Zelia Nuttall
American archaeologist who made extensive studies in antiquities, history and languages, and was a leading authority on Mexican archaeology and ancient picture writing.
Category Archives: Archaeology
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Amelia Edwards
English novelist and egyptologist
Helena Flavia
Saint Helena (247-328), wife of Constantius Chlorus, and mother of Constantine the Great. She won the gratitude of the Christian community by her zeal for the advancement of religion and her acts of piety and munificence.
Lady of Cao
The Lady of Cao is a nickname given to a female Moche mummy discovered in 2005 at the El Brujo archeological site about 45 km north of Trujillo in Peru’s La Libertad Region.
Olga Tufnell
Olga Tufnell FSA was a British archaeologist who worked on the excavation of the ancient city of Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir) in the 1930s. She had no formal archaeology training, but had worked as a secretary for Flinders Petrie for several years before being given a field assignment. Tufnell joined James Leslie Starkey in the expedition to Lachish in 1929 and remained part of the team for years.
When Starkey was killed in 1938, the team finished the season and then closed the site in 1939. Tufnell volunteered to write up the report of the dig and spent the next 20 years researching and writing up the majority of the excavation report, with the final publication (Lachish IV) in 1957. Her work is considered the “pre-eminent source book for Palestinian archeology”.
After her return to the UK in 1939, her work was almost immediately interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, as Tufnell was recruited to the BBC Arabic radio station due to her association with the Middle East; she was also an air raid warden.
At the end of the war, Tufnell returned to her work on the report, raising controversy when she published findings that the time period between two occupational levels, Level II (before Babylonian conquest by Nebuchadnezzar) and Level III (before Assyrian conquest by Sennacherib) was likely to be in the range of 100 years, rather than a decade, as Starkey had suggested. Although most archaeologists believed Starkey’s interpretation was more likely, subsequent excavations vindicated her opinion in 1973.
In 1951, Tufnell became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, which she called one of her “greatest achievements”. Once the full Lachish report had been published, Tufnell turned her focus to the study of scarabs. Although many scholars dismissed the area of scarabs and seals as “unreliable of chronology”, Olga meticulously recorded their dimensions and styles. She was also an early user of computers for measuring the scarabs, and she was due to present a paper on that use of computers just days after her death in April 1985
Birgit Arrhenius
Swedish archaeologist Birgit Arrhenius is a professor emeritus at Stockholm University, where she was a professor of laboratory archaeology, and the first head of the university’s Archaeological Research Laboratory. She has studied locations including Helgö and Mälaren, and she has researched prehistoric decorative arts such as pressblech and garnet cloisonné work. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and was in 1992 the recipient of the Royal Patriotic Society’s Gösta Berg Medal.