Legendary Bryn Mawr Archaeologist's Talk
To Open Exhibition on Her Predecessors

Lucy Shoe Meritt '27, Ph.D. '35, examining the moldings of the temple of Hephaistos in the Agora of Athens, August 1932.  Photo from the Lucy Shoe Meritt Papers.

Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, the Rhys Carpenter Professor Emerita of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, will reflect on the work of the extraordinary female archaeologists who came out of Bryn Mawr in the early part of the century in a lecture Tuesday, Sept. 25, at 4:30 p.m. in Carpenter Library 21. Her talk, sponsored by the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library, accompanies the opening of the exhibition Breaking Ground, Breaking Tradition: Bryn Mawr and the First Generations of Women Archaeologists. A reception and viewing of the exhibition in the Class of 1912 Rare Book Room in Canaday Library will follow the lecture.

Ridgway is one of the great figures in classical archaeology. She holds doctorates from both Bryn Mawr and the University of Messina, and she has taught at Bryn Mawr since 1957. She is one of the foremost authorities on sculpture in the ancient world, the author of many books now considered classics in the field. In recognition of her lifetime achievements, the Archaeological Institute of America awarded her its most prestigious award, the Gold Medal, in 1988.

The exhibition focuses on a remarkable group of women who trained at Bryn Mawr at a time when archaeology was still a very young, very male-dominated discipline. Among the women featured are Edith Hall Dohan, Ph.D. 1906, and Hetty Goldman, A.B. 1903, two of the first women to lead field excavations; and Dorothy Burr Thompson, Virginia Grace and Lucy Shoe Meritt, all of whom graduated from Bryn Mawr in the 1920s, earned Bryn Mawr Ph.D.s in the early 1930s, and conducted ground-breaking research that transformed the study of the classical world and established them as among the leading archaeologists of their generation.

The curator of the exhibition is Megan Risse, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology whose academic work focuses on the archaeology of Pre-Islamic Arabia and Iran. The exhibition will feature historical photographs, many of them from the personal collections of Lucy Shoe Meritt and Dorothy Burr Thompson; watercolors by the excavation's painter, Piet de Jong, of ceramics found during Hetty Goldman's excavations at Tarsus in the 1930s; teaching aids used in early archaeology courses; and antiquities donated to the College by early faculty and students.

The exhibition will run from Sept. 25 through December 21 in the Class of 1912 Rare Book Room in Mariam Coffin Canaday Library. Hours: 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday; 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, except for Fall Break and Thanksgiving weekends.

<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 9/20/2007

Next story>>