Gendering Labour in Palestinian Archaeology, 1890s–1930s

Women workers were a common sight on archaeological excavations in Palestine in the Late Ottoman and Mandate periods, their presence appearing in the historical record through anecdotal and ethnographic descriptions, wage lists or photographic archives. Recently, scholars have begun to explore this fact, highlighting the extent to which rural women undertook manual and waged labour, and the need to scrutinise and challenge stereotypes of archaeological labour which foreground elite white men, not only through examples of educated Western females but also of indigenous women workers.

At present, most such histories focus on single archaeological sites. This paper instead brings together several examples to sketch some broader conclusions and to begin to develop a wider account of the experiences and places of women in early Palestinian archaeology. Expanding a focus only on women workers, I also consider what assumptions underlay the place of male workers on archaeological digs, asking how gendered social practices shaped the experiences of all archaeological workers. In attempting some answers, this article draws on the archives of excavations by Europeans and North Americans, informed by a broader literature on women’s labour in the Levant, seeing female archaeological workers in the context of other forms of paid work done by women. As such, it endeavours to transcend ‘archaeological exceptionalism’, viewing archaeological labour as a type of paid work, embedded in broader experiences of rural labour and the changing work and economic environment under Ottoman and British rule.