Trailblazer: Mary Kitson Clark part 2.

The Tansy Beetle sculpture for Mary Kitson Clark is now on view in Museum Gardens near the Yorkshire Museum.

Historian Sarah Sheils writes about Mary’s work as an archaeologist:

“The Yorkshire Philosophical Society have nominated Mary Kitson Clark, 1905-2005, as their Trailblazer for her contribution to Yorkshire Archaeology, to the Philosophical Society and to the Yorkshire Museum.

Born in 1905 Anna Mary Hawthorn Kitson Clark attended Leeds Girls’ High School and Girton College, Cambridge, where she read History followed by a diploma in Archaeology. At the time women were permitted to study and take the examinations at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, but not to graduate with the title Bachelor or Master of Arts. She came runner up to a male candidate for the Franks scholarship at University College, London; if she had been selected it would have guaranteed her an academic career.

In the 1920s she worked alongside the archaeologist, Ian, later Sir Ian, Richmond on several Roman archaeological sites in Yorkshire. She worked for the Roman Antiquities Committee of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, later affiliated to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, and for the Thoresby, and the Leeds Literary and Philosophical Societies, through which she assisted in the publication of Romano -British research papers. Thus she experienced the important work of cataloguing and publicising  archaeological finds.

In 1929 she was nominated by the Cambridge Archaeology Faculty Board to the British School at Jerusalem where she joined an all-female team of archaeologists led by Dorothy Garrod in the excavation of Palaeolithic sites near Mount Carmel in Palestine.

On her return she put into practice the dictum of a founder member of the  Roman Antiquities  Committee for Yorkshire , that Yorkshire archaeology would best be served by co-ordination between University academics at Leeds and Sheffield and local amateur archaeologists and by integrating bibliographical studies and field work.  This she did to great effect in her own publication, the Gazetteer of Roman Remains in East Yorkshire in 1935; to this day it remains indispensable to the study of Roman Yorkshire.  After her election to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society as a full member in 1928, only the second women to be accorded that honour, she became the (unpaid) curator of the Roman Antiquities in the Museum. In 1938 she was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a notable achievement for a woman at the time.

When World War Two broke out she assembled a group of women to catalogue and prepare the Museum’s Roman collections for evacuation to stately homes in the countryside. One result of this was the growth in museum-based education. During the War her summer schools in Archaeology contributed to the eventual acceptance of York’s bid to open its University in 1963.

In 1943 she married the Reverend Derwas Chitty and left Yorkshire; she remained an active member of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society and in 1985 a celebration of her contributions to Yorkshire Roman archaeology resulted in the publication of “Recent Research in Roman Yorkshire, studies in honour of Mary Kitson Clark (Mrs Derwas Chitty)”.

Nowadays women play a significant role in archaeology, for example Alice Roberts or Mary Beard; Mary Kitson Clark was their trailblazer.”