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Courtesy of the Department of Archaeology, University of Newcastle

Bell’s crowning achievement as an archaeologist came in 1909, when she stumbled across the ruins of an eighth-century A.D. Persian palace in the Iraqi desert (shown here and in the next photo). The castle, now known as Ukhaydir, was inhabited by a group of fierce Bedouin tribesmen, who befriended Bell and helped her with her archaeological research. During four feverish days of excavation, Bell mapped out every room in the massive structure and took dozens of wonderful, panoramic photographs of the site—including the one shown here, with Bell’s own lonely shadow in the foreground.