Women Working the Past

This book offers a new history of women's integral contribution to archaeology, history, and heritage in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and beyond. Born out of the Beyond Notability project, the book draws on the project's openly accessible database to reveal how hundreds of previously forgotten women saved, presented, excavated, researched, analyzed, and promoted the past. Using cutting-edge digital methods, the Beyond Notability team has reconstructed the lives and work of these women from fragments of information held in major UK cultural heritage institution archives. Juxtaposing broad overviews of work and education, family and empire, with focused case studies on lecturing, history-making, excavations, and folklore collecting, the book presents macro and micro histories in parallel, while centering women's experiences and trajectories, as well as their voices. In this way, it is a major contribution to the histories of women's work. By interweaving practice with analysis, it offers a valuable critical and reflexive model for revealing archives' wealth of historical information on marginalized individuals and groups.