Women Researching African Archaeology

It is my hope that this webpage will begin to draw together the network of women working in African Archaeology, expose the important and eminent work of women working in Africa, and serve as resource for women who wish a career in African archaeology.Aspiring a career in African archaeology, I began to review the literature of women Africanist archaeologists and how their research contributed to the discipline. I noted that despite their many significant contributions to African archaeological method and theory, especially those exposing the importance of indigenous populations to their own cultural development, the work of these women tends to be either appropriated or ignored by their contemporaries and by present day "male" archaeologists. Africa is a continent whose history and prehistory have been interpreted from outside the continent, rendering it both Eurocentric and androcentric. Western ideology held that women and people of other cultures, were inferior to European men, and it may have been their similar standpoint that allowed women Africanist archaeologists to view more clearly the intelligence of the indigenous peoples of Africa and in turn acknowledge their responsibility for creating complex African civilization.

Although archaeology has been perceived as male dominated since its inception, throughout history women clearly enacted and emulated important roles as creators and preservers of the past. In pre-colonial Africa, whether women were mediators of trade and information (Curtin, Feierman, Thompson, and Vansina, 1991; Berger 1976) or religious and political leaders (Robins 1993), they must have been responsible for maintaining and transmitting the histories of the past. Colonial rulers, who found it difficult to understand and identify with women, outlawed the activities in which women held political and religious power (Curtin, Feierman, Thompson, and Vansina 1990:35).

Subsequent to the colonization period, westerners have served as heralds of Africa's past to the rest of the world (Schmidt, 1995; Robertshaw, 1990a), and so there is a marked absence of an African voice concerning the reconstruction of Africa's past. The first black African to publish an article on African archaeology in one of the four major journals of African archaeology was Ekpo Eyo in the West African Journal of Archaeology in 1974. Until the 1990s, no female black African archaeologists I know of published in international publications until Alinah Segoby from Botswana (1998). In colonial Africa, race played a strong role in the segregation of society. Until the 1950s, formal education was only minimally available to indigenous African women; even today fifty to seventy percent of African women are illiterate. Today our understanding of how African women serve to transmit and maintain their respective cultural heritages is seriously understudied. The rearticulation of gender and social relations led not only to the absence of an African voice, but also strayed away from emphasizing women as conveyors of the past.

Since the late 1800s, women of European descent have long played a vital role in interpreting the African past, though their contributions have long been either ignored or appropriated by their contemporaries and by present day archaeologists. Mary Barber (1872) was the first woman to write about African antiquities in South Africa, and Amelia Edwards founded the Egyptian Exploration Fund, which then produced the first scientific excavations in Africa (Fagan 1975). Maria Wilman's creation of a new "neutral" non-European based terminology for stone tool assemblages, i.e. the term Middle Stone Age, was well-received, but appropriated by more eminent male scholars. Margaret Murray was the first woman to teach archaeology at a university and to incorporate women into reconstructions of African prehistory. Joan Harding and Gertrude Caton-Thompson attributed rock art and monumental structures to the indigenous people of Africa, during a period when all achievements, including monuments and stone tools, were considered a diffusion from Europe and the Near East. Mary Leakey not only discovered the fossil remains of some significant early hominids, but was the first to reveal the presence of Early Stone Age "living floors" essentially recognizing Africans as the source for emerging human cultures, giving back to Africans the dignity, intelligence, and complexity that the West had taken away. Marie-Henrietta Alimen (1957) published the comprehensive overview of African archaeology, and she is rarely if ever noted or referenced in histographies of African archaeology

A more expansive review of women who have dedicated their lives to African archaeology between the 1860s and 1960s can be found in the African Archaeological Review March 2001.