Dorothy Popenoe

Dorothy Popenoe reading her morning paper.

Dorothy Popenoe (born Dorothy Kate Hughes; June 1899 in Ashford, Middlesex, England – December 1932) was an English archaeologist and botanist.

She attended the Welsh Girls' School in Ashford until the beginning of World War I when she joined the English Land Army. After the war, she worked at the Kew Garden in London, England as an assistant to Dr. Otto Knapf until 1923 when she was invited by Agnes Chase to join the staff of the United States National Herbarium in the Office of Foreign Plant Introduction. She conducted numerous studies of cultivated bamboo. Once there, she met and married Wilson Popenoe, the agricultural explorer and later gave birth to their five children.

In 1925, her husband accepted a position with the United Fruit Company as the director of agricultural experiments and moved the family to Tela on the Atlantic Coast of Honduras.

While in Honduras, Popenoe developed an interest in archaeology and worked on several Honduran archaeological sites including in the Maya fortress of Tenampua in 1927 and Cerro Palenque. Between 1928 and 1932 she excavated in the pre-Columbian cemetery at Playa de los Muertos.

However she could not complete her work because in December 1932, she ate an unripe, uncooked akee fruit, which is believed to have poisoned her and as a result she died.

The results of her excavations at Playas de los Muertos were published posthumously in 1934. Archaeologist Doris Stone included her analysis of the materials Popenoe excavated in her 1941 work "Archaeology of the North Coast of Honduras."