As we were putting together this issue, it occurred to me that all of the authors of the feature articles are women. I was surprised.
Heather Lee McCarthy, a Ph.D. student at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, reports on a revolutionary phenomenon in 14th-century B.C. Egypt, the building of elaborate tombs for women in the Valley of the Queens; folklorist Adrienne Mayor describes the use of chemical and biological weapons in antiquity; and independent scholar Elizabeth Rosen Stone discusses the fusion of Greek and Indian artistic styles in the monumental stone pillars raised by the great third-century B.C. Indian emperor Ashoka.
Interestingly, another article that we were forced to hold for reasons of space, on wooden furniture preserved from Pompeii and Herculaneum, was also written by a woman: Judith Harris, who for years has served as a kind of correspondent in Rome for Archaeology Odyssey.
Should I have been surprised? Out of curiosity, I checked the Editorial Advisory Board of our sister magazine, Biblical Archaeology Review, and found that of the 22 board members only one is a woman.
I then consulted a number of scholars. The bleakest assessment is given by historian and biblical scholar Susan Ackerman of Dartmouth College, who notes that archaeology is a “very gendered discipline” and that “most of its practitioners are men.” Elizabeth Lyding Will, Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Massachusetts, points out that classical archaeology has long been open to women largely because of the pioneering programs at Bryn Mawr College. University of North Carolina archaeologist Jodi Magness agrees, saying “there are lots of women in archaeology, especially classical archaeology,” though “perhaps not as many at the upper ranks.”
Everyone tells me that graduate school enrollments are about equally divided between men and women. According to a survey by the National Science Foundation, 55.6 percent of the Ph.D.’s awarded in archaeology in 2002 went to women. (This was a very small sample, however, and did not include most of the relevant Ph.D.’s, awarded in such fields as classics, history, Bible studies, Egyptology, Assyriology and so on. It is difficult to get good statistics because of the sheer number and variety of disciplines involved.)
Another survey, conducted in 2001–2002 by the American Philological Association, an organization of classical scholars, revealed that 49 percent of the tenure-track hires went to women. On the other hand, the tenured faculty was still largely male (around 70 percent). What may be disturbing to all scholars, however, is that the total number of tenure grants (for men and women) was decreasing. The survey suggests, rather ominously, that the void created by a decrease in the tenured faculty was being filled largely by women, who held 50 percent of the non-tenure-track positions.
So is a woman’s place in archaeology? Undoubtedly, but today’s picture is mixed—many women in the field, relatively few in the director’s tent. Susan Ackerman observes that archaeology may have seemed inhospitable to women because its subject matter has largely been the feats of men—King Solomon’s gates, Pharaoh Khufu’s pyramid, King Priam’s Troy. Now, however, that is changing, and archaeologists are increasingly interested in learning about how ancient people actually lived—how they worked, cooked, raised children, worshiped, managed their refuse, had sex. In this endeavor women simply cannot remain invisible.
As we were putting together this issue, it occurred to me that all of the authors of the feature articles are women. I was surprised.
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.