Groundbreakers: Petrie Museum display on women archaeologists opens in London on 5 November

"Groundbreakers: Women in Archaeology" opens at University College London's Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology on Thursday 5 November and runs until Saturday 30 January 2027. It puts objects from the Petrie's collection beside papers from the archives of the British International Research Institutes (BIRI), the network of British research schools abroad that includes the British School at Athens and the British School at Rome, which announced the display.

The display grows out of "Women Transcending Boundaries", an online research project backed by the British Academy that follows women's fieldwork, scholarship and friendships across the BIRI institutes over more than a hundred years. A film commissioned for it, "Nine Lives: the women who shaped archaeology", is shown in the gallery. The show belongs to this year's Being Human festival of the humanities, held across the UK on 5–14 November.

Two evening talks, both from 6 to 8pm at the UCL Institute of Archaeology in Gordon Square, go with it: "The Joy of Lists, Letters and Wills", on women in the archives, on 9 November, and a reading of "A Thousand Miles Up the Nile" on 11 November. The Institute's first Librarian, from 1945 to 1970, was Joan du Plat Taylor, who had earlier worked at the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia.