Goldman, Hetty (1881–1972)

American archaeologist. Born in New York, New York, on December 19, 1881; died in Princeton, New Jersey, on May 4, 1972; one of four children of Julius Goldman (a lawyer) and Sarah (Adler) Goldman; attended Dr. J. Sachs School for Girls, New York (founded by her uncle Julius Sachs); Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, B.A. in Greek and English, 1903; Radcliffe College, M.A., 1911, Ph.D., 1916; attended the American School of Classical Studies, Athens, Greece, 1910–12; never married; no children.

The daughter of a lawyer and granddaughter of the founder of the investment bank Goldman, Sachs and Company, Hetty Goldman grew up in a comfortable home where intellectual and humanitarian pursuits were encouraged. Her uncle, a classicist who also ran the school she attended as a girl, first piqued her interest in archaeology. After graduating from Bryn Mawr in 1903, she worked as a manuscript reader while attending graduate courses in Greek at Columbia University. In 1910, she decided to continue her education at Radcliffe, where she concentrated on classics and archaeology and also became the first woman to receive the Charles Eliot Norton fellowship to attend the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. While in Greece, at a site at the small coastal town of Halae, she undertook her first dig, which in addition to revealing classical remains also uncovered some of the earliest traces of Neolithic village occupation in Greece. The excavation at Halae also provided the basis for Goldman's Ph.D. dissertation, for which Radcliffe awarded her a Ph.D. in 1916. Goldman's work was interrupted by the Balkan war, during which time she served as a volunteer nurse. Later, during World War I, she spent several years with the Red Cross in New York. She was finally able to return to Halae in 1921.

In 1922, Goldman undertook the first of a number of excavations in Asia Minor, at Ionia, under the auspices of Harvard's Fogg Museum. This time her work was cut short by the Graeco-Turkish war. In 1924, she became director of excavations for the Fogg and, for the next three years, led excavations in Turkey and Greece, often at war-ravaged sites that made her work all the more difficult. Her publication Excavations at Eutresis in Boeotia (1931) documented her work during this period. Goldman's fourth major excavation was at Tarsus near the southeast coast of Turkey. Hoping to discover prehistoric links between Greece and Anatolia, her team had successfully uncovered levels laid around 3000 bce, when, once again, the project was interrupted, this time by World War II.

Hetty Goldman passed the war years at Princeton University, having been appointed the first woman professor at its Institute for Advanced Studies in 1936. There, while researching and preparing her findings at Tarsus for publication, she sponsored German refugees who fled the Nazis. In 1947, she was able to return to Tarsus, where two years later her excavations finally reached the deepest level. She retired in 1948 and continued to prepare her Tarsus research, which was published in three volumes: Excavations at Gözlü Kule Tarsus (1950, 1956, and 1963). In 1966, Goldman was awarded the gold medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement from the Archaeological Institute of America.

Throughout her life, Goldman combined her work and her humanitarian efforts with a wide range of cultural interests and a deep devotion to her family. She died of pulmonary edema in Princeton in May 1972.

sources:

Bailey, Brooke. The Remarkable Lives of 100 Women Healers and Scientists. Holbrook, MA: Bob Adams, 1994.

Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.