Women in the field: preliminary insights from images of archaeology in Portugal in the 1960s and the 1970s. A first essay

Abstract

Between the end of the 1960s and 1974, Portugal experienced a sort of political ‘spring’ (Primavera Marcelista). It started with the final illness of the dictator António de O. Salazar (d. 1970) and ended when the authoritarian Estado Novo government that he had established in 1933 was overthrown (Barreto 2000; Otero 2000). It was a time for hope and adventure, individual and collective, as, for the first time since the end of the 1950s, new ideologies, new theoretical frameworks, and new ways of working began to be introduced in the country, mainly thanks to a generation of intellectuals who went abroad to study at Western European and American universities. Archaeology was no exception, opening the way to international collaboration, in order to update theories, methodologies, and methods. This new era for this science in the country was only possible due to the commitment of the ‘transition generation’ of archaeologists, who constituted a bridge to new ways of thinking the past, of doing fieldwork, and of analysing the excavated data. The intellectual elites followed the new foreign theoretical frameworks and were eager to apply them in their everyday life. Even so, Portuguese society remained strongly conservative overall, especially concerning women. Despite this conservatism, a growing number of young women began studying archaeology, doing fieldwork, travelling abroad to update their knowledge, and collaborating with foreign colleagues. Who were these women? What were their social and economic backgrounds? These are some of the questions I intend to answer in this paper. In addition, I aim to comprehend the reasons for some behavioural differences observed between female and male archaeologists, applying the Panofsky method of image interpretation (Panofsky 1939), using photographs as a primary historical source.