A Boot in the Door: Pioneering Women of Southwestern Archaeology Friends of Archaeology Lecture Series

In this opening event of the lecture series, Archaeology and Women in the Southwest, series sponsored by the Friends of Archaeology and the state Office of Archaeological Studies, Dr. Nancy J. Parezo, professor of American Indian studies and anthropology at the University of Arizona, will speak about the first wave of women archaeologists in the Southwest.

The lecture will be at 6 pm, Friday, Jan. 21, in the History Museum Auditorium. Cost for Friends of Archaeology members is $13 per lecture, $55 series; nonmembers: $16 per lecture, $65 series; students with ID: $10 per lecture. Purchase tickets at Lensic Ticket Office (fees apply) or at the door (checks to Museum of New Mexico Foundation or cash only). Call 505-992-2718, ext. 8, for more information.

The names of the first archaeologists who worked in the American Southwest are famous to anyone who lives in Santa Fe: Alfred Kidder, Kenneth Chapman, Edgar Lee Hewett, and John Wesley Powell. Less well-known is that Jesse Walter Fewkes’s wife came with him on all his trips to Mesa Verde, digging and surveying alongside him. That Matilda Coxe Stevenson was a member of the first scientific surveying trip to Canyon de Chelly. That Emma Mindeleff accompanied her husband Cosmos as he surveyed ruins in the Verde Valley. And that Theresa Russell worked with husband Frank locating and excavating Hohokam sites for the Bureau of American Ethnology.

None of these women are listed in official reports, which never mention their unpaid participation or give them the credit they deserve. The same can be said for the official histories of archaeology. But the early decades of archaeology in Arizona and New Mexico are filled with stalwart ladies who got their boot in the door before the 1920s. These pioneering women set the stage for the many women who came after them, women who have had illustrious careers and increased our knowledge about indigenous history.

It is time to remember these pioneers of the American Southwest and how important husband-and-wife teams were to archaeological research in New Mexico and Arizona. As M. R. Trouillot reminds us, “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences.” These silences are the consequence of power relations entering into the production of histories. To this we can add fields like archaeology, which have been largely defined as male.

Among the women Dr. Parezo will introduce:

Ethnographer and political activist Alice Cummingham Fletcher, who made sure that the School of American Archaeology was in Santa Fe, and who wrote the first national antiquities act with Matilda Coxe Stevenson.

Matilda Coxe Stevenson and her archaeological work around Zuni, Acoma, Cochiti, Zia, and in Canyon de Chelly. Lucy Langdon Wilson, an influential professor and educational reformer and the first female academic to excavate her own sites (Otowi, on the Pajarito Plateau).

Zelia Nuttall, the world’s foremost specialist in Aztec codices, who searched for connections to the ancient Puebloan world. Barbara Freire-Marreco, a graduate student from Oxford; and Maud Woy, from Denver, the first two women to attend an archaeological field school with Edgar Lee Hewett. Marietta Wetherill, who helped her husband excavate sites in Arizona. Women like Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton, Harriet Cosgrove, and Ann Axtell Morris, who carried on work into the 1930s, setting the stage for the rest of the women who will be discussed in this winter lecture series.