English botanist and archaeologist. Dorothy Kate Hughes was born in Ashford, Middlesex, in 1899. She attended the Welsh Girls' School in Ashford until the beginning of the First World War, when she joined the Women's Land Army. After suffering an injury in Anglesea, which required an operation, she was forced to remain inactive for the remainder of the war.
In 1918 she began work at Kew Gardens as a student-assistant to Dr Otto Knapf. For several years she worked in the the herbarium on African grasses, describing a number of new species in Kew Bulletin, and studied in her spare time at the University of London. In 1923 she was invited by Agnes Chase to join the staff of the United States National Herbarium in its Office of Foreign Plant Introduction. There she carried out taxonomic studies of cultivated bamboos and met the agricultural explorer Wilson Popenoe, whom she married a few months later. They had five children within a few years.
In 1925 her husband resigned from government service and accepted a job with the United Fruit Company as director of tropical agricultural experiments. He selected a site for the new Lancetilla Agricultural Experiment Station near Tela, on the Atlantic coast of Honduras, and brought his family down to their new home that December. Labourers clearing the land to develop the site uncovered numerous Mayan artefacts, which the Popenoes described and published in an essay illustrated with drawings by Dorothy Popenoe, who developed a keen interest in the archaeology of Central America. In 1927, she mapped the Mayan fortress city of Tenampua with her Ecuadorian assistant Jorge Benitez. She described their findings in a scholarly report that was published by the Honduran government and was later reproduced in English by the Smithsonian Institution in 1936. The published account by G.B. Gordon of his archaeological research in the Uloa Valley, Honduras, stimulated her to make a series of stratigraphic studies to clarify the relationship between the monochrome and polychrome pottery complexes discovered in the valley. Between 1928 and her death in 1932 she excavated in the pre-Columbian cemetery at Playa de los Muertos and the Late Classic portion of Cerro Palenque, encouraged by Professor A.M. Tozzer of Harvard's Peabody Museum.
In 1929 the Popenoes purchased the ruins of a 17th-century mansion in Antigua, Guatemala, and spent the following years on a complete restoration of the property. In 1932 they returned to Tela where Dorothy Popenoe planned to finish a report of her research. Her life was cut short in December of that year when she ate an unripe, uncooked akee fruit, which is believed to have poisoned her. The results of her excavations at Playa de los Muertos were published posthumously in 1934.
The Peabody Museum at Harvard University keeps a collection of about 150 photographs taken by Dorothy Popenoe of various archaeological sites in Honduras and other parts of Central America, as well as a collection of ceramic artefacts collected by her. She was a talented artist, who in addition to archaeological sketches produced botanical illustrations of Central American fruits studied at the experiment station.
Sources:
R.A. Joyce, 1994, "Dorothy Hughes Popenoe: Eve in the Archaeological Garden", Women in Archaeology: 51-66
F. Rosengarten Jr, 1991, Wilson Popenoe,: Agricultural Explorer, Educator, and Friend of Latin America.
