The TrowelBlazers Project: Digging up the Lost Women of the Earth Sciences

As part of Digital Science’s celebrations for Ada Lovelace Day, for the month of October we are running a series of blog posts where inspiring women and men in STEM are sharing their personal stories. Anyone can get involved and we encourage you to read and share your thoughts using the hashtag #WiSTEMspotlight.

Dr Brenna Hassett is an archaeologist whose research centres on using human remains to understand the past. Based in London, she has worked on archaeological projects in Egypt, Greece, Thailand, Turkey, the US, and the UK. She is a co-founder of TrowelBlazers (www.trowelblazers.com), a collective, grassroots organisation dedicated to resetting imaginations and showcasing the underappreciated contributions of women to the earth sciences in the past and in the modern day. Her first book for the general public ‘Built on Bones: 15,000 years of Urban Life and Death’, which explores the scars of our urban lives written into bone, will be published in February 2017 by Bloomsbury.

Did you know that there was an all-female archaeological excavation team at the site of Great Zimbabwe… in 1929?

Did you know that a marchioness with a bit of a gambling problem was a keen scientist and contributed to the fossil collection at the Natural History Museum?

How many women would you guess have been awarded the Legion D’Honneur for protecting archaeological heritage in wartime?

If you answered ‘no’, ‘no’, and ‘don’t know’ to the above questions, don’t worry – you are not alone. Popular history of science has lost some of its most outstanding stars to prejudices against women, and against the kind of scientific work women have done in the past. Not only do women who went out with pickaxes and shovels to find fossils or dig history get forgotten, there is an entire hidden legacy of legions of illustrators, collectors, fundraisers and popularisers – many of them spouses of better-known men – who have faded into the mists of time. Our mission at TrowelBlazers is to take these lost stories and stars and bring them back into the light. Our reasoning goes: if you can’t see the women who contributed to scientific progress in the past, how can you expect to inspire the next generation of women scientists?

As a digital, grassroots, collective project, run on an entirely volunteer basis, the success of the TrowelBlazers Project (thousands of followers on social media, mainstream media coverage, even our own doll – ‘Real Fossil Hunter Lottie’) shows up two very critical points in the larger conversation around women in STEM subjects. The first is that there are women in STEM subjects, and there have been for a long time. The second is that you may not need a plan or to be a science communication professional to be a success.

What you need, it seems, is a community who are interested, engaged, and online. Sometimes it takes a digital network to unearth the real connections hidden deep in the past. At least, that has been the TrowelBlazers experience—developing an online, digital resource to archive and publish the hidden histories of women who shaped the earth sciences is something we have only been able to do with the help of our community of dedicated guest posters, collections managers, archivists, and historians of science. It’s the very real enthusiasm of this community that keeps TrowelBlazers going, finding new women to feature and uncovering the hidden history of the networks that these pioneering women built to support each other in a very masculine world.

And it’s exactly this unsuspected web of mutual support, with women collaborating and mentoring the next generation, that we see as the most important outcome of the research side of our project; it hints at a model for how to supporting women in a hostile environement, overcoming the expectations and prejudices of the sciences and the academy, which we could do well to develop much more today.

Our next mission at TrowelBlazers is to bring these critical hidden histories to light and keep spreading the word that science can be for everyone. We are launching in October for our biggest and most ambitious action yet: the Raising Horizons project. Raising Horizons is a collaboration between TrowelBlazers, photographer Leonora Saunders, and Prospect Union (which represents STEM and heritage professional). We are creating an eye-catching exhibition of portraits featuring some modern-day TrowelBlazing women of archaeology, geology, and palaeontology, and their historical forebearers. This exhibition will tour up and down the UK, taking place at various iconic venues, accompanied by special events with guest speakers, oral histories, and the chance to show local communities how they have been part of making scientific history.
We already have the support of institutions and organisations like Museum of London Archaeology, the Palaeontological Association, Society of Antiquaries, Geological Society, Past Horizons, Prospect Union, Harris Academy Bermondsey and Arklu (our collaborators on the Fossil Hunter Lottie Doll), but we also need YOUR help, and will be soon announcing a way which our fantastic community- and their networks – can help. With their support, we’ll be able to highlight the work of generations of women in a way that we hope holds us to our mission statement: to reset imaginations and make science accessible to everyone.