Female Archaeologists - Gertrude Bell

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was born on this day (14 July) into a wealthy family in Washington New Hall in County Durham, England in 1868. Her mother died in childbirth three years later and Gertrude was very close to her mill-owning father Sir Hugh Bell who had held several government positions.

Her family's wealth gave her access to the universities and she studied at both Queen's College London and Oxford university. Her studied history which was one of the few subjects that was opened to women at the time. In two years she recieved a first class honours degree.

After graduating, she spent a lot of time travelling the world. During this time she developed a passion for archaeology and languages. Beside English, she spoke Arabic, Persian, French and German, Italian and Turkish.

Her heart lay in archaeology, but she was also a linguist, writer and the best woman mountaineer of her age. She gained interest in the Arabic world and its culture and made extensive journeys across the Middle East. Her knowledge about the Arabs also led to a position as a British secret agent during the First World War after first having volontered as a nurse in France.

After the war, she became focused all her research on Mespotamia and supported an independent Iraqi and became active in their politics. She supported Lawrence of Arabia's protege Faisal and used her connections to have him crowned king. After this, she acted as his advisor. In Iraq, she got the nickname Kathun which means fine lady or gentlewoman.

‘I’ll never engage in creating kings again; it’s too great a strain,’ 

 ~ Gertrud Bell in a letter to her father

In 1923, she opened Bagdad Archaeological Museum (later renamed the Iraqi museum). Unfortunately, the museum was plundered during the Iraqi war in 2003.

On 12 July 1926 Gertrud was found dead after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. It is unclear if it was deliberate or not.

Female Archaeologists - Gertrude Caton-Thompson

Gertrude Caton-Thompson

While thinking of my Historical Women series, I also thought about how many amazing female archaeologists I know of and who also deserves a place in the spot light. Though technically, they can also be viewed as "Historical Women", I have decided to give them their own category. Not least, to present a more varied picture of my own profession.

Dwelling into the research history of archaeology, one actually find rather a lot of different women who worked on excavations with or without men (mainly their husbands). It seems to have been particularly easy for American, British and French women to do archaeological work in the colonies. They also seem to have had it easier if they had worked with something that their contemporary society (late 19th and early 20th century) thought of as fitting for a woman. There are quite a lot of nurses among them for example.

Many of these female archaeologists worked in their shadows of their husbands and have become marginalised in the research history because their texts were published in their husbands's names. There were also quite a few women working in archieves and museum storehouses who's work never really classified as archaeology wherefore they are never mentioned in research historical overviews. Quite a few of them, however, did have an obituary. Not least the archaeologist I intend to devote the rest of this post to. Her name was Gertrude Caton-Thompson and she was born in London in 1888. Her interest in archaeology was founded when she visited Egypt together with her mother in 1911 and afterwards also visited Sarah Paterson's on Ancient Greece at the British Museum. She inherited money in 1912 which made her financially independent and studied both a Cambride and University College London from 1921 onwards. Among her teachers were Margaret Murray, Dorothea Bate and William Matthew Flinders Petrie. She participated in quite a few excavations in Egypt during the 1920's. Not least in the Faiyum oasis with geologist Elinor Wight Gardner in 1925.

Part of Great Zimbabwe

Her most famous excavation is that of the remains of Great Zimbabwe close to Masvingo in what was then known as Rhodesia, but that we today call Zimbabwe. The remains had been known by Europeans since the 16th century when Portugese soldiers at the coastal fort in Sofala in Moçambique heard tales of great remains deep inside the heart of Africa. The first European to visit the remains was the German geologist Carl Mauch in 1871 and Gertrude's countryman J. Theodore Bent was the first to do any archaeological work of the remains at the end of the 19th century. Bent interpreted the remains as too sophisticated to have been built by any known "African race". Instead he sought parallels with the Mediterranean and the Middle East, not least with the Phoenicians.

Aerial view of Great Zimbabwe

In 1905, the British Association for the Advancement of Science sent another student of Flinders Petrie to Great Zimbabwe, David Randall-MacIver. He debunked Bent's migration theory of Great Zimbabwe being of African origin. The was not really what the British Association for the Advancement of Science or the white population of Rhodesia wanted to hear. Not least since they used the remains to legitimize their imperialism in the area.

Therefore the association sent Gertrude in 1929. She did, however, confirm Randall-MacIver's theory of an African origin. Not least since she could find similar objects being made among contemporary native craftsmen. For this she became very impopular among the same crowd as Randall-MacIver's but she stood her ground, publishing her results in 1931. She was not totally unbiased though. After having established that Great Zimbabwe had African origin, she talks about the remains in a rather degrading way, but there is no way to deny that her research was important. She used stratigraphical methods and artefact chronology to date the site to the Middle Ages. Dates that have actually been confirmed by carbon dating today.

Gertrude died in 1985.



References:

• Arwill-Nordbladh, Elisabeth 2003. Genusforskning inom arkeologin, Högskoleverket, Stockholm
• Palmer, Douglas & Bahn Paul G. & Tyldesley, Joyce 2006. Arkeologins största upptäckter, Swedish translation by Kjell Waltman, Historiska media, Kina
• Renfrew, Colin & Bahn, Paul 2012. Archaeology. Theories, Methods and Practice, Thames and Hudson, London
• Trigger, Bruce G. 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Picture from here, here and here.