We are really excited to bring you the series Women of African Archaeology. The production of this series of profiles is a joint venture supported by the Society of Africanist Archaeologists, PanAfrican Association for Prehistory and the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
The idea for this project came from many different inspirations and a general sense that women, particularly African women, were less well represented online, less cited in research, less often profiled in journals as ‘ancestors’ of the discipline, less invited as keynote speakers to conferences, and generally not as well celebrated as their male counterparts. This stands in stark contrast to the fact that African archaeology is majority female and many of the academic positions on the continent, in Europe and the US are held by women.
We put out a call for nominations on various mailing lists and were overwhelmed by the response. It was wonderful to receive so many testimonies to brilliant, pioneering women in the discipline and heartening to see them being recognised by so many of their colleagues.
We could only profile a subsection of those that were nominated. In keeping with the spirit of the TrowelBlazers website we prioritised trailblazing and pioneering women, but there were many we could not represent. This work will continue: we are planning a Wikipedia editathon later in 2020, where we will begin the work of creating Wikipedia pages for some of those we could not feature here. We would also encourage our colleagues to collaborate in this work. Please feel free to contribute your own profiles to TrowelBlazers, contribute to Wikipedia and generally help us to celebrate the work done by women in African archaeology!
The work of researching and producing the profiles was done at the University of York by an excellent team of volunteers: Sally Clarke, Isabelle Diggle, Fionnuala Marron Long, Lucy Moore and Cassiane Stevens. Thank you to all those who nominated our fantastic women, both for getting involved with the process and for responding to requests for more information, pictures and general insights.
Stephanie Wynne-Jones
Women in African Archaeology
Intisar Soghayroun el-Zein انتصار الزين صغيرون
Wonderful initiative!
Laudable
Dear Organisers,
Thanks so much for this. We need a wider publicity for this as there are more women archaeologist of substance that are left out of this list such as Anne Haour.
Please my email is above and we will like to be a part of this work.once again, thank you.
Bolaji Owoseni