Team TrowelBlazer!
Ever heard of Dorothea Bate or Honor Frost? How about Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin or Harriet Boyd Hawes?
Whilst you’ve probably heard of Mary Anning and her paleontological work in Lyme Regis, she was not the only woman working in her field at the time. In fact, more women have been wielding trowels in aid of archaeology, geology and palaeontology than anyone gives them credit for, as Victoria Herridge and the other co-founders of TrowelBlazers have discovered. These women have been neglected for too long, and TrowelBlazers.com aims to celebrate their contributions to science.
When we say these ladies are amazing, we aren’t joking: Dorothea Bate walked into a job at the Natural History Museum in London in 1898 (at just the age of 19!) with no formal education. She later went on to become an expert on Mediterranean fossil mammals, discovering many extinct island species. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, the only woman to win a Nobel Prize for science in Britain, was also an incredibly keen archaeologist, carrying out fieldwork alongside her undergraduate chemistry degree at Oxford.
We believe the TrowelBlazer gang (Brenna Hasset, Victoria Herridge, Suzanne Pilaar Birch and Rebecca Wragg Sykes) are doing an amazing thing, rediscovering the lost female archaeologists of the past. However, wouldn’t it be better if these gals hadn’t have been forgotten about in the first place? Let’s ensure this doesn’t happen again and discover and value the women doing amazing things for science today.
You can also follow the lovely ladies themselves, here:
Brenna Hasset (@brennawalks)
Victoria Herridge (@ToriHerridge)
Suzanne Pilaar Birch (@suzie_birch)
Rebecca Wragg Sykes (@LeMoustier)
