Katherine Routledge

Katherine Maria Routledge (ROWT-lej; née Pease; 11 August 1866 – 13 December 1935) was an English archaeologist and anthropologist who, in 1914, initiated and carried out much of the first true survey of Easter Island.

She was the second child of Kate and Gurney Pease, and was born into a wealthy Quaker family in Darlington, County Durham, northern England. She graduated from Somerville Hall (now Somerville College, Oxford), with Honours in Modern History in 1895, and for a while taught courses through the Extension Division and at Darlington Training College. After the Second Boer War, she traveled to South Africa with a committee to investigate the resettlement of single working women from England to South Africa. In 1906 she married William Scoresby Routledge. The couple went to live among the Kikuyu people of what was then British East Africa, and in 1910 jointly published a book of their research entitled With A Prehistoric People.