THE UNSUNG EXPLORER AND GEOSCIENCE HEROINE MISS ELINOR WIGHT GARDNER (1892-1981): PIONEER GEOARCHAEOLOGIST, QUATERNARY SCIENTIST, AND DESERT GEOMORPHOLOGIST (Invited Presentation)

Miss Elinor Wight Gardner (UK 1892–1981) is an important “hidden figure” who remains missing from our social and intellectual history of Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology. “Miss G.” (henceforth EWG) was Cambridge-trained before degrees were conferred to women, and she may be the first woman geologist working across Quaternary fields, including archaeology, paleontology, botany, zoology and geomorphology. From 1917-19, EWG was Acting Professor in Geology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa – perhaps the first woman to serve in such a role.

Commencing in the late 1920s, EWG conducted fieldwork and collaborative projects in arid lands of North Africa, the Mediterranean and Near East. EWG was the first female geoarchaeologist -- Quaternary geologist and geomorphologist to practice field-based interdisciplinary research, and to document her own scientific observations in publications in leading journals, including Nature, Geological Magazine, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society London and Geographic Journal. EWG’s published works document insights about landforms and processes in deserts related to paleoenvironmental and hydrological changes that affected human and animal activity in Antiquity. For example, EWG’s ground-breaking paleontological work on the Bethlehem bone beds revealed early elephantine diaspora preserved outside Africa, fossil finds which remain central to theories about faunal migrations to Asia through the Levantine Corridor.

EWG worked with many women scholars in the 1920s-30s, a time when women were not commonly regarded as professionals or included in academia. During this part of the early 20th century, the specialisations of Quaternary geology and geomorphology were nascent; traditional geology focused more on deep time, hard rocks and mountains -- and the topics that Gardner pursued were not considered particularly valuable. Among EWG's many career accomplishments: she was the first to commission airplane flights to obtain aerial photographs of unmapped landscapes in the remote Egyptian Sahara. Before radiocarbon dating existed, EWG reconstructed the regional Late Quaternary from painstaking inferences of strata and artefact seriation. Her Plio-Pleistocene paleoclimatology of Kharga Oasis, Egypt related African pluvials and Ice Ages, interpretations later confirmed by modern geochronological methods.