Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,184
By This is the grave of Hannah Marie Wormington.
Born in 1914 in Denver, Wormington grew up there. Her mother was French and so she spoke it when she was a kid and that would eventually help her a lot. She went to Radcliffe to the University of Denver, graduating in 1935. Then she and her mother took a long trip to Europe (they were wealthy). Her main professor at Denver had been a French archaeologist named E.B. Renaud. She got a job in France thanks to his connections and helped excavate some paleolithic sites there. She got to know the archaeologist Dorothy Garrod while there and she became a mentor, especially as a woman in a male-dominated field.
When she went back to Denver, the Colorado Museum of Natural History hired her to catalog some stone tool collections someone donated to them, the first archaeologist to be hired there. She then started her master’s degree at Radcliff in 1937. But that stalled out for a long time. I’m not completely sure why. She married a geologist named Peter Volk in 1940 and built her own career working at the museum. She became an expert in the growing field of archaeology of the American Southwest and in 1939, published Ancient Man in North America and Prehistoric Indians of the South West. This became the major text on the subject for two decades. She was 24 years old when she published it. She then did a ton of research in Utah and western Colorado that she later used for her dissertation.
Oh yeah, she still didn’t actually have those advanced degrees. She returned to Radcliffe and finished that master’s in 1950. Then it was onto Harvard for her Ph.D. Disgusted by the presence of a woman in class, a professor told her to sit outside his classroom and take notes from there. To be a female academic in that era–and really through the 80s and even early 90s from stories I’ve heard from women of that generation (I have had multiple people tell me that the recently passed historian Gordon Wood would not speak to female colleagues at Brown for years)–meant putting up with an incredible amount of shit. Notably, at a time when most archaeologists wouldn’t have a woman on site at all, Wormington hired almost women on her crews. She made a point of it. She was determined to open pathways to other women in this male supremacist profession and world.
She returned to Denver after finishing the Ph.D. She then created something called the “Hall of Man” at what is today the Denver Museum of Nature & Science that opened in 1956, which was one of these displays that was supposed to show how humans evolved in the region through replicas of humans of the past and things like that. I remember seeing things like that when I was younger (not this though, I didn’t get to Denver until I was like 21) and they were really dated even then. Still, it remained in the museum until 2000. No doubt well past its sell-by date, but that is hardly Wormington’s fault.
In 1968, Wormington was fired for reasons that are unclear, could have been personal, could have been budgetary, could have been a combination of factors. Mostly, it seems the director of the museum hated her. She was estranged from the museum for twenty years. Now, that very year, she was elected as the president of the Society for American Archaeology. She was the first woman to be elected to this position. So she was OK professionally. She traveled around the Southwest a lot during the later part of her career, being a visiting professor here and there, including at Arizona State, Colorado College,and even at the University of Minnesota. Then she worked permanently at Colorado College until 1986, when she retired. She was still doing field work pretty late too, including a major study of how Paleoindians used the bison by exploring an ancient bison kill site in eastern Colorado.
Wormington died in 1994. It was a bad way to go. She was smoking on the couch, fell asleep, and the cigarette lit the couch on fire. She was 79 years old.
Hannah Marie Wormington is buried in Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado.
If you would like this series to visit other American archeologists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. James Henry Breasted is in Rockford, Illinois and Alfred Marston Tozzer is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.