As we all know, it’s been a very, very different kind of year. Despite the raging apocalypse(s), however, TrowelBlazers has been hugely fortunate to have benefitted from the sudden shift to digital ‘fieldwork’ at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. Suddenly, we found ourselves with eleven incredibly motivated, aware, and activist undergraduate students ready to spend their summer fieldwork days bringing the story of women’s participation in the digging sciences to light.
This gave us an amazing opportunity to try some new things, like interviewing multiple women from the Estate Little Princess Project, at different career stages, to get first-hand accounts of what matters to them in archaeology. Interviews let us reap the insights from living TrowelBlazers, like this must-read account from Peggy Brunache. We got our first dancing archaeologist in Sharada Shunivasan, our first Bulgarian TrowelBlazer in archaeologist Magdalina Stancheva, and our first post in German on refugee Egyptologist Elise Baumgartel. We saw the enduring legacy of dedicated TrowelBlazers like Nancy Hatch Dupree in Afghanistan all the way to that of the Mistress of the Nazca Lines, Maria Reiche in Peru. We FINALLY got our post on the very different experiences of Black and white women working at the site of Irene Mound. And our own history was not neglected — the women of UCL themselves were brought out to shine.
Along the way, the students managed to navigate the official TrowelBlazers policy of organisation by emergent property. Embracing a collective and totally self-led foray into the world of social media they taught us things about instagram stories we will probably never be able to do ourselves. Mostly, however, they reminded us that working as a group, supporting each other, and being determined enough to email all those archives, colleagues, universities, families, friends; trace, locate, and beg all those photo permissions; and just do the work can take a little archive like TrowelBlazers to a completely new level. So, congratulations to the TrowelBlazers Digital Fieldwork Class of 2020 — you made the world a more TrowelBlazing place!
Please check out the #TrowelTakeover tag on twitter, instagram, and facebook for some of the extra work the students did. With profound thanks to the students and to UCL undergraduate programme coordinator Charlotte Frearson for all of their efforts, from all of us here at Team TrowelBlazers!
-Brenna, Tori, Suzie, Becky
