Born: 17 April 1828, Germany
Died: 20 July 1909
Country most active: Germany
Also known as: NA
Dr. Doris Gutsmiedl-Schümann on early German-speaking archaeologists transcript
The following is excerpted from a 2025 interview with Dr. Doris Gutsmiedl-Schümann, co-investigator for AktArcha, a project researching early female archaeologists from German speaking areas. A German biography can be found on the AktArcha site.
So from German archaeology, we have two very good examples for women who had paid positions in archaeology. Both had these positions because they came from middle class backgrounds, most likely like Sibylle Mertens-Schaaffhausen, and those women also had the education that was expected from women of these middle class and aristocratic backgrounds.
But their families weren’t wealthy, so they either had to marry or they had to find a way to provide for their own living. And both examples I will introduce in a moment, choose not to marry but to make their own living with working in archaeology, especially in museums collections.
In the 1860s, Amalia Buchheim showed her ways of working in a museum to Johanna Mestorf, who later became the first female museum director in a prehistoric collection connected to the University of Kiel. So Johanna Mestorf, who was introduced to museums work in archaeological collections by Amalie Buchheim, was born in 1828. Around 1900, she was a celebrity. Johanna Mestorf was the first female director of an archaeological museum in Germany. And while she’s an example of a woman who persistently worked her way into an academic career basically as an autodidact at a time when women were not yet allowed to study. For this reason, she became a role model for many women around 1900 in their wanting to have an academic life. Johanna Mestorf was born as a medical doctor’s daughter in Holstein, Germany, that’s in northern Germany, where she received an education that included languages and household management like so many other middle class women at her time. But as her father died when she was still a child, the family was financially not very well settled. So her mother managed to send the daughters to school. But after she was coming of age, she has to find work to earn her own living. And her education allowed her to work as a governess in Sweden and Italy. And there she first became aware of archaeology.
But it was not until she was 31 years old that she returned to her family in Hamburg. And from there she began to carve herself a place in scholarly circles as a translator of important Swedish and Danish archaeological publications and as a scholarly correspondent for daily newspapers and magazines. Johanna Mestorf learned Swedish and Danish during her time as a governess in Sweden. And she also made the first connections to men working in archaeology there when she was still in Sweden. And back in Germany, she started to translate their work into German. With her translation work, she made the publications of Scandinavian archaeology available for German-speaking researchers. And that’s important for German archaeology as the prehistoric research in Scandinavia was back then the leading one in Europe. Johanna Mestorf realized during her translation work that she also was interested in museums work. And to make her way into the museums world, so to speak, she acquired the skills for a museums job with a private course at Amalie Buchheim’s place in Schwerin, where she visited her and worked with her on the museums collections in Schwerin. But she also built a personal network among archaeologists and antiquarians of her time by attending international congresses. The first one she attended, as far as we know, is the International Congress of Archaeology and Anthropology in Copenhagen in 1869. So Johanna Mestorf’s big opportunity came when in Kiel a new museum was founded. The so-called Museum für Vaterländische Altertümer of the University of Kiel. So the title of the museums roughly translates to Museum of Patrimonial Antiquaries. And this museum was founded in 1873. And she applied for a job as custos at this newly founded museum and she was backed up with recommendation letters by leading archaeologists of her time. And she got the position as a museum custos there in 1873.
The first director of the museum, the historian Heinrich Handelman, was not very fond of archaeology and he was not very committed to his prehistoric collections. So Johanna Mestorf had a possibility and a place there to basically do her own thing. And she increasingly took on the scientific duties in the prehistoric collections like guiding visitors or writing about prehistoric objects with specialist colleagues all over Europe. And she was also the one who started to write publications on the collections material. This is the main difference we see at this point between Amalie Buchheim and Johanna Mestorf. Amalie Buchheim never published herself. She was cited as a reference and an expert in the publications of other, male researchers of this time, but she never published herself. Johanna Mestorf on the other hand started to publish herself. So when the director of the museum, when Heinrich Handelman died in 1891, it was basically a logical choice that Johanna Mestorf was offered the director’s position. But as she was a woman she was offered the position at a much lower salary. So she accepted the position, but as her salary was lower, she could also expand the museum’s staff with another assistant position. She was basically paying by the money that was saved because her salary as a museum’s director was lower than Heinrich Handelman.
So Johanna Mestorf made the Kiel Museum a hub of European archaeology. And the museum and the museum’s work meditated between Scandinavian and German colleagues. And Johanna Mestorf published on fine complexes from Schleswig-Holstein both for a scientific audience but also for the interested public. The museum became also a contact point for interested local people. She built an exemplary network of local volunteers who helped her in the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein to undertake excavations, to report on new finds and to hand the new finds to her in the Kiel Museum. So Johanna Mestorf basically did not excavate herself, but she had her local volunteers who did it for her and under her guidance. Her scientific work brought her numerous honors in the last two decades of her life. This was ranging from memberships in scientific association and academies throughout Europe, medals of honor, including the gold medal of the Queen of Sweden in 1904, to the title Professor, who was awarded to her by the German Emperor, but without the authorization to teach in 1899. And she also got honorary doctorate from the medical faculty of the Kiel University in 1909, a few months before her death, on her work on bog bodies. And at the Kiel University, her memory was always been honored.