Pacific Matildas: finding the first women archaeologists in the Pacific

Written by Dr Emilie Dotte-Sarout
​University of Western Australia

As archaeologists, we are trained to be aware that in archaeological deposits ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. It is time for us to apply such a mindset to our understanding of the discipline’s history and confront what historians of minorities have long identified as ‘historical silences’, both in archival materials and official histories (Allen 1986; Trouillot 1995). Just as the AWAWS Project is willing to address this issue in regards to the legacy of women in ancient world studies in Australia and New Zealand, a new ARC funded DECRA research project aims at telling the stories of the first Pacific archaeologists who also happened to be women. 

Pacific Matildas: finding the women in the history of Pacific archaeology responds to the call made by historian of science Margaret Rossiter 25 years ago for “future scholars to write a more equitable and comprehensive history and sociology of science that not only does not leave all the ‘Matildas’ out, but calls attention to still more of them” (1993: 337). In this landmark paper, Rossiter described the historical process – coined ‘Matilda effect’ - through which female scientists were written out of history. The historiography of archaeology - itself a side-concern for the history of science - has classically produced narratives that are fundamentally gender-biased (Claassen 1994; Diaz-Andreu & Sorrensen 1998; Cohen & Joukowsky 2004). This is especially pertinent in relation to the relatively small community of Pacific archaeologists, long apparently dominated by male practitioners. Scratching below the surface of this representation, this project proposes to analyse the reasons for the perceived or factual absence of women in the development of the discipline, study the contextual factors that led to such a situation, determine the barriers faced by those women indeed engaged in the field and, by doing so, highlight their legacy, tell their stories.
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These themes emerged during the research I have been undertaking for the previous five years as part of the team working on the ‘Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific’ (CBAP ARC Laureate project led by Prof. Matthew Spriggs). As the very first consolidated and multilingual effort to investigate the historiography of archaeology in the region, highlighting the role of ‘hidden’ figures – namely indigenous collaborators and women engaged in the discipline – was part of our agenda. Yet, our experience clearly demonstrated the specific difficulties encountered in trying to ‘hear’ these hidden voices in the silences of the archives of Pacific archaeology. To overcome this, each of these topics needs to be examined on its own terms. For the women who were part of the development of archaeology in the Pacific to be included in the history of the discipline, explicit attention has to be given to the subject using a specific set of approaches and methods informed by gender studies and the feminist history of science, while integrating those used in the history of archaeology until now. 

Women in the history of science

​The history of women in (western) science as it is today stands at the confluence of two large movements of intellectual transformation, both starting around the 1960s: on the one hand, the development of analyses of scientific knowledge constructions that consider the importance of socio-historical and subjective contingencies; on the other hand, the influence of second-wave feminism prompting an exponential increase in research on women’s history. This intellectual context elicited foundational works in the 1980s researching the lives and legacies of women scientists.
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In particular, the first volume of Margaret Rossiter’s foundational Women Scientists in America (1982) not only demonstrated that many women had been active in American science since the 19th century despite not being represented in dominant historical narratives, but also that they developed specific strategies to overcome oppositional reactions and the segregated structuration of the scientific establishment. These observations hold true for the rest of the western world, with women scientists finding ways to advance knowledge and practice at least since antiquity (Watts 2007), including in the belatedly appearing disciplines of the social sciences (McDonald 2004; Carroy et al. 2005). Rossiter identified the gendered assumptions that tended to keep women out of science as a masculine field, writing that 19th century “women scientists were (…) caught between two almost exclusive stereotypes: as scientists they were atypical women; as women they were unusual scientists” (1982: xvi). This question has since been much examined by feminist historians of science (Watts 2007; Schiebinger 2014) and is certainly pertinent in regards to the first women who were interested in the emerging field of prehistory/archaeology in the Pacific: not only were they entering the masculine realm of science, but also those of fieldwork and the public sphere in exotic, mostly colonial spaces – not a woman’s place by any 19th century and early 20th century expectations. It must also be remembered that in most of the western world, sociocultural gendered norms were articulated with the legal subjugation of women, severely restricting their freedom and participation in public society until the 1960s in some of the European countries that played a role in the history of Pacific archaeology.

Finding the women in the history of Pacific archaeology

Laura Thompson. Images courtesy of guampedia.com and Dr. Rebecca Stephenson

A number of women have already been identified as a result of my previous work with CBAP and will be researched during the Pacific Matildas project; for example, traveller and artist Adèle de Dombasle who documented archaeological sites in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia during the 1840s; Jeanne Leenhardt, an essential collaborator and network agent for both her husband Maurice Leenhardt and amateur archaeologist Marius Archambault in New Caledonia during the 1900s-1920s; Laura Thompson (the second person, after Ralph Linton, to earn a PhD in Pacific archaeology, in 1933)[1] who was especially active in Marianas’ archaeology around the mid-20th century; and Aurora Natua, a key indigenous network agent, material culture and oral tradition expert collaborator for the first professional archaeologists to work in French Polynesia throughout most of the second half of the 20th century (Dotte-Sarout et al. forthcoming).
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But I will not work alone on this project, and in addition to collaborative works with colleagues in Australia and elsewhere, postgraduate research projects are proposed within this DECRA. PhD candidate, Sylvie Brassard, has just started investigating the role, names, and legacies of the elusive group of women ‘volunteers’ working at the Musée de l’Homme during the emergence of the distinct school of French ‘archéologie océaniste’ in the mid-20th century. I am looking for interested postgraduate students to examine other topics, such as the particular dynamics that characterised the increasing engagement of women in New Zealand and Australian archaeology during the 20th century; the works and unusual careers of early women anthropologists sharing an interest in string figures;  those who became specialists in material culture studies; and indigenous ‘folklorist’ experts in oral traditions linked to archaeological history. Finally, Dr India Dilkes-Hall is working with me to develop a database compiling the women’s scientific written outputs that we aim to make accessible online at the end of the project, offering a wide exposure to the Pacific Matildas’ legacies.  We also want to use it as a tool to conduct citation rates analysis in the main and most enduring archaeology journals of the region to provide a comparable measure of research impact with their male colleagues and between themselves.

Together, we want to ensure that the ‘Matildas’ of Pacific archaeology are not left out of its history.

[1] Although Margarete Schurig also completed her museum-based doctoral dissertation Die Südseetöpferei (Pacific Pottery) in 1930 in Leipzig, which remained the foremost text on the subject for at least the next thirty years.
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References

• Allen J. 1986. Evidence and Silence: Feminism and the Limits of History. In Pateman C. & Gross E. (eds) Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory. Allen & Unwin: 173–189.
• Carroy J., Edelman N., Ohayon A., Richard N. 2005. Les femmes dans les sciences de l’Homme (XIX-XXe siècles). Inspiratrices, collaboratrices ou créatrices. Seli Arslan.
• Claassen C. 1994. Women in Archaeology. University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Cohen G. & Joukowsky M. 2004. Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists. University of Michigan Press. Diaz-Andreu M. & M.L.S. Sorensen. 1998. Excavating Women: A History of Women in European Archaeology. Routledge.
• Dotte-Sarout E., Maric T. and Molle G. Forthcoming. Aurora Natua and the motu Paeao site: Unlocking French Polynesia’s islands for Pacific archaeologists. In Jones T.H. Howes & Spriggs M. (eds) Uncovering Pacific Pasts: Histories of archaeology in Oceania. ANU Press, Acton (submitted August 2020).
• McDonald L. 2004. Women Founders of the Social Sciences. McGill-Queen's University Press.
• Rossiter M. 1982. Women scientists in America: Struggles and strategies to 1940. John Hopkins University Press. 
• Rossiter M. 19993. The --Matthew-- Matilda Effect in Science, Social Studies of Science, 23 (2): 325-341. (NB: Matthew is a stikethrough in original reference)
• Schiebinger L. 2014. Women and Gender in Science and Technology. Routledge.
• Trouillot M-R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press.
• Watts R. 2007. Women in Science. A Social and Cultural History. Routledge.