Fan Fiction, Fictional Archaeologists, and Libraries

 I love writing fan fiction.  The research for a story can lead me down the most interesting rabbit holes.

In this case, I read a Good Omens fan fic on AO3 called It's Not the Years, It's the Milage, by MovesLikeBucky.  The plot is basically the first Indiana Jones film, but with Aziraphale as Indy and Crowley as Marion, and I enjoyed it enormously.

But before Indiana Jones, there was Pimpernel Smith.

Leslie Howard played the first adventurous archaeologist - Professor Smith, who was in charge of a student dig in Germany just before the Second World War.  When he wasn't directing the students, he was smuggling intellectuals out of Germany before they were arrested by the Nazis.  The film was made in 1941, in black and white, and has a moment of terrible sexism where Professor Smith insults the women archaeology students to make them walk out of the lecture hall, so he can invite only the young men on the student dig with him.  Apart from that, though, it is wonderful fun, with the Nazis puzzled by the tune used to signal to the escaping intellectuals, and a very funny conversation about Shakespeare at an Embassy party.

It occurred to me that Aziraphale would work far better as vague academic Professor Smith than as action hero Indiana Jones - but I didn't want to do a straight swap of the characters.  Aziraphale could go undercover in Germany as an antiquarian bookseller much more easily.

And this is where the research comes in.  I work in a secondhand and antiquarian bookshop, and I had recently been cataloguing some books about Germany.  I noticed that many of them were published in Leipzig.  So Aziraphale could have a bookselling contact in Leipzig he could write to.  I discovered that Leipzig was, indeed, a centre for book publishing - and that there had been a terrible air raid in 1943 which destroyed the booksellers' quarter (the Graphisches Viertel), including the oldest music publishing house in the world, along with an estimated 50 million books.  The German National Library was badly hit.  1,800 people also died in the RAF raid.

That happened after the period I wanted to set my story, though.

I wanted Aziraphale to buy a collection of occult books, possibly from a castle somewhere.  Thuringia sounded like an interesting location, not too far from Leipzig, so I started to look at local castles - and hit solid gold!

The Duchess Anna Amalia Library is still housed in the Green Castle in Weimar.  In the 1930s it was known as the Ducal Library, and it had been a library since Duke Wilhelm Ernst started it in 1691.  Duchess Anna Amalia moved it to its present location in 1761.  It houses important collections of Shakespeare and Goethe, and a 16th century bible connected to Martin Luther.

Aziraphale would be in Paradise!

Even better, it looks like this:

It even has a book tower that reminded me of Aziraphale's shop:

There was a serious fire there in 2004, but it has been wonderfully restored, as the pictures show.

And now I want to visit Weimar....

Destruction at Stonehenge

 I'm disappointed in the headlines from the Observer today:

"Druids face defeat as bulldozers get set for Stonehenge bypass: Ancient artefacts will be lost when tunnel for A303 is built near site, campaigners claim."

First of all, it isn't just druids who have been opposing the proposed tunnel for the A303.  It's archaeologists.  Professor Mike Parker Pearson is a member of Highways England's independent A303 scientific committee, and he has been vocal with his opposition to the scheme on archaeological grounds for years.  He's an expert on the landscape surrounding Stonehenge, where he's been working for many years, and the new bypass will cut a swathe of destruction through that landscape.  He likens the destruction to burning ancient manuscripts - once gone, all the information that could have been gleaned from the area destroyed by the road building is gone forever.

In June this year, a giant Neolithic structure was discovered nearly 2 miles from Stonehenge, close to Amesbury.  It was previously unknown, and consists of a series of huge shafts, each more than 5m deep and 20m across.  They had previously been dismissed as natural features or dew ponds.  The circle of shafts is centred on Durrington Walls, one of England's largest henge monuments - and all of this is part of the same prehistoric landscape that includes Stonehenge.  They are not individual sites - they are part of a greater whole.

Another opponent of the tunnel scheme is the Chairman of Amesbury Museum and Heritage Trust, Andy Rhind-Tutt.  

The Unesco World Heritage Committee, which designated Stonehenge (and the surrounding area) a World Heritage Site, also oppose the scheme.  They are concerned that the road scheme will impact adversely on the Stonehenge landscape because the tunnel is too short.

And it's not just "ancient artefacts" which will be lost - it's all the evidence of archaeology along the length of the new dual carriageway.  Professor Pearson says that the rescue archaeology (which has to take place in advance of new construction) will only be expected to retrieve 4% of the artefacts present.  He estimates half a million artefacts will be machined off without being recorded.

Disappointingly, one of the supporters of the tunnel scheme is Anna Eavis of English Heritage, who makes the point that the present road is "noisy and smelly and looks awful".  This is probably true, but the tunnel scheme is not necessarily the best way of tackling that problem.  She also claims that any archaeology which will not be preserved in situ will be recorded - which is emphatically not what Professor Pearson claims.

In the next week, the tunnel scheme may finally get approval from Transport Secretary Grant Shapps.  It may help road congestion, when it's finally finished in five or more years time, but it will harm an important part of English archaeology, and World Heritage, forever.

Trowelblazers: Dr Sada Mire

I'm still looking for British women archaeologists who are black. I haven't succeeded yet, but I have found someone with a local connection.

Dr Sada Mire was chosen by Hay Festival in 2017 as one of their Hay 30 international thinkers and writers. Onstage at the Festival she talked to Rageh Omaar and Mary Harper (who was the Africa Editor at the BBC World Service) on Somaliland: the African miracle you've never heard about. Also in 2017, New Scientist magazine chose her as one of their list of Inspiring Women in Science.
Dr Mire is the only working Somali archaeologist, and she is described in the programme notes as Swedish-Somali, as she was an asylum seeker who ended up in Sweden after fleeing Somalia with her twin sister Sohur as unaccompanied child refugees. Sohur went on to become a medical doctor. Their father was a police criminal investigator who was murdered when they were twelve.
She is an art historian as well as an archaeologist, and she is a visiting professor in the department of archaeology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. She also holds a PhD from UCL's Institute of Archaeology, London.
In 2007 she led a team of fifty people to Somaliland, where they discovered prehistoric rock art at almost one hundred locations. At least ten of these are likely to receive World Heritage status, according to her Wikipedia entry.
As a result of her work on the rock art, she founded the Horn Heritage, a non-profit organisation to fund her work. She was also involved with the establishment of Somalia's Department of Tourism and Archaeology. She is also active in campaigns to protect Somali archaeological sites from looting and destruction.
Her latest book came out this year, and is called Divine Fertility: the continuity in transformation of an Ideology of Sacred Kinship in North-East Africa.

Trowelblazers: Tabitha Kabora

I found it quite difficult to find details about any black British women archaeologists. American women archaeologists are much easier to find online - Black archaeologists in the United States have formed the Society of Black Archaeologists, but there's no similar body in the UK.
Then I found an article about a seminar on racism in archaeology, and the chair of the debate was Tabitha Kabora.
Dr. Kabora did her doctoral thesis at the University of York on the utility of the long-term perspectives of archaeological and environmental studies, in order to understand the effects of human-environment interactions on agricultural systems. Her research formed part of the Archaeology of Agricultural Resilience in Eastern Africa Project (AAREA).
Her BSc and MSc degrees were from the University of Nairobi, in Environmental Sciences and Conservation Biology. So she's actually Kenyan, and came to the UK for further study.
At the moment she's working on the Europe's Lost Frontiers project while employed by the University of Bradford as an Environmental Modelling Research Assistant. Her work is on Doggerland, the sunken area in the North Sea which used to be a land bridge between the British Isles and the Continent. She has been developing palaeo-ecological models of Doggerland during the early Holocene period to incorporate into computer simulations.

Black Archaeologists: John Wesley Gilbert

It's been quite a long time since I did a post about archaeologists. Usually I've been looking for women archaeologists, but other minorities get overlooked too. So this time I thought I'd take a look at John Wesley Gilbert.

His archaeological career was short, but he was the first black man to attend the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, where he worked on the dig at Eritrea with John Pickard, and helped to produce the first map of the ancient city. He won a scholarship from Brown University to go, and the work he did there contributed to his Master's degree - the first awarded by Brown University to a black student.
There's a fascinating and detailed account of his time in Greece at https://nataliavogeikoff.com
He was also one of the first ten black students to attend Brown University, and the first black professor at the Paine Institute, which he had also attended as a student. He taught Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French and German.
In 1911, he went to the Congo with a Methodist mission, where he spent time translating the Gospels into the local Bantu language, Tetela. He also contracted an illness from which he never really recovered.
He was born in 1863 to enslaved parents in Georgia, and died in 1923 as a respected educator. During the early 20th century he was focused on improving the education of African Americans. He was critical of textbooks that were written for white students, without considering the contributions of black people throughout history. He also advocated for interracial co-operation and harmony, though his ideas were criticised by some other black intellectuals of the day.
His wife Osceola was also a teacher, and they had four children.

Few African Americans have followed a career in archaeology, but in 2011 the Society of Black Archaeologists was formed to address the treatment of African material culture and to encourage African Americans to enter the field.

Rodmarton

I've been looking up some details about the village of Rodmarton - and there's lots of interesting stuff. I'll have to make sure my friend invites me to stay again!

Evidence of a Roman settlement has been found, and several major Roman roads pass close by. Cirencester (a Roman town) is only 6 miles away. There's also a nearby long barrow which looks very interesting. It's called Windmill Tump, and seems to be Neolithic, and is part of the Severn-Cotswold group of long barrows.
While the village was historically inhabited by agricultural workers, the present population of 333 people are mainly in managerial or professional jobs, according to Wikipedia. It's part of the Kemble Estate, and Kemble railway station is nearby. There's even a vaguely local link, as Michael Biddulph, who inherited the Estate in 1884, came from Ledbury in Herefordshire.

There are also strong links to the Arts and Crafts Movement in the area. The nearby hamlet of Tarlton was the site of a pottery which did design work for Wedgewood, and the manor house - well, the manor house is a gem, though it's also very hard to photograph from the road, being very long, and well screened by hedges and walled gardens and orchards.
The present building was built between 1909 and 1929, in the Arts and Crafts style, with Arts and Crafts furniture. Everything was done by hand with local materials and local craftsmen. The stone for the building was quarried locally and brought to the site by a private railway line.
The present owners are the fourth generation of the Biddulph family to live there. Michael Biddulph's son Claud (there's a plaque to his memory in St Peter's Church) provided the money, and the house was built by architect Ernest Barnsley, one of the leading lights of the Cotswold Arts and Crafts Movement, his brother Sidney and his son-in-law. The Biddulphs also wanted to use the house as a place to teach traditional crafts. There are 74 rooms, including one of the last private chapels to be built in England.
Ernest also laid out the 8 acres of gardens, and they are advertising opening times in February to see the snowdrops (I love snowdrops). They also host opera (which I can take or leave) and a rare plant fair.

Sunday at WorldCon 2 - Archaeology

I was very keen to go to the panel on Archaeology in SFF - The Bare Bones of Worldbuilding. I trained as an archaeologist, so a lot of what the panellists touched on was familiar to me, but there was still plenty there that was new to me.
It was nice to see a textile historian on the panel, Dr Katrin Kania from Germany, and Marie Brennan the author also has a background in archaeology.
They talked about using knowledge of archaeology to create detail about, for instance, a city built on a river delta, thinking about the origins of the settlement in huts on stilts, with the islands gradually built up and larger buildings constructed, and the flow of trade and who would have access to the imported luxury goods, and who would be relying on local goods and food.
There was quite a lot about Central American archaeology that was new to me - recent geophysical studies of the jungles have revealed way more pyramids than anyone was expecting, but in remote areas that are very hard to get to. The idea that the Mayan cities were primarily ritual centres has been overturned, too, as more recent surveys have revealed the huge suburbs where ordinary people lived, which in turn has meant that the estimates of population have risen greatly.
The assumptions archaeologists make was considered too - for instance, the lack of roads 'obviously' meant there was a lack of trade and travel. What was overlooked here was the existence of a vast network of waterways. There was also the point that the Amazon was not untamed primal jungle, but basically a vast overgrown orchard that had been used by the local people for centuries.
So, who got it right? Recommendations included The Drowning City by Amanda Downham.
The panel were also asked for top tips to make archaeology 'sexy'. What was cool to find that wasn't treasure?
(For me, the most exciting thing I ever found was a very boring looking black pot - it was the context, and it's completeness, that made it interesting, the only complete Thetford Ware pot found at the Castle Mall dig in Norwich, on a site that was littered with masses of Thetford War pot sherds).
A book that was recommended here was What Does This Awl Mean? by Janet Spencer, where she talks about the life of a prehistoric woman based on the markings carved into an awl, a very basic and easily overlooked tool. Mary Beard's book about Pompeii was also praised.
They also talked about the different approaches to the subject from US and EU archaeologists. In the US, archaeology is seen as a branch of anthropology whereas in Europe there are more written sources to consult, and archaeology is seen as a branch of history. But, historians and archaeologists ask different questions about the evidence. One of the great examples is the 'postcards' from Vindolanda, which give a picture of the everyday life of the fort on Hadrian's Wall, complete with requests for warm socks and invitations to birthday parties.
Marie Brennan was quite excited that her latest book, which touches on some of the things discussed in the panel, was out on Tuesday - Turning Darkness into Light.
The panel finished with some problems that can be caused by archaeologists - such as archaeologists declaring there were no more Mayans, leading to the government of Guatemala refusing to acknowledge the existence of actual living Mayan Indians in their country. And there were the fanciful reconstructions - there's a famous picture of a line of people carrying offerings reconstructed by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos - which looks great until you realise that the original fresco was complete only up to the ankles - everything above that came from Sir Arthur Evans' imagination!

Stonehenge World Heritage Site Under Threat

I went to Stonehenge many years ago, on a coach trip, when access to the stones was via a grim little underpass from a bleak car park. The stones themselves were great (though I preferred Avebury, where you could wander around the stones, and which we visited on the same trip).
When I go back to Stonehenge, as I intend to do one of these days, I want to see the new visitor centre, and I want to see the stones as part of the amazing landscape that I've learned about over the last few years. It's far more than just Stonehenge - the archaeology extends over the whole Plain, linking many different sites, and it's a unique picture of prehistoric communities coming together in a place that was special to them.

And, of course, the government wants to put a road through it.

There's a road there already, of course, the A303 - originally built when nobody was terribly interested in archaeology and what it could tell us about the past.
The plan is to widen the A303, and put a 2.9km tunnel under the Stonehenge area. This will not just be a tunnel - it'll be the slope down to it at both ends, and it's planned to be a four-lane Expressway with deep cuttings and junctions.
It will cause great damage to the surroundings of Stonehenge, and the site will probably lose its World Heritage status.

There's been a campaign to stop this from happening for some time now, but it's important to keep reminding the powers that be that the road scheme is opposed.
There is a website at www.stonehengealliance.org.uk
They also have a Facebook page and are on Twitter at @savestonehenge

The Stonehenge Alliance is supported by Ancient Sacred Landscape Network (ASLaN) (you can see they chose the name just to get that acronym!), Campaign for Better Transport, Campaign to Protect Rural England, Friends of the Earth and RESCUE: the British Archaeological Trust.

As a former archaeologist, I really have to support this campaign, or I'd have to hand in my trowel!

Pagan Phoenix - Miranda Aldhouse-Green

I'd been looking forward to the last talk of the afternoon. Miranda Aldhouse-Green is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University, and under the name Miranda Green she's written books about Celtic Gods and Goddesses. I've got the one on Celtic Goddesses, and it's very good.
The title of the talk was Silent Gods? Spirits and the Sacred in Roman Britain.
She began with what Roman people thought of Britain - and even in the 3rdC AD, when Roman Britain had roads and cities and villas and every aspect of civilised life, Roman writers were claiming that the island was a swampy forest full of half naked savages!

There have been some interesting finds recently, though, which give us more of an insight into Celtic religion of the time. She mentioned the Le Cottilon hoard in Jersey, for instance, a solid lump of coins, gold torcs and silver jewellery - which was probably not just buried as a sort of bank, for safe keeping, but had a religious meaning. One of the pieces in the collection was an antique even to the people who buried the treasure - a Bronze Age spear head.
She also mentioned a bronze figure which had been found at Culver Hole in Gower, which may have been a moon goddess.

Something really exciting turned up at Chartres in 2005, though - an underground Roman shrine which included four incense burners, one for each of the four directions. Here there's no doubt about the Celtic nature of the worship, because the incense burners are marked with the word "Dru", meaning druid.
There's a theory that the owner of the shrine was consciously re-creating a pre-Roman belief system which was no longer being used. Also, the druid priests of the past may have been converted, in this re-creation, from human priests into spirits which could be worshipped.

Then we got something to be passed round the audience - replicas of "spoons" which often turn up in a religious context. They have no handle as such, apart from a bit at the top of the spoon bowl to hold it, and they always come in pairs, one of which has a raised cross on the bowl and the other has a small hole, off centre. The idea is that these are tools for divination, by which some sort of powder is blown down a straw through the hole, making patterns on the other spoon with the cross, as they are held together.

The head has always been important in Celtic myth, so it was interesting to discover that when Boudica attacked the Temple of Claudius in Colchester, they cut off the head of the statue of Claudius which stood outside and threw it in the river!
At Uley, in Gloucestershire, there was a Temple to Mercury - and the head of the statue of Mercury was buried when the shrine became Christianised. The statues of Mercury in Britain tend to have horns on their heads rather than the more classical wings. Uley is also one of the places where curse tablets can be found - curses inscribed into lead, mostly invoking horrible fates on people who have stolen the curser's property.

Meanwhile at Lydney Temple there seems to have been a special association with dogs - several figurines have been found there. Lydney was the Temple of Nodens, a god of healing, and overlooked the River Severn where there was a good view of the Severn bore.

Roman towns were laid out in the same way across the Empire, and one of the reasons for this was to allow "perambulations" between the most important buildings, something that an important Roman would do regularly to see and be seen.

Then we were off to Hadrian's Wall, where Roman and Celtic gods were being worshipped together. For instance there's an altar to Jupiter (Best and Greatest) at Maryport fort on the Wall, which was the official altar of the legion, but on the back is a carving of a wheel, symbol of a Celtic god who was obviously important to the troops stationed there.
Also at Hadrian's Wall was a temple to a god unknown anywhere else, Antenociticus, who is presumed to be a local deity, but was important enough to the builder of the temple to have a life sized statue.

Even further north, at the Antonine Wall, there was a Temple of Mithras I hadn't heard about before. It also had a mask of Sol with cut out mouth (so the priest could speak through it) and cut out rays around the head, so a light source behind the mask would make it look much more impressive.

Going back to Boudica - there's a tombstone in Corinium/Cirencester to a woman called Bodicacia.

And finally (the talk had over run a little because of problems with the slides earlier) at Bewcastle Roman Fort, again on Hadrian's Wall, there are five altars dedicated to the Germanic god Cocidius, and one dedicated to an amalgam god, Mars Cocidius. The Romans saw nothing wrong or strange about mixing their gods together and creating something new.

The London Mithraeum

This was the highlight of the week!

Back in the 1950s, an excavation of a bomb site unearthed a Roman temple that had people queuing round the block to see it. It was only near the end of the dig that the archaeologists found the conclusive evidence that it was a Temple of Mithras.
The Temple was reconstructed nearby, and so things remained for many years.
Then a company called Bloomberg acquired the site to build a new office block, and they offered to put the Temple back in its original position as part of the rebuilding work. As the Temple was discovered 7 metres under the present ground level, this was not as easy as it sounds. Also, some of the Temple was discovered to be still in situ, so the reconstruction is actually slightly to the west.

They have done a magnificent job, in consultation with a team from the Museum of London. They also conducted an archaeological dig of their own, between 2010 and 2014, discovering many artefacts that are usually not preserved, but survived here because of the marshy nature of the ground.
And all this is open to the public for free (except on Mondays). When the Temple first opened, it was necessary to book, but now you can just turn up, and friendly staff are there to help you.

The top layer has a display of architecture, and beyond that a cabinet of finds from the site beneath our feet. Anyone who wanted could look at a touch-screen device to show what the artefacts were, but I always feel this is cheating slightly. So we lingered by the writing tablets, and sandals, and the merchant's scales, and the piece of door (!) and the pottery for a while, and then we went down the stairs to the next level (there's a lift, too, I think). The black marble walls are inscribed with the ground levels over the centuries, such as at the time of the Great Fire (which destroyed everything above), and the date (1505) that Thomas More moved into a house on this site.
The room downstairs is dim, with pictures being projected on the walls along with a commentary spoken by Joanna Lumley. There are also three plinths, each with information about the cult of Mithras, the Temple itself, and the head of Mithras that was found in 1954. You have to wait here for a little while (and there are also seats) because visitors are only let into the Mithraeum itself every 20 minutes.
I knew some of the information, but was surprised by the strong links between the cult of Mithras and astrology.
And then, the Mithraeum itself.
There is a sound and light show which is very effective, with voices speaking Latin and mist. Then the lights go up and you can examine the ruins more closely. There's a walkway right around the outside, and also over the part of the Temple nearest the door. There's a central aisle, with 7 pillars down each side, and between the pillars and the walls a narrower space where the congregation sat. At the top end there's a Perspex copy of the altar slab, showing Mithras slaying the bull (or at least waving a dagger around in the general area of the bull's throat - opinion is divided about whether he's actually killing it or not).
There's also a square well in one corner.
No-one is really sure what went on in the Temple, because it was a mystery cult, and nothing was written down - but we do know it was all-male, and popular with soldiers. The temples that have been discovered are also rather too small to get a bull inside, so there probably wasn't any ritual sacrifice involved in the worship. The London Mithraeum is actually larger than average - about 100 temples have been discovered across the Roman Empire. This one is also oriented towards the East, like a Christian church.

It was a ridiculously exciting experience for me. I first found out about Mithras when I read The Eagle of the Ninth, aged 12. Rosemary Sutcliff would have been drawing on recent news stories to write the scenes inside the temple. So along with my archaeological knowledge, I was sitting in the dark with Marcus Flavius Aquila, in his Raven mask, in the flickering torch light.

Eagle of the Ninth

As a child, I adored the work of Rosemary Sutcliff, and one of my favourites was the Eagle of the Ninth, telling the story of the Ninth Hispana Legion as it marched north into the mists of Caledonia and into legend.
At the time, the early 1950s, Rosemary Sutcliff was working from current archaeological research, by which the Ninth really had marched north and disappeared. Since then, traces of the Legion have been found at a later date, elsewhere in the Roman Empire, but when she was writing it really did seem that they had vanished into the mists.
And the other inspiration for her story was archaeological work at Silchester, where a Roman eagle statue had been found hidden in the hypocaust of a villa there. You can still see the Silchester eagle, at the Museum of Reading, though now it seems that it may have been part of a statue in the town, and not a legionary eagle after all.

In 2011 a film was made of the book, starring Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell, and though Donald Sutherland was perfect as Uncle Aquila, the plot of the film left out about half the book, jettisoning Cottia (the girl next door), Cub (the wolf cub), and Marcus's disguise as the oculist Demetrius of Alexandria completely. And they changed the ending.

In 1977, though, BBC Scotland made the story into a series. I loved the series when it was first shown, starring Anthony Higgins as Marcus and Christian Rodska as Esca, so I was delighted when I learned that it was now available on DVD, from Simply Media - and a little apprehensive. Would it be as good as I remembered?
They obviously had a tiny budget, but they did have the advantage of the rolling Scottish hills to film in, which gave it that epic scope. The director also managed to film battle sequences quite cleverly using overlaying images and only about a dozen extras.
It's a difficult book to make a story of, with a lot of the action in flashback as the story of what happened to the Ninth is told by a Roman and a Caledonian tribesman, and towards the beginning of the book, Marcus spends months recuperating from his wound at his uncle's house with not a lot happening. They manage to fit the story into six episodes quite satisfactorily, though.
I was very happy. They got it right.

Trowelblazers - Bridget Allchin in South Asia

Here's a fascinating archaeologist with links to Gordon Childe, Kathleen Kenyon, and Agatha Christie!

Bridget Gordon was born in 1927, in Oxford, and during the Second World War she ran the family farm in the Scottish Borders when her father was called up for military service. He was a Major in the Indian Army Medical Service.
After the war, the family moved to South Africa, where Bridget managed to persuade her family to let her study at Cape Town University, where she was taught anthropology and archaeology as part of her African Studies degree. She also learned to pilot a small aircraft, taught by a Battle of Britain pilot!
She returned to London in 1950, where she wanted to take up a higher degree in prehistory at the LSE, only to be told that she needed to do another first degree because the one she had was "colonial".
She went for an interview with Gordon Childe, who was the Director of the Institute of Archaeology at UCL, and walked out ten minutes later with her being admitted to a doctorate focussed on the late Stone Age of South Africa. This was where she met Kathleen Kenyon and Agatha Christie.
While studying, she met Raymond Allchin, late of the Indian Army, who was studying Sanskrit and Hindi. Raymond was offered a PhD scholarship to study the archaeology of the Deccan in 1951, with provision for a wife's fare and allowance, so they got married and set off. First, though, they spent their honeymoon in the Dordogne, looking at prehistoric wall paintings.
At first in partnership with her husband, and later on her own, Bridget established herself as a foremost authority on South Asian archaeology, from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka, with many publications to her name. By this time, she and Raymond also had two children, born in the early 1950s.
One of the projects she worked on was the study of the Great Thar Desert, between India and Pakistan, and stone tools were one of her areas of expertise.
She became secretary-general of the Association of South Asian Archaeologists in 1970, and became editor of Afghan Studies in 1978. She was also the founding editor of the journal South Asian Studies.
In 1980 she and Raymond helped to found the Ancient India and Iran Trust, and she became first secretary, and later chair, of the Trust.
She was also a fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge for 50 years, and in 2014 she was awarded the Royal Asiatic Society's gold medal in recognition of her role as a pioneering female field archaeologist in South Asia. She and Raymond also gave their name to the Annual Allchin Symposium on South Asian Archaeology.
She died in June this year. Raymond died in 2010. There is a joint autobiography called From the Oxus to Mysore in 1951: the Start of a Great Partnership in Indian Scholarship.

Trowel Blazers - Mary Leakey

The Leakey family are among the "aristocracy" of archaeology - justly famous for their work in Africa. Mary Leakey was the wife of Louis Leakey, working with him for many years at Olduvai Gorge, and the mother of Richard Leakey, who also went on to become a famous archaeologist.
She had an interest in archaeology from an early age, but had an unconventional education, so was unable to go to university. However, she attended lectures on archaeology, and studied under Mortimer Wheeler at the London Museum. He accepted her to work on her first dig, at St Albans. She also worked for Dorothy Liddell at Hembury, a Neolithic site, where she worked for four years, until 1934.
She met Louis Leakey when she was hired to illustrate his book Adam's Ancestors.
They spent much of their time, after they married, working on sites in Kenya and Tanzania, including Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli, where they brought up their children Jonathan, Richard and Philip. These sites are of immense importance in the study of early hominids.
She died in Nairobi in 1996, at the age of 83.
Here she is, with a cast of the famous footprints found at Laetoli, made by an early hominid classified as Australopithicus afarensis, around 3 million years ago:

Trowelblazers - Katherine Routledge and Easter Island

Katherine Routledge was an anthropologist and archaeologist, born in 1866. She was educated at Somerville Hall in Oxford, where she gained a degree in Modern History in 1895.
In 1906, she married William Scoresby Routledge, and went with him to live among the Kikuyu people in South Africa. In 1910 they published a book about their experiences called With A Prehistoric People.
They next decided to mount an expedition to Easter Island. They had a schooner built which they called the Mana and, with the support of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the British Museum and the Royal Geographical Society, they recruited a crew and borrowed an officer from the Royal Navy. They set out for Easter Island in 1913, arriving at the beginning of 1914. Although Katherine had no formal training in either anthropology or archaeology, she was given notes and instructions to follow by the Oxford scholar Dr Marett. They excavated statues, and collected oral history and legends from the Easter Islanders, doing a lot to preserve the traditional culture of the island. For instance, she recorded tattoos on the backs of older inhabitants which corresponded to carvings on the backs of some of the statues - tattooing had been suppressed by European missionaries, so this information was not available to later scholars except through her records.
Then the German East Asia Squadron, including armed cruisers and light cruisers, rendezvoused off the island, and landed captured French and British merchant seamen there. It soon became clear that World War One had started, and Katherine complained to the local schoolmaster, as the representative of the neutral country of Chile (Easter Island was within Chilean waters) while her husband sailed the Mana to Valparaiso to complain to the government officials there. The Germans did leave the area after that.
In 1915, they left the island, and in 1919 she published a book called The Mystery of Easter Island. Objects that she and her husband found are now in the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum, and her notes are held by the Royal Geographical Society.
Sadly, she suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, which got worse in 1925 - she was institutionalised in 1929 and died in the mental institution in 1935. Her husband left some of her field notes to the Royal Geographical Society, but other papers continued to turn up later in the family papers.
A book about her life was written by Dr Jo Anne Van Tilburg, a prominent archaeologist on Easter Island, or Rapa Nui. It is called Amongst Stone Giants: the Life of Katherine Routledge and her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island.

Trowelblazers - Jale Inan, Turkish archaeolgist

Halet Çambel wasn't the only Turkish woman archaeologist - the first woman to work in archaeology in Turkey was Jale Inan.
Her father was the director of the Izmir Archaeology Museum, and she was born (the second daughter of the family) in 1914. He encouraged his daughter in her interest in archaeology, and managed to get her a scholarship to study in Germany, at the German Archaeological Institute. Jale remained in Berlin during the war, completing her doctoral thesis in 1943, sometimes studying in a bunker with bombs falling. Then she returned to Turkey, working at the University of Istanbul. She married Mustafa Inan in 1944, and the following year gave birth to a son.
In 1946, she began work on the Temple of Artemis at the site of Perga, having spent the preceding two years organising the archive at the University and setting up a chair of archaeology with Arif Mufid Mansel. She spent the rest of her career working on sites around Turkey and publishing in both German and Turkish. She died in 2001.
In 1980, at Perga, the bottom half of a statue of Hercules was discovered. No-one knew at the time that one of the workmen on the site had stolen the top half of the statue, which turned up later in New York. In 1990 Özgen Acar, a Turkish journalist, visited the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, and spotted the top half of the statue, a 2ndC AD copy of a statue known as Weary Herakles, by Lysippos. When Jale Inan learned of this, she worked to re-unite the two halves of the statue, having a plaster cast of the bottom half made so that it could be shown that the two halves fitted together. The Americans resisted the calls to return the statue to Turkey until 2011.

Trowelblazers - Halet Çambel

Halet Çambel was a Turkish archaeologist - and an Olympic fencer! She was the first Muslim woman to compete in the Olympic Games, in 1936, in Germany. She was invited to meet Adolf Hitler, but refused on political grounds. She had already been dubious about competing in the "Nazi Games" and felt that this was a compromise too far, according to her obituary in the Telegraph.

Here she is, third from the left.

She was born in Berlin in 1916, the daughter of a Turkish cultural attaché there. The family was very close to Kemal Ataturk, and they could not return to Turkey until the mid 1920s, when Turkey became a republic. She was a frail child so, inspired by German children's books about knights, she decided to learn fencing. Later she was educated in Turkey, and went on to study archaeology at the Sorbonne in Paris between 1933 and 1939. Returning to Turkey, she became a scientific assistant at Istanbul University in 1940. In 1944 she received a Doctorate and in 1947 she began lecturing there.
She also spent two years as visiting scholar at the University of Saarbrucken in Germany and did a lot to strengthen ties between the German and Turkish archaeological communities.
Later, she became a professor, and founded the Institute of Prehistory at Istanbul University. She married Nail Çakırhan, an architect and communist poet, who divorced his Russian first wife in 1937, and they remained together for seventy years.
She dug at Karatepe, in the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey, after the Second World War, with the German archaeologist Helmut Theodor Bossert, who was the professor of archaeology at Istanbul University. This was a site associated with the 12th Century BC Hittite king Azatiwada, and she played a key role in deciphering the Hittite hieroglyphics found at the site, with the help of the Phoenician alphabet. This site became her life's work - for over fifty years she spent about six months of every year there. She also spent time in the early days teaching the local children, as there were no schools in the remote area.
She was also active in preserving her country's cultural heritage, creating an outdoor museum at Karatepe in 1960, for which her husband designed some buildings. She also opposed the damming of the Ceyhan River, which would have drowned many archaeological sites. She was able to negotiate a compromise on the water level which saved the sites.
In 2004, she received the Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands for her services to Turkish archaeology.
She died in 2014, aged 97.

Trowelblazers - Tatiana Proskouriakoff

Tatiana Proskouriakoff was a Russian archaeologist whose speciality was Mayan culture. She was born in Tomsk in 1909, and her father was sent to the US in 1915 by Czar Nicholas II to oversee the production of munitions for the First World War. When the Revolution happened in 1917, the family were forced to stay in the USA, and Tatiana only visited Russia again once, to meet fellow Mayanist Yuri Knorozov.
Initially trained as an architect, she went to work for the University of Pennsylvania Museum in 1936, on the Mayan site at Piedras Negras, between Mexico and Guatamala. Here she discovered the discipline which would become her life's work, and led to positions at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, and later Harvard University.
During the Second World War, she worked on the translation of Mayan heiroglyphs, making significant contributions to the field.
She became the honorary curator of Mayan art at the Peabody Museum on 1958, where she also taught a number of young women who went on to work in the field of Maya archaeology, and she died in 1985. She was buried at Piedras Negras, in Structure J-23, on Easter Sunday, 1998, where there is a plaque in her honour. Another plaque in her honour has been set up in her home town of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania.

Trowelblazers - Dorothea Bate, Welsh Palaeontologist

Since it's close to St David's Day, I thought I'd choose a Welsh archaeologist this time. Dorothea Bate was born in Carmarthenshire, the daughter of a police superintendant.
In 1898, when she was nineteen, she went down to London and talked her way into a job at the Natural History Museum - and stayed there for fifty years. Her first job was sorting bird skins and later she prepared fossils, being paid piece work, by the number of fossils she prepared. She was learning all the time, and in 1901 she published her first scientific paper, "A short account of a bone cave in the Carboniferous limestone of the Wye valley", which appeared in the Geological Magazine.
She also visited Cyprus, first at her own expense and in 1902 with a small grant from the Royal Society, where she discovered the fossil bones of a new species of dwarf elephant, which she named elephas Cypriotes. She was able to do this with the help of a family connection on the island.
Later she visited other Mediterranean islands, making other discoveries of previously unknown prehistoric fauna. She was known for using dynomite to get at the fossil layers! Most of this work was financed from her own pocket, and she was unable to become a scientific member of staff with the museum, as this was forbidden to women until 1928.

The Coves dels Coloms in Majorca, where Dorothea Bate found the remains of Myotragus balearicus, the mouse goat

She became friendly with the archaeologists working at Knossos, including Sir Arthur Evans, while working in Crete, and in the 1920s worked with Professor Dorothy Garrod in Palestine. In 1937, they published The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, detailing the prehistoric fauna found there, including a hippopotomus.
In China, she worked with Percy Lowe on fossil ostriches - and she also found a fossil giant tortoise in Bethlehem!
She was consulted throughout her career by other archaeologists, including Louis Leakey, for her expertise in identifying fossil bones.
During the Second World War, she was transferred from London to Tring, where she eventually became officer-in-charge when she was nearly seventy. She died in 1951, and sadly, shortly after that, her personal papers were destroyed in a house fire. Her field notebooks, however, have been preserved at the Natural History Museum, including detailed maps of the islands where she worked.
Last year she was the subject of an episode of a Radio 4 series called Natural History Heroes (still available on iplayer), and there is also a book called Discovering Dorothea by Karolyn Shindler.

Trowelblazers - Eve Stewart and Cyprus

Eve Stewart was the second wife of James Stewart, of Sydney University. James had a long interest in the archaeology of Cyprus - he requested to be posted there during the Second World War, but spent most of the war as a POW. He also bequeathed his large collection of books about Cyprus to the Cyprus Museum before he began his war service.
His first wife, Eleanor, was also an archaeologist, and she assisted him on his early digs in Cyprus.

After the War, he headed back to Australia via Cyprus - he was to become the first person to teach archaeology formally at an Australian University. On the way met Eve Dray, who shared his interest in the archaeology of Cyprus. He arranged for Eve to come to Australia as his "technical assistant", and in 1951 he divorced Eleanor and married Eve.
James died in 1962, and Eve spent the next 50 years completing his work. She had some influence over the way the Department of Archaeology in Sydney University developed, and it was the collection put together by James and Eve that formed the basis of the Cypriot Collection in the Nicholson Museum.
There is a biography of the couple called Love's Obsession, by Judy Powell.

Trowelblazers - Edith Hall Dohan

Edith Hall Dohan was the first student to be awarded a PhD in classical archaeology by Bryn Mawr College, in 1906. She was also the first Bryn Mawr student to become a Fellow in Athens, in 1903 when she joined the American School of Classical Studies - she was the only female student that year. She studied Mycenaean and Cretan pottery there, and met Harriet Boyd, joining her at the dig at Gournia, Crete in 1904 for her first field experience. Her letters home, to her parents and older sister Anne, paint a vivid picture of life for a woman archaeologist in the 1900s.

Later, she taught archaeology at Mount Holyoke College, while continuing to dig in Crete on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, then known as the Free Museum of Science and Art. At Vrokastro, she became the second American woman to direct a dig on Crete, and the third in Greece. In 1912 she left her teaching post to work for the Museum full time.
In 1915, she married, and took a break in her career to bring up two children while teaching part time.
In 1931, she returned to the University of Pennsylvania Museum to take up the post of associate curator of the Mediterranean Section. She was also the book review editor for the American Journal of Archaeology at this time.
Her last important work was a book on Etruscan Tombs. She died suddenly at her desk in 1943.