Esther Boise Van Deman was a leading archaeologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in South Salem, Ohio, to Joseph and Martha (Millspaugh) Van Deman, she was the youngest of six children. She excelled in school and had an exceptional talent in music, a field her parents encouraged for her. In 1892, Van Deman received her Bachelor Degree from the University of Michigan and, one year later, her Master of Arts Degree in Latin. After teaching at Wellesley and Bryn Mawr, she received a Ph.D. in Latin from the University of Chicago in 1898. She then taught at Mount Holyoke College. In 1901 she won a fellowship to the American School of Classical Studies (now the American Academy) in Rome. In 1903 she returned to the United States and was a professor at Goucher College. From 1906 to 1910 she lived in Rome as a Carnegie Institution Fellow, and from 1910 to 1925 was an associate of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. and taught Roman archaeology at the University of Michigan. She spent most of the rest of her professional career in Rome, where she died in 1937.

Van Deman was the first American woman to achieve recognition in the field of Roman archeology. As a self-taught photographer, she utilized the medium to assist her research and illustrate her pioneering articles and books on building techniques and aqueducts. Her life's work centered around the analysis of building materials to establish a chronology of construction on ancient sites. 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 in 1909. Van Deman then extended her research to other types of concrete and brick construction and published "Methods of Determining the Date of Roman Concrete Monuments" in The American Journal of Archaeology. 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, was The Building of the Roman Aqueducts. At the time of her death, Van Deman was at work on a monograph-length study of Roman construction. Her work was completed and published by longtime friend and colleague, Marion Elizabeth Blake. A collection her photographs, taken during archaeological surveys in the Roman Campagna, excavations in the Roman Forum and study trips in Europe, Italy and North Africa between 1898 and 1930, is archived at the American Academy in Rome. 

Contributor: John Locke Doggett(49553259)