Elinor Wight Gardner: Pioneer Geoarcheologist, Quaternary Scientist and Geomorphologist

Abstract

Elinor Wight Gardner (1892–1981) was the first female geologist who worked and published as a geoarcheologist. During her career, she worked in arid lands of North Africa, Mediterranean and the Near East, and was regarded as a pioneering geoscientist who made important contributions in multiple fields, including archeology, geomorphology, paleontology and Quaternary science. Despite her ground-breaking work at many archeological sites, Gardner’s impact has been largely unrecognized. Few details are known about her personal life; she was a private and reserved person who left limited first-hand accounts of her opinions and motivations. Gardner worked with charismatic figures such as her life-long friend and primary collaborator, the archeologist Gertrude Caton Thompson (1888–1985). This biography synthesizes primary sources and draws insights about Gardner’s character from her bibliography, publications and notebooks, and mentions by contemporary peers. Much attention has focused on the historical “ancestral passions” of characters working in the fields of geology and archeology, with much emphasis on the ‘founding fathers’ and significantly less recognition of its ‘grandmothers’. We bring attention to the full scope of Gardner’s insightful contributions through analysis of her important collaborative research projects linking archeology and landscape studies during the early twentieth century.

Holocene geomorphological and pedosedimentary archives of eastern Sahelian paleoenvironments (Kassala, Sudan)

“…Brass, 2018; Clarke et al, 2016; Gasse, 2000; Gatto and Zerboni, 2015; López-García et al, 2013; Mercuri et al, 2022; Nicoll, 2004; Ritchie and Haynes, 1987). In arid lands, scholars documented the occurrence, within in the geological record, of pedosedimentary features that are incompatible with present-day dryland climates and environs (Cremaschi et al, 2010; Nicoll et al, 2021). Because such natural contexts were often found intimately mixed with archaeological remains, it quickly became clear that the very nature of human settlements, migrations and achievements throughout the archaeological past needed to be – at least partially – scrutinized through the lens of physical geography and environmental changes (Butzer, 1982; Heitz et al, 2021).…”

Critical Geoarchaeology: From Depositional Processes to the Sociopolitics of Earthen Life

“…Geoarchaeology-the practice of using techniques rooted in the geosciences to address archaeological research questions-has long-established foci on site-formation processes, geochronology, and the reconstruction of paleoenvironmental contexts as objects of scholarly investigation (e.g., Courty et al 1989, Goldberg & Macphail 2006, Nicoll et al 2021, Rapp & Hill 2006, Waters 1992. Such topics of inquiry have been so fundamental to the specialty that some scholars have suggested that all archaeology is essentially "geoarchaeology," given the degree to which any archaeological interpretation is premised on assumptions or explicit inferences about the formation and preservation of the excavated archaeological record (cf.…”