This unique collection of pioneering women’s biographies includes not only field archaeologists, but also those who have been deeply involved in the discipline of archaeology: philologists, epigraphers, writers, artists, museum curators, professors, and fund raisers. Not surprisingly, most of these women were right in the middle of the archaeological process. This web project provides a broad view of how these women became major contributors to the field, at the same time crafting their own identities. The life stories of these women, their extraordinary intellectual and archaeological accomplishments, are provocative, for they transcended the cultures they lived in and, despite the struggles they faced, achieved much of enduring importance.

This project originated in 1994 as the inspiration of Professor Getzel M. Cohen of the University of Cincinnati and Professor Martha Sharp Joukowsky of Brown University. Volume I of Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists, published by the University of Michigan Presss in 2004, contains biographies of Jane Dieulafoy, Margaret Alice Murray, Gertrude Bell, Harriet Boyd Hawes, Edith Hall Dohan, Hetty Goldman, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, Dorothy Garrod, Winifred Lamb, Theresa Goell, Kathleen Kenyon, Esther Van Deman.

In Breaking Ground the impression may have been given that we have covered in full women active in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology. This misconception could not be further from the truth, and that is why this web project is devoted to additional pioneering women and their lives. This was to become a dictionary and second volume of Breaking Ground, but it inevitably grew into a volume of encyclopedic proportions.