Amanda Adams Read Free Page B

them to kick their dusty boots up onto the kitchen table. Remind me of your crazy lives and courage. I asked each of them to look over my shoulder as I wrote their respective chapters, and if that didn’t make the writing any better, it did make my own journey through their stories richer.
    Archaeology’s essence is to uncover the origins of things, the epicenters of change, the evolution of style, technology, and everything else that makes us human. It makes sense that these pioneering women would take such a field of study as their own. As they challenged ideas about what a woman could accomplish, transformed styles of clothing through cross-dressing, cut their hair boyishly short, and broke into a scientific field previously denied them, little did the ladies know to what extent they were making history themselves.
    ABOVE : Amelia Edwards, the revered godmother of Egyptology

EPILOGUE
    EXCAVATIONS
    C amels, deserts, archaeology, solitude, and women’s lives lived fearlessly: a romantic combination that appeals to us folk bound to laptops, an apartment lease or mortgage, and routine. The pioneering women archaeologists experienced a brand of adventure that evokes dreamy wanderlust and longing for the time when a woman could gallop across deserts on a horse wearing impractical but fetching clothes, a knife strapped to her leg beneath her petticoat, a bag full of ammunition and letters, no return ticket, tea and conversation in tents. These women seemed so free in a way we no longer are, tethered as we are to email and cell phones and appointment books. Nor can we truly escape from our own Western culture, as Coke cans, fast food, and neon lights greet us upon arrival in most corners of the world. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to go away was really and truly to be gone.
    After exploring the lives of each of the seven women in this book, I realized that except for Dorothy Garrod, none of them were young women when they embarked on their archaeological travels, only to return to the equivalent of settled suburban life after a fleeting moment in a faraway place. Nor did they build enviable careers by age thirty. On the contrary, their professional and personal achievements were a slow burn.
    While most of the ladies chronicled here had at least an interest in archaeology and history when they were young, archaeology often sneaked into their lives in unexpected ways and at unexpected times. Amelia Edwards found her passion for Egyptology by chance on the Nile. She was thirty years old when she set out looking for life’s new path, though. Advancing archaeological work in Egypt was not something she had in mind. To do so, she compromised a lucrative career as a novelist to start learning hieroglyphics in her late thirties, mastered it, and became a middle-aged Egyptologist.
    Zelia Nuttall had loved Mexican archaeology since reading picture books made of ancient symbols and codes as a child before bedtime, but she did not venture out into the archaeological field itself until age fifty-three. Accustomed to life in a big fancy house with servants and distinguished guests to entertain, she was downright excited about camping in an abandoned quarantine station for weeks on a deserted island so she could dig. You never do know when life’s best adventure will present itself.
    Jane Dieulafoy’s career in archaeology was handmaiden to her marriage. Had she married a different man, Susa might never have been their shared dream. Still actively excavating in Morocco just before she succumbed to fever at age sixty-five, Dieulafoy followed her passion for archaeology all the way to death’s door, and her taste for rigorous fieldwork only deepened as she aged. She and Marcel excavated and went on arduous journeys their whole lives. It was a rare form of sustainable adventure.
    Gertrude Bell was forty-four years old when she started flirting with the (married) man she loved. She was forty-five when she rode solo on a