Born: 27 August 1850, Germany
Died: 1944
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.
Among the amateur archaeologists of this time, we have one example that I personally find quite fascinating. This is Julie Schlemm, who was born in 1850 in Berlin, and she was working as an amateur archaeologist, especially in publishing. She was, like Johanna Mestorff, the daughter of a medical doctor, and we can trace her archaeological work throughout her life, but we never saw that she was paid or compensated for her archaeological work, so we assume that she had some wealth from her father or from her parents, so that she didn’t have to earn money to make a living. She simply had money to do her archaeological work. Julie Schlemm lived in Berlin, and in 1893, she became a member of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistoric Archaeology. In German, the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte. And this association was co-founded by a very prominent medical doctor of the time, Rudolf Virchow, who was also very fond of prehistoric archaeology, especially in the later parts of her life. The father of Julie Schlemm was also a member in this society, and we assume that she was introduced to the society by her father, and maybe accompanied her father to the meetings of the society.
After her father died, her mother donated the father’s book collection to the society. We also assume that Julie Schlemm was using the library and the book collections of the Berliner Gesellschaft to do her research. Julie Schlemm attended the meetings and lectures of the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte. She participated in the conversations, and she sent photographic material of prehistoric artifacts to the collections of the society. We also know that once she even copied the plates of a damaged book for the society. And during her amateur and autodidact work on archaeology, she began to take her own notes and make her own drawings of prehistoric artifacts. And all these notes she took throughout her life, she began to compile into a handbook to acquaint herself with archaeological terminology better. And she published this book in 1908 as a service to her fellow sufferers, as she wrote in the introduction, who had, like her, turned to archaeology out of passion and had no easy access to the larger libraries and the public collections of universities who were more or less closed to the public and only available to students and scientists of her time. We also know that Julie Schlem was part of some advising boards of Berlin museums, and she consulted museums in their work of acquiring new objects and cataloging the collections. But she was always working, so to say, in the second row, so she was not very visible, except for her handbook of prehistoric archaeology. It was the first handbook in Germany of prehistoric archaeology who focused on artifacts and objects, but as later on bigger handbooks, more extensive encyclopedias of prehistoric archaeology were collected and published, this first handbook of prehistoric archaeology was largely forgotten. And for us in the project, AktArcha, it was very surprising, when we found out about her work and of all the little tasks and pieces of her work she was doing in the Berlin museums and the Berlin archaeological societies of the later 19th and early 20th century. And she is an example of a woman working in archaeology who was doing a lot, but not very visible.