If Women Have Courage...: Among Shepherds, Sheiks, and Scientists in Algeria

The author was a small-town girl a year out of the University of Wisconsin with a Bachelor's degree in economics when she married Alonzo W. Pond, a young archaeologist just back from a year in the Sahara. It was the 1920s. American women had won the right to vote and were launching out on non-traditional ventures. Museums were sponsoring expeditions in search of clues to humanity's distant past. This is Dorothy L. Pond's account of her experiences in Algeria between 1926 and 1930 as part of Logan Museum's (Beloit College) expeditions to excavate Stone Age habitation sites. By 1928 the Ponds had an 18-month-old daughter; in 1930 the staff had grown to 16, including 12 college boys. Dorothy describes both the mundane and the exotic from a woman's point of view, from the daily work of archaeology and shopping trips to the local markets to moonlight strolls through Roman ruins. The book will be of particular interest to those interested in the behind-the scenes workings of early scientific expeditions as well as social history, anthropology, feminism in the 1920s, or simply a Midwestern American woman's perspective on living and working in North Africa between the World Wars. Dorothy's account is supplemented by an Afterword by archaeologists Mary Jackes and David Lubell, who worked in the same area decades later and have been analyzing material from the Pond expeditions.