With A Seamstress Tape & A Smile: Talk on women archaeologists in Italy & North Africa in the early twentieth century

Dr Caroline Goodson will give a lecture on the work of Esther Van Deman and speak more broadly on the work of other women Archaeologists in Italy and North Africa in the early twentieth century.

Esther Van Deman’s photographs act as fulcrum for the works in our current exhibition My Sister Who Travels. A leading American archaeologist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she was the first woman to specialise in Roman field archaeology. Her focus on photography as a method of research was uncharacteristic in the discipline at the time, which relied predominantly on drawing. Combined with her aesthetic sensibility and her desire for very precise images, Van Deman produced a meticulous archive of 2700 photographs taken mostly in Italy, France, Algeria and Tunisia between 1898 and 1930.

Caroline Goodson is a medieval archaeologist and historian, Senior Lecturer in History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has excavated and carried out field work in Morocco, Algeria and Italy, with ongoing research interests in Southern Italy and the Maghreb. Her publications have addressed themes in urbanism and the histories of cities, the relationship between medieval cults and the built environment, and the uses of the past in medieval society.