Chapter 5 American Archaeology's Lost Women: Unacknowledged Labor & the Making of Archaeology

Abstract

While work has been done to uncover the roles of female archaeologists who supported their husband's careers with little acknowledgment or support, less work has been done to explore the diversity of hidden women's labor that helped support American archaeology during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Browman 2013; White et al. 1999). Institutions such as Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology benefitted early on from countless female staff, including clerks, secretaries, and librarians. This paper seeks to make connections between women's labor in archaeology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and adjunct labor in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.