What a remarkable and captivating book! And one that pays equal respect and attention to the fact that these people were pioneers in their field, and that they were women in their field; both are equally interesting. It doesn't shy away from the complexity of their lives as Victorian women in a traditionally masculine field (and, indeed, masculine world), and neither does it diminish their accomplishments as being good...for a woman. I found the entire work fascinating and well-rounded and it encourages me to both read more in the field and read more by and about the seven archaeologists (and often authors) that it explores. ( )

Wonderful idea for a book: Collect brief biographies of pioneering female archaeologists under one roof. Amanda Adams' execution of this idea is uneven, at times insightful and witty, at other times thin and irritating.

I picked this up mainly to read about Agatha Christie, who I only recently had learned was an archaeologist, but her chapter was one of the less interesting. Those on "Mexico's Archaeological Queen," Zelia Nuttall, and on the American Harriet Boyd Hawes are among the highlights.

The "irritating" parts are those in which Adams pads her biographies with psychological speculation about the women's motives, or hammers the post-feminist angle repetitively. For example, on Gertrude Bell: "...she wanted marriage and family life very much. She would be a midwife to modern Iraq but would never be a mother. If thwarted love wasn't the very reason Bell traveled as hard and as far as she did, it is certainly what she thought about as she rode her horse for hours alone in sandy silence." Well, actually, maybe she was thinking about her work, or that she could really use a new pair of boots, or what to have for dinner.

Adams touches on, but only lightly, Bell's role in shaping the colonialism that twisted Iraq and on the foreigners who took the treasures of other nations.

The book sorely needs maps and better photo captions.

But grousing aside, it's a handy introduction to the distaff side of a fascinating field. ( )

The best discoveries are by accident. The women in Amanda Adams’ book Ladies of the Field: Early Women Archaeologists and Their Search for Adventure would agree.

I discovered Ladies of the Field by accident, while I was digging through a book stack looking for something else. I unearthed it in on a dark shelf at the back of a little bookstore, where it was sitting demurely, exactly the kind of odd little book one might expect to find in a store run by a mother and daughter in a small southern town. On the cover a rather indomitable woman in full Victorian dress smiled into the camera—pet dog in her lap, desert in the background.

I picked it up because of the way the woman was smiling—a kind of wry half-grin—and because like many girls I went through my Egypt phase (the same way I went through my horses phase and my dinosaur phase and my fossils phase) and I’ve never truly shook it off. I have this story I tell about exchanging a Christmas gift of jewelry for a dictionary when I was young. What I don’t often add is that the “dictionary” was E. A. Wallis Budge’s An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary (Volumes I and II), reprinted by Dover. So archaeology, anthropology, mythology, Egyptology, paleontology—these were all common terms when I was growing up. I loved “ologies” of almost any kind.

What struck me most about Ladies of the Field, however, and the reason why I took it off the bookstore shelf and added it to my stack of purchases on the counter, was that I didn’t recognize the lady on the cover. I would have said I had a decent, if casual, familiarity the field of archaeology (and with Victorian adventuresses), but in this book that introduces seven “early women archaeologists and their search for adventure,” I only knew three of the names. When I flipped open the book, I stumbled on an engraving of a figure in a pith helmet, surrounded by crates, holding off an angry mob of Arabs with a pistol. The caption read “Jane Dieulafoy protecting her crates of precious artifacts against theft.”

I didn’t know who Jane Dieulafoy was, but I wanted to.

Which pretty much sums up the philosophy of this enticing, if all too brief little book. It is a collection of portraits of seven women that you probably don’t know, but you want to: Amelia Edwards. Jane Dieulafoy. Zelia Nuttall. Gertrude Bell. Harriet Boyd Hawes. Agatha Christie. Dorothy Garrod. All women who defied the conventions of their time and the roles society had dictated for them in order to give free reign to their wanderlust, intellectual curiosity, ambition, and thirst for adventure. And each of whom can be credited with significant contributions to the field of archaeology. Each of whom, that is to say, got her hands dirty digging in the dirt. Women who knew their way around a shovel. read full review