Women in Federal Archeology: The First Antiquities Act Permits Issued to Women

Archeology in the early twentieth century was largely a men's enterprise. The wives of famous archeologists often took an active part in their husbands' research, and between the world wars women such as Ann Axtell Morris, Mary Russell Colton and Rosemary Nusbaum contributed to their husbands' fieldwork. Few women, though, applied for permits to lead research projects of their own.

The Department of the Interior issued fewer than ten Antiquities Act permits to women between 1907 and 1935. Among the pioneers who received them were Frederica de Laguna, Katharine Bartlett, Winifred Gladwin, Florence Hawley Ellis, Louise Parcher and Dorothy Keur.

Frederica de Laguna

Frederica de Laguna was the first woman granted an Antiquities Act permit by the Department of the Interior, in July 1930, twenty-four years after the act was passed, for a wide reconnaissance "in the Seward peninsula of Alaska, in the vicinity of the coast." Working for the University of Pennsylvania, she returned to Alaska four more times under Interior permits between 1930 and 1935, and used the research for her doctoral thesis on Upper Paleolithic and Eskimo art. In 1933 she received the first Ph.D. in archeology that Columbia University's anthropology department awarded to a woman; hers may be the earliest thesis completed by a woman archeologist in the United States.

Her notes and reports, kept with her permit files at the National Archives, show precise collection records and carefully drafted maps of the sites and areas she surveyed. Her work in Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet led to collaboration with Kaj Birket-Smith of the Danish National Museum, another permit holder. They had planned a joint expedition, but his ill health kept him home while she began the fieldwork; they later wrote several articles together on Arctic archeology.

Florence Hawley

Florence Hawley, an instructor at the University of Arizona, followed de Laguna into the permit process in 1931, directing a major excavation on an undeveloped part of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. Combining excavation with statistics and science, she secured her place in American archeology. She had already excavated and worked on collections at Chetro Ketl in Chaco Canyon, from 1929, work that led to her Ph.D. in 1934. Using material from within one of the first national monuments, she did pioneering tree-ring (dendrochronological) analysis: in 1931 she dated a building timber from Chetro Ketl. Studying under A. E. Douglass of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, she helped build a tree-ring chronology reaching back to about A.D. 200.

Dorothy Keur

Dorothy Keur was the last woman in this period to apply to the Department for permission to investigate ruins on public land. Her 1935 file holds no copy of an actual permit for her work in Alcove Canyon, near the Round Rock Trading Post, Arizona, although her husband, John, a Dutch biologist and not an archeologist, did receive one. The couple planned to photograph the area and collect surface material in preparation for a later excavation, for the Bronx branch of Hunter College in New York City, where the collection would go. The file shows that the Smithsonian Institution and the Departmental Consulting Archeologist, Jesse Nusbaum, recommended approval in early June 1935. Whether or not that project went ahead, Keur later did extensive archeological work at Big Bead Mesa in New Mexico in the late 1930s and early 1940s; the site is now protected by the Bureau of Land Management.

Why it mattered

These women's research reflects the growing intellectual independence of American women in the early twentieth century. Before, women had come to archeology through philanthropy, through professional clubs that backed legislation, or by helping their husbands in the field and laboratory. Antiquities Act permits let women archeologists explore on their own account, and their work was varied: de Laguna worked mostly in Alaska, far from the usual Southwest, while Hawley joined field skills to statistical and scientific expertise uncommon at the time. Their work in the 1930s made a place for women in archeological research and in the Department of the Interior's archeology programme.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Women in Federal Archeology," excerpted from Kathleen D. Browning, "Implementing the Antiquities Act: A Survey of Archeological Permits 1906–1935," Studies in Archeology and Ethnography 2, National Park Service, 2003. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/women-in-federal-archeology.htm