Harriet Boyd was the first woman to lead an archaeological excavation in the Aegean. At a time when few women travelled on their own, she discovered, excavated and published an account of the Minoan town of Gournia in Crete. She was the first woman to lecture to the Archaeological Instituite of America - ten times in fourteen days in January 1902. While prominent as a lecturer and teacher, archaeology was only a part of her life: in 1897 she was nursing with the Red Cross in the Greco-Turkish war, in 1915 she was nursing Serbian typhoid victims on Corfu, and by 1917 she was in Northern France setting up a rehabilitation centre within sound of the front. While the past and its arts were her profession, the present and the future were her passionate interest - whether local social problems in her home town of Boston or international affairs which took her to lunch with Mrs Roosevelt at the White House. Mary Allsebrook's light-hearted and extremely readable account of her mother's extraordinary experiences shows Harriet Boyd to be truly one of America's pioneers.