Dorothy Mackay: A Forgotten Female Pioneer in Archaeology

Abstract

In 2022, the author of this paper came across four letters regarding epigraphic documentation of some elite tombs in the Theban necropolis, Egypt, written by Dorothy Mackay and addressed to Alan H. Gardiner, at the archive of the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford. The author of the letters was the wife of Ernest Mackay (1880–1943), a British archaeologist best known for his later work on the Indus Valley Civilisation, who was excavating on the Theban west bank between 1913 and 1916. However, as further investigation revealed, Dorothy, until recently an obscure figure, was an accomplished scholar in her own right, who worked together with her husband, acted as a curator of two museums, and published extensively in times when it was far from easy for women to obtain an education, let alone conduct research. Despite that, the only recent sources discussing Dorothy and her scholarly accomplishments lack some vital details on her life. The aim of this contribution is to provide some further information and context on Dorothy Mackay and her research in the first half of the twentieth century.