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Archaeological Views: Missing from the Picture

American Women in Biblical Archaeology

By Jennie Ebeling

Women have made important contributions to digs in the Holy Land since the early days of archaeology. Photographs in excavation reports from the late 19th and early 20th centuries attest to large numbers of Palestinian women and girls among the laborers at archaeological digs. Writing in 1902, Frederick J. Bliss and R.A.S. Macalister described the labor pool on their excavations in the Shephelah as largely female: “At first we employed only men and boys, as the women and girls were shy, but after we had gained the confidence of the whole village, the female element predominated.”1 A number of […]

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Footnotes

1. See Robert R. Cargill, “Digs 2019: A Day in the Life,” BAR, 45:01.

2. ?See Jodi Magness et al., “Inside the Huqoq Synagogue,”BAR, 45:03.

3. William G. Dever, “The Death of a Discipline,” BAR, 21:05.

Endnotes

1.
Frederick J. Bliss and R.A.S. Macalister, Excavations in Palestine During the Years 1898-1900 (London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1902), p. 4.

2.
Jennie Ebeling, “Where Are the Female Dig Directors in Israel?” The Bible and Interpretation, May 2011 (bibleinterp.com); Beth Alpert Nakhai, “Factors Complicating the Reconstruction of Women’s Lives in Iron Age Israel (1200-587 B.C.E.),” in Saana Svärd and Agnès Garcia-Ventura, eds., Studying Gender in the Ancient Near East (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2018), pp. 289-314.

3.
Female archaeologists currently outnumber male archaeologists in the United Kingdom, and women are expected soon to dominate archaeology in other European countries as well.