Women in Archaeology at Fort Vancouver: From a Few Helpers to Often the Majority

Fort Vancouver archaeologist Elaine Dorset excavating in Vancouver Barracks. NPS photo

Women have helped uncover Fort Vancouver's complex history since the first excavations — at first as a small minority of the crew, and now often as the majority of the employees, students, volunteers and partners in the park's cultural resources work.

1947–1952: the first excavations

Archaeologist Louis Caywood led the digs to find and interpret the fort. His crews were mostly men, but at least three women took part — notable given the barriers women faced then.

• Winifred Caywood, his wife, helped dig a trash pit found unexpectedly in 1950 during a demonstration for visiting park officials. Found on a Friday, and at risk of vandalism if left over the weekend, it was excavated by the couple in two days — yielding "more than two pickup truckloads of boxes of artifacts."
• Florence Jean Howard, one of six university students hired as aides in 1950, from the University of Washington, did lab and cataloguing work.
• A "Miss Tony Howard," mentioned only briefly, found "Pit No. 7" and worked one full day.

Susan Kardas (standing) and Bryn Mawr students excavating the Fort Vancouver Village in 1969. NPS photo, FOVA 159799

Susan Kardas, the first woman to lead

In 1968, Susan Kardas became Fort Vancouver's first female archaeological investigator, digging at the Village site.

• Training: educated at the University of California, Santa Barbara; PhD in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College (1971), mentored by Frederica de Laguna and Jane Goodale. Before Fort Vancouver she worked with James Deetz at La Purisima Mission (1962–1964), then at Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, and Fort Kentucky in Sackets Harbor, New York, and surveyed the upper Columbia River in 1966.
• Partnership: she and her husband, archaeologist Edward Larrabee, surveyed the Village in 1968; their report was called one of the "finest" ever received by National Park Service Director John Rutter. They later founded the firm Historic Sites Research.
• A fight for funding: seeking $2,500 for a second season, Kardas wrote to Congresswoman Julia Butler Hansen that being a woman might hurt her chances, since archaeology was still not fully open to women. Hansen — herself a pioneer in politics — encouraged NPS Director George Hartzog to fund the dig and a joint field school with Bryn Mawr and the University of Washington, which included five Bryn Mawr women. Kardas's letters to Hansen also complained of discrimination against her and her students.
• The work: Larrabee was the named field director, but Kardas's dissertation drove the research; she did most of the design, analysis and writing. The digs found four houses, pits (including animal burials) and rock concentrations. Her 1971 dissertation, The People Bought This and the Clatsop Became Rich, explored culture contact in the fur-trade community — especially Native Hawaiian men and Native American, mostly Chinookan, women — by combining history, ethnography and archaeology.
• Its limits: most of what she found was British or European, likely bought at the Hudson's Bay Company "Sale Shop," and the methods of the day looked for "ethnic markers" such as projectile points rather than the everyday goods that might reveal identity.

The 1974 excavation crew; David and Jennifer Chance are at left in the back row. NPS photo

The 1970s

More women joined the work, including Oregon Archaeological Society volunteers who helped excavate the Sale Shop. The planned I-5 and SR-14 interchange prompted big digs in the Village and a former pond in 1974, 1975 and 1977.

• Jennifer V. Chance excavated with her husband David Chance, ran the field lab in 1975, and co-authored both reports — the first written for the "lay public." Their work traced how the industrial revolution affected Indigenous and non-European people at Fort Vancouver, and read patterns in the pond's layered trash to track changes in objects over time.
• Caroline D. Carley co-authored reports on the southeast stockade excavations (1973–1974), analyzed the glass for the 1975 report, and was field director in 1977. Her University of Idaho thesis showed, through medical artifacts, that a palisaded hospital stood near the pond, as documents said.

These digs revealed Village houses, the pond, and the U.S. Army's Quartermaster's Depot, including the Ingalls House, and fed studies of bricks, medical practice and window-glass dating.

Oregon Archaeological Society excavations at the Fort Vancouver Jail. NPS photo

The 1980s and 1990s

Men led most 1980s projects, but women worked on crews and wrote reports — including the 1980–1981 South Vancouver Barracks and Village dig, which found the houses of HBC employees John Johnson, Little Proulx and William Kaulehelehe and parts of the Quartermaster's Depot.

Archaeologist Jacqui Cheung. NPS photo

Linda Freidenburg, with a Portland State University master's degree, worked in the 1990s as a contractor through Eastern Washington University, cataloguing earlier finds and building much of the museum collection's records. She relocated the post hole of the fort's well sweep — leading to its accurate reconstruction — and co-authored reports with Bryn Thomas, directing the lab for the Carpenter Shop dig before its 1997 rebuilding.

Archaeologist Katie Wynia, one of many women working at Fort Vancouver in the 2000s. NPS photo

Late 1990s to today

As the park's Cultural Resources Division grew, so did the projects — and the women. The Northwest Cultural Resources Institute, a partnership with universities based at Fort Vancouver, opened doors through field schools, lab volunteering and academic research.

• At least 100 women are estimated to have contributed since the late 1990s — staff, contractors, researchers, avocational archaeologists, volunteers and students.
• Staff have included archaeologists Dr. Elizabeth Horton, Heidi Pierson, Jacqui Cheung, Cheryl Paddock and Leslie O'Rourke; today, Cultural Resources Program Manager Theresa Langford, Curator Meagan Huff and Archaeologist Elaine Dorset. Katie Wynia has worked there for nearly a decade.
• Women have written more than 10 master's theses and doctoral dissertations on Fort Vancouver.
• The field school has trained more than 100 students, an estimated more than half of them women.

More women in archaeology is a trend across the field — but at Fort Vancouver they were often at the forefront, and the park now offers a welcoming program for women training or working in archaeology.

At public archaeology field schools, park archaeologists share their science with students. NPS photo

Sources

Based on "Women in Archaeology at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site," National Park Service, part of the series Using Science to Preserve the Past; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Susan Kardas's letter and dissertation are paraphrased.