Dutton’s Dirty Diggers: The Girl Scout Archeology Camps of the Southwest

From 1947 to 1957, archeologist Bertha Dutton ran Senior Girl Scout archeology camps across the American Southwest. On the Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast (episode 123), Jason Church, chief of technical services at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, talked with anthropologist Catherine "Kay" Fowler, a former camper and an author of Dutton's Dirty Diggers, the book about them.

The episode: "Dutton's Dirty Diggers", from the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast.

The Preservation Technology Podcast. Credit: National Park Service.

Bertha Dutton

Dutton earned her bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of New Mexico and her PhD at Columbia, and spent almost her whole career at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe. To the girls, she was proof that a woman could build a career in archeology, at a time when young women were steered toward secretarial or hairdressing work, or, if drawn to science, nursing but not medicine. She was well known among Pueblo, Navajo and Apache people, who welcomed her groups.

The camps

Close to 300 girls took part.

• Traveling camps lasted two weeks on the road, camping across the Southwest, sometimes several times a summer. They visited many national parks, which held or were coming to hold important archeological sites, and pueblos. At Mesa Verde everyone climbed the ladders into Balcony House.
• Excavation camps, six in all and two weeks each, were held at Pueblo Largo in the Galisteo Basin, south of Santa Fe.

Some girls came back again and again, one of them eleven times. Fowler went twice, in the program's last two years.

Dutton planned every detail in advance, down to where the hospitals and doctors were. A certified first-aider traveled with them, a botanist usually came along, and Dutton, who also had training in geology, taught as they went, including how to handle rattlesnakes, cholla cactus and scorpions in sleeping bags. A caravan of vehicles was tended by one man, the "car wrangler." Parents paid about a dollar and a half for an insurance policy. When Morefield Camp flooded, the girls' sleeping bags floated away and had to be fished out and dried. Leading figures in Southwestern archeology came to talk to them; the campers often realized only years later who they had heard.

Dutton was fun but strict, and insisted the trips were for learning, not just fun in the sun. She banned collecting sherds or anything else in the parks, but steered girls who fell for the region's Native art toward quality pieces at trading posts and pueblos. With the $20 her parents gave her, Fowler bought a small Navajo rug, a basket and a San Ildefonso pot, and on her second trip, a turquoise nugget necklace. Fowler doubted such trips could be run on the same scale today.

Where the diggers went

A number of campers became anthropologists and earned PhDs at a time when women rarely went beyond a bachelor's degree. Others went into medicine, law, biochemistry and other advanced work: at least three earned history PhDs, among them Jo Tice Bloom; one became a biochemist; Maryanne Stein earned a PhD in anthropology and a law degree and practiced environmental law in Albuquerque; others became nurses, often with master's degrees. Vorsila Bohrer became a botanist and archeobotanist. Many stayed with Girl Scouts for their own daughters, valuing the program for building young women's confidence that they could be whatever they wanted, and that no one should tell them otherwise because they were women.

Writing the book

Fowler began with archival research at the Museum of New Mexico's Laboratory of Anthropology for a Society for American Archaeology symposium on public involvement in archeology. There she met another former camper working in Dutton's archives, and through Alexander Lindsay of the Museum of Northern Arizona she met two more. Fowler and Jo Tice Bloom did most of the archival work; the others contributed diaries, and one had Dutton's little black books listing every girl on every trip — the source of the nearly 300 names. Archivist Diane Bird of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, herself from a Rio Grande Pueblo, gave them generous access, and a reunion of former campers helped identify people in unlabeled photographs. The work began around 2007; the University of Utah Press published the book in 2020.

Sources

Based on "Podcast 123: Dutton's Dirty Diggers," Preservation Technology Podcast, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, published by the National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words.

• The episode's audio is the National Park Service's own file, from the podcast's feed.