Beyond 'Notability': Re-evaluating Women's Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage in Britain, 1870 - 1950

'It's hard to be what you can't see.' Marian Wright Edelman's observation captures the importance of diversity and representation in social, intellectual and political life. This project seeks to address this challenge in one field: women's work in British archaeology, history and heritage in the 19th and 20th centuries. Although academic research and citizen-science initiatives have begun to address this agenda, and figures such as Amelia Edwards and Gertrude Bell have entered the popular imagination, obstacles remain to evaluating the full extent of women's historical contributions to British cultural life. Political disenfranchisement, gendered social roles, and dependent economic status combined to place women in informal, ancillary positions in museums and other cultural institutions. Their work is often overlooked in contemporary sources and their networks difficult to reconstruct, obscured by married names and non-professional status.
Archives offer a key to unlock the work of women and other non-elite historical actors, creating a fuller and more inclusive understanding of the past. Yet many significant national and regional institutional archives remain inaccessible. Few have been catalogued or digitised. Even where physical access is possible, inherited conventions of naming and data organisation render women hard to identify, their activities difficult to reconstruct.
This project brings together academic researchers with expertise in intellectual and social history, information science and digital humanities in partnership with the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) in order to recover the broad landscape of women's work in archaeology, history, and heritage and their intellectual networks in 19th and 20th-century Britain via detailed investigation of two significant cultural-institutional archives. We will take as our basis the extensive archival holdings of the SAL (founded 1707), and the Royal Archaeological Institute (RAI, founded 1844), housed together at the SAL headquarters in Burlington House, Piccadilly. We will conduct the first ever comprehensive analysis of these institutions' archival holdings for the period 1870 to the 1950s: a time of great social, political and cultural change in Britain which was marked by women's entry into various fields of British public life. Building upon approaches in recent information science, we will develop a framework for cataloguing the archives so as to highlight and render discoverable the rich evidence of women's historical activities that they contain. We will also trace these women's activities beyond the SAL and RAI archives, using Linked Open Data to connect them to other institutions and heritage sites in the UK and beyond.
On the basis of this analysis we will write a new history of archaeology, history, and heritage in 19th- and 20th-century Britain, which will reveal the extent of women's contributions to the shaping, practice and institutionalisation of these fields. With the SAL's assistance we will develop partnerships with other institutions that emerge, through our research, as significantly connected to the women whose histories we uncover, in order to enrich interpretations of regional and local museums, heritage sites and other cultural institutions across the UK. We anticipate interest in the project findings from cultural and heritage institutions, local and national media, and academic and public history researchers.
Team members will produce a research monograph and articles, a unique research dataset published under open-license in a project website, conference papers, a programme of interactive public engagement events and digital creative materials that can be adapted and reused to enrich education and outreach in museums and heritage institutions.