Originally published in the ebook A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention.

by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Victoria Herridge, Brenna Hassett and Suzanne Pilaar Birch

The familiar narrative of female scholars being sidelined by the establishment is well-entrenched, and deservedly so, given the ample examples available. But to tell heroic tales of the triumph of the lone female scholar misses a key point — networks and collaborations are vital to scientific success. It could also undermine the aggregate contribution of women, potentially allowing them to be dismissed as anomalies.

In this chapter we introduce four British women from the first half of the 20^th century who worked in archaeology and palaeontology: Dorothy Garrod, Dorothea Bate, Gertrude Caton-Thompson and Kathleen Kenyon. Frequently presented as islands in an ocean of patriarchal academia, these and many other women were in fact more like a chain of sea mounts and, like these mountains rising from the ocean floor, we must look below the surface to find their true connected nature. Undoubtedly these women achieved much in their own right, but the untold story lies in how they acted as hubs, connecting each other and many other women like them — including us.

A splendid regiment

Women have been part of archaeological, palaeontological and geological research from the inception of these fields. Probably the most famous is Mary Anning who, in the early 1800s, found the first identified examples of ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and pterosaurs and was possibly the greatest fossil hunter ever.

By the first half of the 20^th century these fields appear to be full of women, some working away quietly, others at the heart of major discoveries and advancements. As Glyn Daniel, a legendary figure in archaeology, wrote in an obituary for Dorothy Garrod, she was part of “a splendid regiment of women” marching the discipline forward during this time. Just one example of women in leadership roles is the Prehistoric Society in Britain, which had three female Presidents between 1921 and 1939, including two of the women we focus on. (Although it’s noticeable that following the end of Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s presidency in 1946, there were no further women in this role until exactly sixty years later.)

Apart from a handful of celebrities, such as Gertrude Bell, women’s achievements during this period are still mostly overlooked outside academic circles. Popular and scholarly works have sought to raise the prominence of particular women (examples being Women of Science, Breaking Ground and Ladies of the Field), yet reality is far removed from this picture of a few isolated bastions of female attainment. Not only were there a lot more women — hundreds, in fact — working in these fields than is commonly realised, they were linked by a complex web of connections. By weaving together the achievements of the four women highlighted in this chapter, we also highlight these research networks and how they influenced the future of the discipline.

Tea and sherry at Tibn Towers

From 1929 to 1934, an archaeological excavation took place at Mount Carmel, a Palaeolithic site in Palestine. There had already been varied fieldwork taking place across the Near and Middle East, but the Mount Carmel excavation was different. It was directed by Dorothy Garrod, a young prehistorian who had cut her teeth working with the greatest names of the day in France, and was now forging her own path into the virtually untouched prehistory of Palestine.

Just the year before, Garrod had been elected as the second female President of the Prehistoric Society (following the venerable Nina Layard). Having already worked in Kurdistan she now took charge of digging at El-Wad cave, a project which would last seven years and would see her defining cultural sequences for the region for decades to come. This cemented her reputation and touched the professional lives of many women.

That first 1929 spring season, although not by design, was made up of an international all-women team. Living together in tents, they quickly experienced the strange and wonderful mix of physical hardship, intellectual excitement and intimate friendship which develops on long field projects. The women with Garrod that year were Mary Kitson Clark, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth Kitson, and Elinor Ewbank from the UK, along with Dean Harriet M. Allyn and medical doctor Martha Hackett from the US. Working alongside them was a large local contingent of Arab women — an integral but now mostly unknown part of the team — who quickly became highly skilled at finding stone tools.

Thanks to the discovery of Garrod’s personal archive, including field notes and journals, a remarkable picture of life at Mount Carmel over the years can be drawn. The tents of the early seasons were replaced by mud-brick huts (tibn), known as “Tibn Towers”. Visitors were met as they came up “the Drive”, and tea and sherry were served regularly.

Pamela Jane Smith, who has worked extensively on Garrod’s archive, notes the frequent humour to be found in the team’s field diaries, despite the difficult conditions which included extreme heat and dust, bad water and serious illness of team members. There are also wonderful photographs, including Garrod relaxing with Yusra, one of the local women excavators. It was in fact Yusra who made a ground-breaking find when she discovered the skull of a Neanderthal, which she excavated with Jacquetta Hawkes. Hawkes later became a major name herself in archaeology, and is now best known for her work on the Minoan civilisation of Crete. Excavating with Garrod at Mount Carmel was her first experience of fieldwork.

Yusra dreamed of going to Cambridge to complete a degree in archaeology, but could not follow that path. However, others did move from digging at Mt Carmel to independent research. For example, Mary Kitson Clark went on to have a successful career in Roman archaeology, Elizabeth Kitson worked and published on palaeoanthropological sites in East Africa, while Elinor Ewbank became a chemist.

Many archaeologists worked with Garrod at Mount Carmel, and all three of the other women we have chosen to highlight visited or dug with her there: Gertrude Caton-Thompson, who remained Garrod’s life-long friend, and Kathleen Kenyon visited in the early 1930s; and Dorothea Bate, by that time a venerable animal bone specialist, dug there in 1934. But Tibn Towers is only one location in time and space that links the achievements of these remarkable women. A brief survey of their individual careers serves to underline their accomplishments as well as provide context for the networks between them.

Dorothy Garrod, 1892-1968

Dorothy Garrod is a monumental figure in 20^th century prehistoric archaeology and, at least within academia, is mostly acknowledged as such. As the director of the excavations at Mount Carmel, she acts as a node around which we can trace contemporary research networks.

Though she had a degree in ancient history from Newnham College, Cambridge, and a diploma with distinction in Anthropology from Oxford, it was her time spent training in France in the 1920s at the cutting edge of prehistoric discovery that was most formative. She began her career digging there and would return to it towards the end of her years, still seeking to uncover what were then the earliest chapters in human history.

Garrod’s years in France were spent under the direction of the renowned prehistorian Abbé Breuil. She recalled that his approach to instruction had a way of opening up fresh perspectives. But over the course of the next few decades, it was her own work that would completely change academic and public perspectives on the earliest human past.

On one of Garrod’s first independent digs, at Devil’s Tower in Gibraltar, she found the remains of a Neanderthal child, whom she named “Abel”. Following her apprenticeship on the continent, she returned to the UK to write her first book, The Upper Palaeolithic Age in Britain, the first comprehensive overview of the Ice Age period.

The decade that had begun with her as a student on the continent ended not only with her election to the position of President of the Prehistoric Society in 1928, but also her first foray into the Near East, with the famous excavations she led at Mount Carmel. She was one of only a handful of people to work in that region and, in 1939, after years of ground-breaking work, her stellar rise within the field of archaeology culminated in her appointment to the Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. She was the first woman to be appointed to an academic Chair at either Oxford or Cambridge. While she remained in the position until she retired in 1952, it seems she found the world of faculty and lecturing more repressive than the freedom and pure intellectual excitement of fieldwork. In the spring of 1968, just a few months before her death, she was the first woman to be awarded the Gold Medal by the Society of Antiquaries.

This overview only scratches the surface of her deep contribution to the study of world prehistory and the advancement of archaeology as a scientific discipline. Over the course of her career, she worked at over 20 sites in France, Britain, Iraq, Palestine, Bulgaria and Lebanon. Through her groundbreaking appointment at the elite heart of academia she advanced the position of women considerably as professional scholars in all fields. And while at Cambridge she personally taught and trained many of the ever increasing numbers of women archaeologists.

Dorothea Bate, 1878-1951

By the time she first met Dorothy Garrod in 1923, Dorothea Bate was a well-known and established fossil mammal expert, and twenty-five years into what would be a fifty-two year long career. Dorothea Bate was working at the Natural History Museum, where women were only allowed to be employed as permanent scientific staff in 1928. Bate’s status at the museum was therefore unofficial and paid only on a per-fossil-curated basis. Nevertheless, her academic reputation was the equal of many of her male colleagues. She was widely published, funded by the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, and discoverer of ten new species of birds and mammals — both living and extinct. Her achievements in the first half of her career at the NHM are a testament to her tenacity, determination and intelligence, qualities that were clearly apparent from the outset.

In 1898, aged just nineteen, Dorothea Bate had a now infamous interview with the Natural History Museum’s curator of birds, Dr Richard Bowdler-Sharpe. She wanted to work with him and he told her to go away; she did not. Instead, she so impressed him with her ornithological knowledge that within three years, Bate had become part of the museum’s research community — the first woman to do so — and had published her first scientific paper. Her work on the Pleistocene, or Ice Age, fossils found in a British cave near her home in the Wye Valley confirmed her credentials as a serious researcher, and served her as a training ground for her first pioneering expedition, to Cyprus in April 1901.

In Cyprus (1901-1902) and then Crete (1903), Bate’s main aim was to find the fossil remains of extinct mammals, particularly the remains of dwarf elephants and hippopotamus. Her efforts were rewarded on both trips, discovering a new species of dwarf straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon cypriotes) on Cyprus, while on Crete she found dwarf hippopotamus, dwarf deer as well as what we now know to be a dwarf mammoth. Five years later, on Mallorca, she made an even more extraordinary discovery — the fossilised remains of a tiny-brained, goat-like creature, with huge forward facing eyes, ever-growing mouse-like front teeth, and very short legs. Nothing like it had been seen before, and its strangeness required the naming of a new genus, as well as a new species. Bate named it Myotragus balearicus: the mouse goat of the Balearics.

She took considerable risks on her field trips. There were the day-to-day dangers and exertions of the expeditions themselves when she would travel by foot or by mule, often alone except for local (male) guides. But she also braved more substantial hazards when she scaled limestone cliffs or, if the cliffs proved too vertiginous, swam through the sea in search of bone caves she had heard of from local shepherds, or even criminal antiquities smugglers. And when she finally found fossils, sometimes after weeks of searching, she would excavate by any means she could, including explosives, in all weathers and often through high fevers.

The outbreak of the First World War, however, saw a shift in Dorothea Bate’s career from amateur towards professional, and from student to teacher. Her academic achievements were accumulating and the Natural History Museum increasingly needed her skills. After World War One, Bate was completely ensconced within the museum and although she was still not on the permanent staff, she had developed from a woman who sought advice from experts into the expert that others turned to, whenever an ice age fossil mammal from Britain or the Mediterranean needed identifying. Finally in 1948, at almost seventy years old, Dorothea Bate was given her first official position at the Natural History Museum: Officer in Charge at Tring. She stayed in that role, continuing to work and publish on fossil mammals right up to her death in January 1951.

Gertrude Caton-Thompson, 1888-1985

Unlike Dorothea Bate, Gertrude Caton-Thompson came to a scholarly path late in life. Her interest in archaeology was apparently sparked when she visited historical sites on holidays as a young woman, and when she attended lectures on ancient Greek cultures at the British Museum. In 1915 she had her first taste of field work as a volunteer at an excavation of a Palaeolithic site in France. Later she attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 where she met Gertrude Bell and TE Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, both known for their historical and cultural interests in the Middle East. Her interest in archaeology thus strengthened, she turned down a permanent civil service job in the early 1920s, instead embarking upon a life of studying ancient civilisations.

Caton-Thompson began her archaeological education in 1921, studying surveying, Arabic and Egyptology with Margaret Murray at University College London. She went on her first major excavation at the great Egyptian site of Abydos, a dig run by Flinders Petrie, a key figure in Egyptology. As part of this project, she worked independently at other sites in the country, including digging an early Christian site she discovered with Hilda Petrie, Flinders’s wife, whose own contributions to his projects are frequently overlooked.

Caton-Thompson went on to collaborate with Dorothea Bate in the excavation of the prehistoric cave of Ghar Dalam, Malta, before returning to work on settlement sites in Egypt. With the geologist Elinor Wight Gardner, who would later become another of Garrod’s Mt Carmel diggers, in 1924 she began one of the first archaeological inter-disciplinary research projects, a survey of the Al-Fayyūm region.

Caton-Thompson moved swiftly onto one of her greatest achievements, when in 1929 she investigated the enormously impressive site of Great Zimbabwe, then within the British colony of Rhodesia. Her work here proved that not only was this monumental site the work of an indigenous African culture, but that it had been a great empire with trade links to the Indian Ocean. Following this, Gertrude returned to North Africa to survey the Kharga Oasis in the Sahara Desert, and in 1937 she undertook her last field campaign, this time working outside Africa in Arabia. This was the first major excavation undertaken in the region, and she collaborated once again with Elinor Gardner, while the writer and traveller Freya Stark joined them for her Arabian expertise. Although Caton-Thompson and Gardner were good friends, Stark did not get on well with either of them, and wrote a long, thinly-veiled attack on the pair and their field trip once it was over.

Returning to Britain, in 1939 Caton-Thompson started her stint as the longest-serving President of Prehistoric Society, less than ten years after Dorothy Garrod. Not long before her death in 1985, Caton-Thompson was made a fellow of University College, London. During her career she received many awards, including being the joint-first woman to be awarded an honorary degree from Cambridge and, in 1944, was the second woman to be elected to the British Academy.

Despite a privileged upbringing, including a stint in a French finishing school, Caton-Thompson seems to have grabbed hold of the independence and excitement offered by life as an archaeologist, and at times she needed to be tough. She caught malaria several times, and there are various stories of rough times and dangers during fieldwork, including disturbing a leopard while out surveying, and walking all night when Elinor’s team became stranded in the desert without water.

Kathleen Kenyon, 1906-1978

Dame Kathleen Kenyon, or “K” as she was known to friends, is perhaps the least slighted by public memory of the pioneering female figures discussed here — it would be very difficult to argue that anyone made a Dame of the British Empire could be considered overlooked by history. Her cut-glass voice and imposing physical presence are instantly recognisable in the many high profile radio and television documentaries she featured in. In particular, the 1956 BBC television program Buried Treasure: The Walls of Jericho, available from the BBC4 online archive, portrays a confident presence, evincing little hesitation as she outlines the massive enterprise of her sensational archaeological excavation of the biblical city of Jericho.

Kenyon’s first experience in archaeology was a grand adventure, even for a socially privileged young woman: she took the boat to Africa to work with Gertrude Caton-Thompson at the Great Zimbabwe site. After this character-forming experience, she took to fieldwork in earnest, working on many British sites with Tessa and Mortimer Wheeler, two major figures in the field.

Following work in the Near East, Kenyon was integral to the foundation of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London in 1937, and Kenyon is visible in archival photographs swathed in fur and seated front and centre in this modern academic enterprise. This image of Kenyon represents a transition from the hard-nosed, female scientific explorer codified by her predecessors towards something more recognisable as a modern academic. With Kenyon, we see institutional change in how a woman archaeologist might carry off a career. She enjoyed a long tenure as a respected academic, including important methodological contributions to field archaeology such as the Wheeler-Kenyon system of excavation, which ensures she is remembered for more than being a remarkable women at a time when women were not widely remarked upon.

It was Kenyon’s involvement with the Institute of Archaeology that had the biggest impact on the image of women in archaeology for our modern generation of academics. She is still remembered there as a dominating presence who traveled the halls of the Institute with her pack of noisy, beloved dogs, paying no heed to the terror her presence might strike in the more nervous sort of student. Her memory is alive and well in the institution she dedicated her life to, not as an abstract historical figure, of interest as much for her gender as her work, but as a confident, capable archaeologist.

Perhaps one of the most compelling images of Kenyon comes from the UCL archives of her work at Jericho. In a thoroughly modern image, she stands centred and still, hands on hips, in a denim shirt and matching flared skirt, as a sea of workmen, wheelbarrows, dust and activity eddies around her. The picture was taken nearly 70 years ago, but it could be an image from any of the large present-day excavations which are headed by the women who followed in her footsteps.

Joining the dots

The preceding biographies give a flavour of the impact of just a few of the women who were working in archaeology and palaeontology at the end of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. They all crossed paths at Garrod’s Mount Carmel excavation, but beyond this there are many other links which can be traced between them.

As the most senior of the four women in age and research experience, Dorothea Bate influenced both Dorothy Garrod and Gertrude Caton-Thompson by sharing her expertise in fossil animals. In 1922, she trained Caton-Thompson to identify animal remains in advance of her excavations at Ghar Dalam cave in Malta, and then, in 1923, helped Garrod with British Ice Age remains for her book The Upper Palaeolithic Age in Britain. In both cases, this marked the beginnings of life-long friendship and collaboration: Bate later worked with Garrod on Devil’s Tower in Gibraltar and Shukbah Cave, Palestine, and was a key figure in the large network of women archaeologists in the Middle East during the 1920s and 1930s. As well as excavating at Mount Carmel in 1934, Bate worked with Caton-Thompson’s friend and frequent collaborator, geologist Elinor Gardiner, in Bethlehem in 1937.

Dorothy Garrod and Gertrude Caton-Thompson, broadly contemporaries in age and with similar research interests, were also friends, corresponding regularly. Caton-Thompson held a Fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge during Garrod’s tenure, and followed in her footsteps by heading the Prehistoric Society. Much later, Caton-Thompson wrote an obituary for Garrod in 1969, giving some measure of the closeness of their professional and personal relationship.

Caton-Thompson also greatly influenced Kathleen Kenyon, who as we have heard, had her first fieldwork experience with her at Great Zimbabwe, which was another all-woman excavation (excluding local workmen). This seems to have been an equally enthralling and terrifying experience for the young Kathleen. She used her skills in photography to record finds, supervised her own trenches independently, and put her knowledge of automobiles to good use by looking after the project vehicle.

But Kenyon found Caton-Thompson a formidable supervisor and while clearly relishing the expeditions they took together to survey other regional sites, Caton-Thompson’s bluntness and hands-off approach as a teacher was intimidating. Following this challenging but exciting experience, Kenyon embarked upon other fieldwork, including at St Albans in Britain, where she found Tessa Wheeler a much more patient mentor, and at Samaria in Palestine with the Crowfoot family (having already met one of their daughters, Joan, on the St Albans digs). During the Samaria digs Kenyon visited Garrod’s Mt Carmel project and, presumably, was entertained in style at Tibn Towers.

Kenyon had therefore been at the centre of research environments full of women during her formative years, and the connections she forged undoubtedly stood her in good stead later in her career. For example, Garrod served on the committee which recommended Kenyon for her lectureship at the Institute of Archaeology.

Kenyon became a mentor herself, as her Jericho digs were a training ground for key figures in the next generation of women archaeologists, including those like Diana Kirkbride who came from less privileged backgrounds. That is the legacy of the Dame in the denim skirt; not the end of a string of notable women but rather a firm foundation of a professional, academic role for women in archaeology.

The careers of these four women mark a shift from largely self-funded “amateur” to professional academic. Dorothea Bate’s own career neatly illustrates this shift: from being the first woman scientist at the Natural History Museum, where she cut a lone female figure amongst the frock-coats and whiskers, she ended her career — finally — with a prestigious and permanent job, and part of a large and dynamic network of researchers that included many, many women, some of whom she had helped to train.

Bate was part of a trailblazing wave of British women, including Nina Layard, who corresponded with Dorothy Garrod about stone tools; Margaret Murray, who taught Gertrude Caton-Thompson; and Tessa Wheeler, who trained Kathleen Kenyon. And across the Atlantic, in the halls of America’s women’s colleges, another splendid regiment was forming, with their own links to the British contingent, for example, Harriet Boyd Hawes and Edith Hall Dohlan, whom Dorothea Bate met back in 1904 on the former’s excavations in Crete.

Younger generations of archaeologists owed a lot to Bate and company for the barriers they broke down at various institutions, and the support and encouragement they provided. Still later generations owe a similar debt to Garrod and Kenyon and their contemporaries through demonstrating that it was possible to direct enormous field projects, and to ascend the upper echelons of academia. Dorothy Garrod was the first woman to hold a Professorial chair at either Cambridge or Oxford, paving the way for women throughout academia, not just in archaeology. Kathleen Kenyon was acting director of the Institute of Archaeology in London during World War Two, and went on to be Director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (1956-67), and then Principal of St Hugh’s College Oxford (1962-73). Although others proved that years of fieldwork did not necessarily mean academic recognition: Gertrude Caton-Thompson was a respected researcher with a huge amount of fieldwork behind her (and was reputedly also considered for the chair awarded to Garrod), but for the most part she did not have the recognition of a permanent position.

Keeping the trowels blazing in the 21^st century

As early career researchers in archaeology and palaeontology, we had all heard of various women in these fields. Some individuals’ research we knew intimately, for example VH’s own research on dwarf elephant fossils necessitated delving deeply into Dorothea Bate’s work and original archives. Others we had vignettes of in our minds, as figures of legend within the story of archaeology as a discipline, such as Kathleen Kenyon and Dorothy Garrod. Wanting to celebrate the contributions of women to archaeology, palaeontology and geology, we joined forces to create an online project: TrowelBlazers. We hoped to harness the power of social networks to raise the profile of pioneer women researchers, and to build a community that supports and values the contributions of women researchers today.

As we began to research these trowelblazers, we were struck by the sheer numbers of women scientists and how they connected and supported each other: digging together, advising and collaborating, training later generations. Not only were these women often working long-term with particular individuals (see figure on findingada.com), they were all woven into an extraordinarily wide web. The complexity of connections is fascinating, but we think it indicates something more important: that networks matter.

Today archaeology has better gender parity statistics than many other scientific disciplines, with an older generation in senior roles, and more women than ever joining the profession, creating ever-renewing connections of training, mentoring and collaborations (as can also be seen in palaeontology and geology). Could this stem from the highly developed and integrated early networks of women that worked together, and competed with each other?

Women in archaeology, geology and palaeontology, individually and together, made enormous advances right from the start of these scientific fields. It is both their scholarly achievements and their research community building that we find inspiring, and hope others do too.

Acknowledgements

We humbly acknowledge the enormous amount of work done on the history of women in the fields of archaeology, geology and palaeontology that we rely on for this chapter and the TrowelBlazers blog. In particular we thank Pamela Jane Smith, who has spent many years researching Dorothy Garrod, and has been generous in her support of our efforts to open up this amazing story to a new audience; and Karolyn Shindler, biographer of Dorothea Bate, who has been a great source of information and supportive friend to VH — both in respect to this chapter and to VH’s scientific research. A huge amount of original research on Caton-Thompson, Garrod and Kenyon can be found in GM Cohen and MS Joukowsky’s brilliant 2006 book, Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists, which formed the basis for our network figure (available on findingada.com) and much of this chapter. We include in the bibliography further sources we have used in writing this chapter.

Further reading

Cohen, GM & Joukowsky, MS (2006), Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists, University of Michigan.

Davies, M (2008), Dame Kathleen Kenyon: Digging up the Holy Land, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Irwin-Williams, C (1990), “Women in the Field. The Role of Women in Archaeology before 1960”, in Kass-Simon, G & Farnes, P (eds) Women of Science; Righting the Record, Indiana University Press, pp. 1-41.

Shindler, K (2005), Discovering Dorothea, London: Harper Collins.

Smith, PJ (2009), A Splendid Idiosyncrasy: Prehistory at Cambridge 1915-50, BAR British Series 485, Oxford: Oxbow.

Buried Treasure: The Walls of Jericho (1956). BBC documentary about Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations at Jericho. Viewable online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01819yv

Full bibliography available on findingada.com.

About the authors

Web: trowelblazers.com
 Twitter: @trowelblazers

Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Rebecca Wragg Sykes is a Palaeolithic archaeologist, specialising in the Neandertals. She is fascinated by this incredibly adaptable and successful ancient human species, and is passionate about improving their still lamentable public image as the ‘losers of the Ice Age’. She is a stone tool (lithic) expert, scientific writer and consultant. Her postdoctoral research project, funded by the European Commission 7^th Framework, involved exploring Neandertal landscapes and territories by looking at the technology and transport of stone tools from sites in the Massif Central, southeast France.

Twitter: @LeMoustier
Website: rebeccawraggsykes.com
Bloomsbury author page: https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/rebecca-wragg-sykes/

Victoria Herridge

Victoria Herridge is a palaeobiologist at the Natural History Museum, London. She researches the evolution of dwarf elephants on Mediterranean islands, and uses the field notes and diaries of scientists like Dorothea Bate to rediscover the sites that the museum’s dwarf elephant fossils originally came from.

Twitter: @ToriHerridge
Website: toriherridge.com
Bloomsbury author page: http://bloomsburywildlife.com/victoria-herridge/

Brenna Hassett

Brenna Hassett is a physical anthropologist and archaeologist, and Research Associate at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL. Her research interests focus on understanding childhood health, growth, and development by studying human remains, particularly teeth. She has worked on a wide variety of archaeological material and sites ranging from the Upper Palaeolithic to the 18^th century AD, and from a variety of locations including Egypt, England, Greece, Thailand and Turkey.

Twitter: @brennawalks
Bloomsbury author page: https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/brenna-hassett/
Blog: https://cosmicshambles.com/words/blogs/dirtyscience

Suzanne Pilaar Birch

Suzanne Pilaar Birch is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Geography and directs the Quaternary Isotope Paleoecology Lab, University of Georgia, US. Her research interests include understanding the effects of climate change and human-animal-environmental interactions in the past. She has worked on a range of archaeological projects spanning from US to Croatia, Turkey, Kazakhstan and China.

Twitter: @suzie_birch
Academic website: https://anthropology.uga.edu/directory/people/suzanne-pilaar-birch