Abstract
Elinor Wight Gardner (1892–1981) was the first female geologist who worked and published as a geoarcheologist. During her career, she worked in arid lands of North Africa, Mediterranean and the Near East, and was regarded as a pioneering geoscientist who made important contributions in multiple fields, including archeology, geomorphology, paleontology and Quaternary science. Despite her ground-breaking work at many archeological sites, Gardner’s impact has been largely unrecognized. Few details are known about her personal life; she was a private and reserved person who left limited first-hand accounts of her opinions and motivations. Gardner worked with charismatic figures such as her life-long friend and primary collaborator, the archeologist Gertrude Caton Thompson (1888–1985). This biography synthesizes primary sources and draws insights about Gardner’s character from her bibliography, publications and notebooks, and mentions by contemporary peers. Much attention has focused on the historical “ancestral passions” of characters working in the fields of geology and archeology, with much emphasis on the ‘founding fathers’ and significantly less recognition of its ‘grandmothers’. We bring attention to the full scope of Gardner’s insightful contributions through analysis of her important collaborative research projects linking archeology and landscape studies during the early twentieth century.
Highlights
Miss Elinor Wight Gardner (1892–1981) is often cited for her role as a geologist in multiple important studies undertaken with the storied archeologist Miss GertrudeCaton Thompson (1888–1985), Gardner herself was a keen scientist whose contributions remain underappreciated
This paper presents an initial biography of Gardner based on the available primary and secondary sources that mention her, including Gardner’s own letters, field notebooks and published works as well as well-known materials, including Caton Thompson’s autobiography [15]
We demonstrate that Gardner’s work was rigorous and cutting-edge, and we describe how her research facilitated new insights and important foundational knowledge because her collaborative approach blended survey geology, Quaternary studies and geomorphology with the established field of archeology
Summary
Miss Elinor Wight Gardner (1892–1981) is often cited for her role as a geologist in multiple important studies undertaken with the storied archeologist Miss Gertrude. Caton Thompson (1888–1985), Gardner herself was a keen scientist whose contributions remain underappreciated. Gardner documented her own interdisciplinary observations from field surveys and excavations in North Africa, Arabia and across the Mediterranean (Figure 1) and her published contributions remain unparalleled in their excellence and breadth. Caton Thompson and Gardner were two well-educated British women who joined forces around 1924, and spent several decades conducting ground-breaking work, often in very difficult and remote field locales. Working in tandem and as a collaborative team, these women were exceptionally far ahead of their time in recognizing the importance of regional investigations linking geology and archeology.
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