and from the platform burial sites on the permafrost; took photographs; gathered plant specimens and mammoth bones; and wrote down her experiences.

Maud and Dora left at the end of the Summer.  With Michikha, a Tungus (Evenki) woman, Maria and Henry spent Winter 1914/Spring 1915 travelling the mountainous area east of Turukhansk.  Although Maria made light of the conditions in her book My Siberian Year, she experienced considerable hardships and illness through the Arctic Winter.  Meals were eaten with nomadic reindeer-herding families; “Armed with this [knife] I caught hold of the meat with my teeth, and sliced off a mouthful, which I proceeded to masticate as well as its parboiled condition would permit”.  The miles of walking and sledding from tent to tent were exhausting.  Frostbite was an ever-present danger despite being “ensconced in a foot-bag made of the winter coat of a reindeer buck, and cased in thick Jaeger stockings worn inside a pair of dog’s-hair stockings and two pairs of hairy skin boots.”

Maria made a special study of shamanism and religion in the region, and also commented on the history and politics of Siberia.  She also wrote poetically about the short days in the Winter landscape, “There is a rosy light that was never anywhere else by land or sea, that flushes the mountain peaks of the ‘stony’ tundra to an ineffable glory during the brief twilight days that precede the return of the sun in the spring, while the valleys and the lowlands are filled with a blue sea of unlifting shadow.”   After her return to England in 1915, the objects she had collected with Henry were deposited in the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Pennsylvania University Museums, and the botanical specimens in the Fielding-Druce Herbarium (Oxford).

Maria seems to have completed some war work for the British Foreign Office’s War Trade Intelligence Department.  In 1916 she became the University of Oxford’s first female lecturer in anthropology.   Her three-year appointment came to an end in 1919.  She toured the United States to meet leading anthropologists.    In 1920 she was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Murchison Award, and she obtained a year-long teaching position at the University of Bristol.   Sadly this promising career was cut short when Maria committed suicide in May 1921, a few days after her naturalisation certificate was issued.   A fund in her memory was established at Somerville College.   Her collected works, edited by David Collins, were republished by the Curzon Press in 1999.

post by Katy Whitaker

The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford, has a Showcase display about Maria’s Siberian expedition on until 28 February 2016 (http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/exhibitions.html)

Collins, D. and Urry, J. (1997) “A flame too intense for mortal body to support” Anthropology Today 13(6): 18-20

Czaplicka, M.A. (1914) Aboriginal Siberia: a Study in Social Anthropology   Oxford: Clarendon Press [available at https://archive.org/details/aboriginalsiberi00czap]

Czaplicka, M.A. (1916) My Siberian Year   London: Mills and Boon

“A Woman’s Travels.” Times [London, England] 8 Sept. 1915: 9. The Times Digital Archive. [Web] Accessed 16 October 2014 http://find.galegroup.com/ttda/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=TTDA&userGroupName=wiltsttda&tabID=T003&docPage=article&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&docId=CS152372520&type=multipage&contentSet=LTO&version=1.0

“Death Of Miss M. A. De Czaplicka.” Times [London, England] 30 May 1921: 8. The Times Digital Archive. [Web] Accessed 16 October 2014 http://find.galegroup.com/ttda/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=TTDA&userGroupName=wiltsttda&tabID=T003&docPage=article&searchType=&docId=CS135467198&type=multipage&contentSet=LTO&version=1.0

Home Office (1921) HO 334/92/8081 Naturalisation Certificate: Marie Anteinette Christine Elizabeth Lubicz de Czaplicka. From Poland. Resident in Bristol. Certificate A8081 issued 24 May 1921 [The National Archives] http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C11938471