Harriet Smith, Educator and Archaeologist

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Harriet Smith worked at the Field Museum in Chicago for much of her long career. She was in the Education Department and focused primarily on teaching high school students about archaeology and other disciplines. However, this simple statement does not do justice to Harriet’s contributions to and impact on archaeology. She was the first professional woman to direct archaeological excavations at Cahokia, she worked elsewhere in the Midwest, and she conceived and directed a summer program at the Field Museum in Chicago, focused on Anthropology for High School Students, initially funded by the NSF. The summer program ran for 20 years. This paper examines her contributions to Cahokia archaeology, as well as her contributions to educating and training several generations of archaeologists.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32568