In 1949, the first Congress of Roman Frontier Studies was held in Newcastle upon Tyne. It was attended by almost 40 archaeologists, mostly from Europe, some accompanied by their partners. The publication of the proceedings included 11 papers, all but one of which were by men – the sole female contributor was Anne Robertson of Glasgow University, who spoke about the Antonine Wall. A photograph of 38 participants, though, includes nine women. Who were they? It would be helpful if a record of those attending the conference had survived, but despite assiduous searches none has been found. Moreover, there are at least two other female participants known who are not in the photograph. Why is this important? It is because the contribution of female archaeologists to Roman frontier studies has generally been overlooked. A case in point is Brenda Heywood (née Swinbank), who died on 20 December 2022. Brenda is known to have attended at least part of the Congress, but does not feature in any surviving photograph.
Brenda was born at Ackworth in Yorkshire in 1929, and went on to study History at Durham University, attaining her degree in 1949. One of her lecturers there was Eric Birley, later Professor of Romano-British History and Archaeology, and it was he who kindled Brenda’s interest in the period. So, with a 2:1 under her belt (firsts in History were not usually awarded at Durham in those days), Brenda stayed on to undertake research on the Vallum, the enormous earthwork that runs behind Hadrian’s Wall from Newcastle upon Tyne to Bowness-on-Solway. She walked the whole length of the Vallum, notebook in hand, recording its state as she went: this valuable record of the Vallum in the early 1950s has been digitised by Newcastle University and is available online at https://doi.org/10.25405/data.ncl.21896055.v1. Brenda identified the earthwork’s crucial issues and set out to try to solve them through selective excavations that were largely successful; her findings were published in the local archaeological journals Archaeologia Aeliana and the Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society.
No full-time academic posts were available at Durham when Brenda’s initial research grant ended in 1952, so she completed her research while working as a History and Latin teacher at a high school in the Yorkshire Dales. Two years later, she was awarded her PhD, making her only the third woman in Britain to have been granted a PhD in Archaeology (the external examiner was Mortimer Wheeler, also present at the 1949 Congress). Brenda became one of the first professional women in British archaeology in 1956, when she took up a two-year post at University College, Cardiff.
