Esther Boise Van Deman

Esther Boise Van Deman (born Oct. 1, 1862, South Salem, Ohio, U.S.—died May 3, 1937, Rome, Italy) was an American archaeologist and the first woman to specialize in Roman field archaeology. She established lasting criteria for the dating of ancient constructions, which advanced the serious study of Roman architecture.

Van Deman earned bachelor’s (1891) and master’s (1892) degrees from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. After teaching Latin at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, Maryland, she received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1898). She then taught Latin at Mount Holyoke College (1898–1901) and Latin and archaeology at Goucher College (1903–06). From 1906 to 1910 she lived in Rome as a Carnegie Institution fellow, and from 1910 to 1925 she was an associate of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. Between 1925 and 1930 she taught Roman archaeology at the University of Michigan.

In 1907, while attending a lecture in the Atrium Vestae in Rome, Van Deman noticed that the bricks blocking up a doorway differed from those of the structure itself and showed that such differences in building materials provided a key to the chronology of ancient structures. The Carnegie Institution published her preliminary findings in The Atrium Vestae (1909). Van Deman extended her research to other kinds of concrete and brick constructions and published “Methods of Determining the Date of Roman Concrete Monuments” in The American Journal of Archaeology in 1912. Her basic methodology, with few modifications, became standard procedure in Roman archaeology.

Van Deman’s major work, written after she retired and settled in Rome, is The Building of the Roman Aquaducts (1934).