LEADING
LADIES John Lucey profiles the pioneering women who led archaeological excavations in Ireland.
The period between the two world wars, which saw the emergence of archaeology as a systematic discipline, was also when landmark legislation liberated women to vote and to work in various professions. Historically, archaeological excavations were conducted by men, and no woman worked as a professional archaeologist in Ireland until the 1930s. Up to the 1940s very few women directed their own excavations, with most working as site assistants rather than as directors or supervisors. Three women, one native and two non-nationals, were among those who led digs in Ireland and who can be justifiably judged to be female pioneers in archaeology. They were born in the first two decades of the twentieth century, with their dates of birth sequentially eight years apart.
Françoise Henry (1902–82) Paris-born Françoise Henry is perhaps best remembered as an art historian but was also an archaeologist of some note, having carried out a considerable amount of excavation in Ireland. She received her training at the École du Louvre—where her doctoral dissertation was on the subject of prehistoric tombs—and at the Sorbonne, and secured a position at the French Museum of National Antiquities. After her first visit to Ireland in 1926, when she became fascinated by what she saw, the study of early Irish decorative stone carvings became the main focus of her career. It is rather fitting, therefore, that her effigial monument should be sculptured in stone (Fig. 1).
Henry began her Irish career as an exchange lecturer in 1934 at UCD, but she returned to France five years later to help in the war effort, for which she received the Legion of Honour, the country’s highest order of merit. Back at UCD in 1946, she continued her fieldwork and was lecturing in Archaeology and European Art, becoming Director of Studies in Archaeology and the History of European Painting. From 1951 she was also Keeper of the Archaeological Archive there until her retirement in 1974.
She was helped in some of her fieldwork by Helen Roe (1895–1988), with whom she shared an interest in high crosses. Henry’s main excavations were in Mayo, Kerry and Wicklow. In the 1930s she started her excavations on Inishkea Island off the Blacksod Peninsula in Mayo. In 1938 she excavated some houses which had been built on a sand-dune in the eastern part of the island. These were the first excavations carried out systematically in Ireland in an Early Christian monastery of the beehive type. In 1950 she again excavated habitation sites on Inishkea, work which was financed by the government (Special Employment Schemes Office) and carried out under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA). She carried out investigations in Kerry over a period of some twenty years and in 1957 published her detailed survey of early medieval settlement on the Iveragh Peninsula. Henry also excavated at Templena-Skellig, Glendalough (1956–60), the findings of which remained unpublished at the time of her death (Fig. 2; see Archaeology Ireland 32 (2) (2018) for ongoing research at the monastic site).
Henry had the distinction of being elected a Member of the RIA (MRIA) in 1949 as one of the first four women to be finally admitted. In her Certificate of Candidacy for membership she modestly described herself as ‘Research Assistant in Archaeology’! That she was a versatile person is perhaps an understatement: she
Above: Fig. 1—Stone sculpture of Françoise Henry by the artist Dhomhnaill O'Murchu (Photo: M. Smyth. Reproduced with the kind permission of the National College of Art and Design). Left: Fig. 2—One of the checklists of equipment for Françoise Henry’s excavations at Glendalough in 1960 (UCD Archives).
Archaeology Ireland Winter 2019
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