The "Adventuring" of Katharine Menke Keeling Woolley

Excellent post from the Penn Museum Blog.

  Katharine helping Leonard record measurements of drain pipes at Ur.

By: Kyra Kaercher

Ur Project February 2016

Life on a dig is always exciting, and particularly when it is the life of a woman on a dig in the 1920s. Many women travelers went to the East to escape the restrictive roles that European society had assigned to them. Women like Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), who helped to write the Iraqi antiquities law of 1924, Jane Dieulafoy (1851-1916), who excavated at Susa in Iran, or Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) who traveled throughout North Africa, turned to the East and a life of adventure. Katharine Menke Keeling Woolley (1888-1945) was no different. Raised in Germany and educated at Oxford, she became a nurse during WWI where she met and married her first husband, Colonel Bertram Keeling. He worked as a surveyor in Egypt and they moved to Cairo. Not long after their marriage, he committed suicide on the Giza Plateau, in a supposed fit of temporary insanity (Henrietta McCall Lecture 2012). Multiple theories have been put forth as to the reason for this insanity; one being that Katharine had Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, and would not be able to have children (Henrietta McCall Lecture 2012).

The First Museum - Found in Ur of the Chaldees!

An absolutely fascinating article.  I'd no idea Woolley also discovered this while excavating at Ur! From io9.com, Secret History (cue spooky music....)

The story behind the world’s oldest museum, built by a Babylonian princess 2,500 years ago
May 25, 2011

Alasdair Wilkins—In 1925, archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered a curious collection of artifacts while excavating a Babylonian palace. They were from many different times and places, and yet they were neatly organized and even labeled. Woolley had discovered the world's first museum.

It's easy to forget that ancient peoples also studied history - Babylonians who lived 2,500 years ago were able to look back on millennia of previous human experience. That's part of what makes the museum of Princess Ennigaldi so remarkable. Her collection contained wonders and artifacts as ancient to her as the fall of the Roman Empire is to us. But it's also a grim symbol of a dying civilization consumed by its own vast history.

The Archaeologist

Ennigaldi's museum was just one of many remarkable finds made by Leonard Woolley, generally considered to be among the first of the modern archaeologists. Born in London in 1880, Woolley studied at Oxford before becoming the assistant keeper at the school's Ashmolean Museum. It was there that Arthur Evans - himself a renowned archaeologist for his work with the Minoan civilization on the Greek island of Crete - decided that Woolley would be of more use out in the field, and so Evans sent him to Rome to begin his excavating career.

Although Woolley had a longstanding interest in excavation, he had little or no formal training in how to actually go about doing it. He would be left to teach himself on the job, and many of the techniques and approaches he came up with would prove hugely influential to future archaeologists. Just before the outbreak of World War I, he excavated the ancient Hittite city of Carchemish alongside his younger colleague T.E. Lawrence, who would soon cast aside his archaeological career for his more famous role as...well, as Lawrence of Arabia. You can see the two together in the photo on the left.

But it was Woolley's work in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur that would really cement his legacy. Beginning in 1922, Woolley excavated huge swaths of an ancient city-state that had endured for thousands of years, from the ancient Sumerian civilization of 3000 BCE to the Neo-Babylonian Empire of 500 BCE. One of his biggest discoveries - you might call it the Sumerian equivalent of King Tut's tomb - was the tomb of Shubad, a woman of great importance in 27th century Sumer whose tomb had remained undisturbed through the ensuing 4,600 years.

However, it was the discovery of something from the very end of Ur's existence that interests us in this particular case. And for that, we might as well go straight to the words of Leonard Woolley himself.

The DiscoveryIn his book Ur of the Chaldees, Woolley recounts his excavations of a palace complex in Ur. This particular palace dated to the very end of the city-state's long history, right before the absorption of its territories into the Persian Empire and the eventual abandonment of the city around 500 BCE. This was the time of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and while Babylon was (unsurprisingly) the capital of this empire, the now ancient city of Ur was still important both for its strategic location near the Persian Gulf and for its legacy as a once great power.

As Woolley explains in his book, he and his team were quite confident that they were excavating Ur from its latest period, which is why the artifacts they found in one particular chamber (a photo of which is on the left) made so little sense:

Suddenly the workmen brought to light a large oval-topped black stone whose top was covered with carvings in relief and its sides with inscriptions; it was a boundary-stone recording the position and the outlines of a landed property, with a statement as to how it came legally into the owner's hands and a terrific curse on whosoever should remove his neighbor's landmark or deface or destroy the record.

Now, this stone belonged to the Kassite period of about 1400 BC Almost touching it was a fragment of a statue, a bit of the arm of a human figure on which was an inscription, and the fragment had been carefully trimmed so as to make it look neat and to preserve the writing; and the name on the statue was that of Dungi, who was king of Ur in 2058 BC. Then came a clay foundation-cone of a Larsa king of about 1700 BC, then a few clay tablets of about the same date, and a large votive stone mace-head which was uninscribed but may well have been more ancient by five hundred years.

What were we to think? Here were half a dozen diverse objects found lying on an unbroken brick pavement of the sixth century BC, yet the newest of them was seven hundred years older than the pavement and the earliest perhaps sixteen hundred.

Rest of article.

The Gault Site

Until I read this article, I had no idea that the Gault site had been a "pay to dig" site or that it had been subject wholesale to looting. 1929 - this dude Pearce is considered a revered figure in archaeology? More like a looter himself - just like Woolley (Ur) and Carter (King "Tut's" tomb, Egypt) and the other so-called "archaeologists" of that era. They were all out to find gold treasure trove, like Schliemann had a few generations before at Troy. I'm more of an archaeologist than they ever were - and I have no formal training whatsoever! (Image: Clovis point, Gault site) The second interesting point of this article is that it points to pre-Clovis peoples here in North and South America and, specifically, at the Gault site. Well - duh! Archaeological evidence of this has been uncovered at other sites scattered across North American for at least the past 20 years (maybe even longer than that). However, vested interests and reputations are at stake - it would NOT do to admit one was a bit hasty in interpreting existing evidence at the time, oh no! Can't do that - what would happen to the textbook contract and all the papers written IGNORING all available evidence at the time? In this day and age of the internet and instant communications, can that kind of academic arrogance continue to stand? The Gault site Written by Chris Dyer Friday, 16 January 2009 The Gault Site, located northeast of Florence off FM 2843, is considered one of the premier archeological discoveries in North America. James E. Pearce, known as the Father of Texas archeology, excavated the site in 1929. Texas’ first professional archaeologist, Pearce also served as the chairman of the University of Texas’ anthropology department in the 1920s and was instrumental in founding the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin. Pearce-led excavations, spanning eight weeks at the Gault Site — named because of its original location on the farm of Henry and Jodie Gault — revealed a wealth of information. For the next 60 years, collectors and looters gained access to the site and focused their search for valuable artifacts on the upper deposits. For a while, archaeologists believed that all of the levels of human occupation at Gault had been destroyed. Up until 1998 the location had been operated, on and off, as a commercial pay-to-dig site where anyone could dig, sometimes for as little as $10 a day. Property ownership changed hands and the pay-to-dig days were over. In 1990, a collector discovered two incised stones sandwiching a Clovis point. Luckily, the looters and collectors had left the site’s deeper layers containing Clovis deposits relatively undisturbed. Clovis culture defines a period of thousands of years (from 9,000 to 13,500 years ago), and does not just define the people at Gault. The term encompasses all people using Clovis technology, first discovered in Clovis, N.M. The archaeologists at Gault are studying all the different patterns of human activity, which span many thousands of years, and comparing the data to other sites all over the continent to better understand the Clovis culture as a whole. “The Gault School is interested in the larger question of the peopling of the Americas — who were the first peoples, what were they like and where did they come from?” Clark Wernecke, director of the Gault School of Archaeological Research in Austin, said. “Discoveries at Gault, right here in Central Texas, include 65 percent of all known excavated Clovis materials and play an important part in this discussion. If we were to discover artifacts below the Clovis strata, that part becomes even more important.” Wernecke said an estimated 1.7 million artifacts, 600,000 of which are Clovis age, have been recovered from Gault. Archeological evidence reveals that the most common food source at Gault was small amphibians and turtles, and people lived at the site for extended periods of time. This contradicts the idea that all people of the Clovis culture were nomadic and survived solely by following herds of mammoth and other large game across the continent. Remains of mammoth turn up at Gault, but not as frequently as evidence of a host of other food sources. Archaeologists are focusing their efforts on excavating areas below the Clovis layer and are attempting to determine if Gault will yield evidence of people who lived in Central Texas prior to 13,500 years ago. Deep tests conducted at the site have repeatedly turned up evidence of pre-Clovis occupation. The Gault Project team wants to construct an interpretive center at the site, complete with walking trails where people can learn about Central Texas’ history and environment. The site is open by appointment, and Gault staff and volunteers give guided tours. To volunteer or schedule a tour or field trip, visit http://www.gaultschool.org/. Chris Dyer is the director of The Williamson Museum, 716 S. Austin Ave., Georgetown.

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Some information on the Gault Site - and photographs.