Female Agency and “Lost Cities” in the Late Ottoman and Early Mandate periods

Outline

The history of ancient urban sites and their “rediscovery” by Western travellers is one full of narratives about men and adventure, politics and power, conquest and knowledge, technological advances and innovative discoveries. The narratives involving women in these contexts have often been overlooked and to this day remain largely unwritten. This is due to several factors, including a general scarcity of published evidence, less attractive - at least on the surface - narratives, and a general perception that their stories were less compelling, and the enduring view held by many contemporaries and reinforced by later scholars, that their roles were marginal or merely supportive. 

Antiquarian travel, archaeological fieldwork, and collecting practices have long been perceived as gendered pursuits. Despite the visibility of a select few, women have largely been written out of the grand narratives of adventure and exploration that have shaped Western perceptions of the East. While some gained recognition as writers, archaeologists, collectors, and patrons, many more were documented only in supporting roles, identified as wives, daughters, or companions of prominent men. Further women would have included those in local contexts, e.g. Arab, Armenian, Kurdish, Ottoman, Jewish, of whom we today know even less, due to the scarce sources. While some women recorded their experiences and activities in their own words, many accounts and examples have not reached academic or public audiences. 

Yet the ways in which women operated within these structures and tropes became instrumental to the development of archaeological research and practice in the region and cannot be reduced to mere reflections of their male counterparts. Women travelled, thought, excavated, collected, wrote, and articulated their aesthetic and intellectual preferences in ways that were often distinct. They also formed their own networks of employment, mentorship, friendship and collaboration, alongside dynamics of competition, conflict and animosity. 

Focusing on travellers, archaeologists, collectors, and patrons active in Western Asia during the Late Ottoman and Mandate periods, this workshop aims to illuminate those whose voices have long been silenced or sidelined. We seek contributions that critically engage with the role of women in shaping antiquarian and archaeological practices, as well as with the power relations and material networks that circulated through the objects they recorded, collected, and interpreted. 

In recent years, the turn toward archival archaeology has opened new possibilities for critically revisiting the foundations of the discipline and the structures of exclusion embedded in its historiography. This workshop invites participants to reflect not only on the women who were actively involved in travel, excavation, collecting, and patronage, but also on the ways in which their traces have been recorded—or erased—in institutional and personal archives. By engaging with letters, diaries, field notes, photographs, inventories, and museum records, we aim to foreground the archival labour required to reconstruct these fragmented histories and to question the silences that persist in dominant narratives. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a broader rethinking of the gendered practices of knowledge production and the archival politics that continue to shape the field of archaeology. 

By moving beyond narratives of exceptionalism and frameworks that view women primarily in relation to men—whether as relatives, colleagues or objectified—this workshop offers a space to begin to reframe the complex entanglements of gender, power, and knowledge in the making of archaeology in particular in the context of the large-scale urban excavations of the late 19th and early 20th century in Western Asia.

Programme

Book of Abstracts (incl. Programme)

Speakers and discussants

• Annemarie Schantor (German Archaeological Institute, Rome)
• Anthony Quickel (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
• Birgit Sporleder (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
• Dagmar Schäfer (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
• Eleanor Q. Neil (Aarhus University)
• Johannes Köhler (Freie Universität Berlin)
• Kristine Dyrmann (Aarhus University)
• Lennart Kruijer (Leiden University)
• Mannat Johal (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
• Michael Blömer (University of Münster)
• Miriam Kühn (Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin)
• Olympia Bobou (Aarhus University)
• Rory McInnes-Gibbons (Durham University)
• Rubina Raja (Aarhus University)
• Sarah Irving (University of Staffordshire)
• Sebastian Willert (Leibniz-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow)
• Sonja Bäse (German Archaeological Institute, Rome)
• Tine Bagh (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek)
• Wendy Doyon (EUME, Berlin)