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octavia_cade 's review for:
Grit-Tempered: Early Women Archaeologists in the Southeastern United States
by Nancy Marie White
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
I can't say that I know much at all about the history of archaeology, and I know vanishingly little about places and cultures of the southern US states that might be of interest to archaeologists. (And when I say "vanishingly little," I mean nothing at all. I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia looking at maps and aerial photos for context.) I read this because I came across the book and thought "why not?" - I'm always interested in women in the history of science, and it was well worth reading.
This book is basically potted academic biographies of twentieth century women archaeologists working in the American south. They get a chapter each, and there are a small handful of broader-view chapters that go along with it. It's a shame that some of these - for instance, the chapter on African American women who excavated sites as part of Roosevelt's New Deal - don't appear as longer studies somewhere, but as the authors point out, so much information has been lost, or was never recorded in the first place. Something is better than nothing, however, and that applies to work records and anonymous photographs as well as potsherds.
The nontraditional routes that some of these women took to get into archaeology, and their experiences in that field, make for some fascinating reading. I still have a very poor grasp of southern archaeology, but I do have a much better idea of how far adaptation, specialisation, and cooperation can get an individual scientist, even under very challenging circumstances. (If I had ever been assigned by any of my university professors to make sandwiches for all the men in the class while being excluded from night-time field trips, I don't think I would have responded graciously... thankfully times have changed, and even in this book that sort of behaviour seems the outlier. Many of the women here had outstanding male mentors who encouraged their success and ensured them opportunities, so I was glad to read that. Science should be for everybody, sandwich guy, so please take from me the great big Fuck Off that Elizabeth S. Wing could not give you.)
This book is basically potted academic biographies of twentieth century women archaeologists working in the American south. They get a chapter each, and there are a small handful of broader-view chapters that go along with it. It's a shame that some of these - for instance, the chapter on African American women who excavated sites as part of Roosevelt's New Deal - don't appear as longer studies somewhere, but as the authors point out, so much information has been lost, or was never recorded in the first place. Something is better than nothing, however, and that applies to work records and anonymous photographs as well as potsherds.
The nontraditional routes that some of these women took to get into archaeology, and their experiences in that field, make for some fascinating reading. I still have a very poor grasp of southern archaeology, but I do have a much better idea of how far adaptation, specialisation, and cooperation can get an individual scientist, even under very challenging circumstances. (If I had ever been assigned by any of my university professors to make sandwiches for all the men in the class while being excluded from night-time field trips, I don't think I would have responded graciously... thankfully times have changed, and even in this book that sort of behaviour seems the outlier. Many of the women here had outstanding male mentors who encouraged their success and ensured them opportunities, so I was glad to read that. Science should be for everybody, sandwich guy, so please take from me the great big Fuck Off that Elizabeth S. Wing could not give you.)