The Groundbreaking Women

When mention about the groundbreaking women Margaret Murray is one of the women that we should remember. British archaeologist and scholar Margaret Murray emerged in the late 19th century as a formidable figure in the developing specialty of Egyptology (Weisberger, 2018).

On 13 July 1863, there was a special girl born in this world. Margaret Alice Murray was the name given by her family. Margaret Murray was born in Calcutta, British India, the youngest daughter of a merchant and his wife. India is the place which she has grown up that gives Margaret Murray a big impact on her future life. In 1894, Margaret Murray began studying Egyptology at UCL (University of London). UCL is the place she meets Flinders Petrie the department head. Flinders Petrie was an English Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology who encourage Margaret to write her first research paper. Margaret’s career was to lead her on a ground-breaking journey which brings her to explore in the area of archaeological and theoretical landscapes of Egyptology, folklore, and feminist political reform.

One of the vital experiences that make Margaret Murray a groundbreaking woman was her first excavated in Egypt with Petrie, at Abydos in 1902-1903. In 1907, Margaret makes an excavation at Deir Rifa which related to the unwrapping Khnum-Nakht and 1908 herself lead the unwrapping Khnum-Nakht. This makes her the first woman that publicly unwrapped mummy. Her independent excavations took place in the 1920s and 1930s on the Mediterranean islands of Malta, where she excavated the important prehistoric site of Borg in-Nadur, and Menorca, where she excavated two Bronze Age megalithic sites at Trepuco and Sa Torreta (Whitehouse, 16). Besides that, Margaret Murray not only participates in the field of excavation. In 1899 she was appointed to a junior lectureship, making her the first female lecturer in archaeology in the UK (Whitehouse, 16). Apart from that, Margaret Murray was one of the first archaeologists to be employed at UCL (University of London). However, she did not appoint as a female professor until 1949.

Margaret Murray also brings her concern about the feminist campaign. She joined the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union, took an active role at protests and marches, including the 1907 Mud March and the Women’s Coronation Procession in June 2011 (Scott, 2018). My First Hundred Years is an autobiography that records her lifetime. On 13 July 1963, she celebrated her 100th birthday with a huge celebration in her honor. And after two months on 13 November 1963, Margaret Murray ended her brilliant life.

We should learn the value and spirit form Margaret Murray which becomes a determined and brave person in our life.

Dorothy Garrod was an archaeologist, born in Chandos Street, London. She was an English archaeologist who focused on the Palaeolithic period with her main specialize in human origin and the first seeds of agriculture (Adams, 2010). Garrod study for a Diploma with Anthropology in Pitt River Museum. Her lecturer at that time was Robert Marett and she graduated in 1921. After that, she had found her intellectual vocation, which is specialized in the archaeology field of the Palaeolithic Age.

In the years between 1922 and 1924, Dorothy Garood went on to work with the French prehistorian Abbé Breuil at the Institute de Paleontologié Humaine, Paris (Scott, 2017). In 1925, Garrod investigated Devil’s Tower Cave and found the skull of a Neanderthal child, which she named Abel, now called Gibraltar 2 (Debakcsy, 2019). In the following year, Garrod also had published her first academic work, The Upper Paleolithic of Britain. In 1928, she had led an expedition through South Kurdistan for the excavation work in Hazar Merd Cave and Zarzi Cave. In 1929 to 1932, Garrod became a research fellow at Newnham and later a Leverhulme Research Fellow, and published The Stone Age of Mount Carmel in 1937, considered as a ground-breaking work. After holding several academic positions, she was appointed to the Disney Chair of Archaeology at Cambridge in 1939 (Díaz-Andreu, 2012). During World War II Garrod took leave of absence from the university and joined the Photographic Intelligence Service and was a section officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (Catharine M. C. Haines, Helen M. Stevens, 2001).

After the war, Garrod returned to her position and change the introduction of a module of study on prehistory. According to (Darvill, 2008), Dorothy not only was a British archaeologist and scholar noted for her work on Paleolithic but she was also the first woman to hold an Oxbridge Chair. In my view, Dorothy Garrod is one of the most influential women of her time. Her efforts in the archaeological world are remarkable in providing the means to archaeologists to continue their research in the present and the future.

Dame Kathleen was began her career as a photographer for a first field exposure leading dig at Zimbabwe on 1929 with a British archaeologist. Under the supervision of Gertrude Caton Thompson, she was assigned to a systematic archaeological finds process, accurate excavation, detailed documentation and proper selection. Consequently, it makes attract attention Dame Kathleen to the archeological remains of ancient Britain, she started operating at a variety of sites and reporting several findings between 1930 until 1951. Contributed to Caton Thompson's The Zimbabwe Society, "Sketch of Discovery and Development on the East Coast of Africa" was her first publications article. After the end of the Second World War, while working as a director of the British School of Archeology, she carried out excavations in the ancient site of Jericho, Jordan and the Old Testament. Since, her excavated in Jericho to it Stone Age base she had revealed it to be the oldest known human settlement ever inhabited.

During the year of 1952, the findings about discoveries the Neolithic cultures were made. She being well known among whole world of archaeologists because of the idea that a significant biblical storyline was related to Jericho made it a straightforward option for the founders for archaeology in Palestine to test the utility of the emerging science in upholding the biblical interpretation of history. No more remarkable discovery may be discovered than those of the walls that Joshua caused to crash thus these walls were established as those of the Biblical period with Jericho was a rallying point in the effort to use archaeology to affirm the past of the Bible. In which more surprising, this brought the development of an agricultural system at around 7000 B.C., from which there was also a huge stone wall and a high tower, and also an intricate domestic architecture from the 7th century.

An unusual 7th-millennium series of plaster sculptures based on human skulls was especially illustrative of the careful technique of excavation. Therefore, archeological methods that Dame Kathleen intensively applied to her excavations, and which are subsequently regarded as the Wheeler-Kenyon process. Whereas, most of the archaeologists have been inspired and adjusted their techniques to the exception of this being originally Israeli archaeologists, who were unavailable of conduct the excavations in Jericho and later in Jerusalem. The events of her life certainly show she demanded equal treatment with her male peers and was not inclined to defer to them. Although it might not have always felt compelled to them, it has enabled her to become one of the century's most extensive worldwide archeologists in 20th century. To sum up about Dame Kathleen, Digging up Jericho (1957), Excavations at Jericho (vol. 1, 1960; 2, 1965), Amorites and Canaanites (1966), Royal Cities of the Old Testament (1970), and Digging up Jerusalem (1974) are writings related to her later work.