She was an archaeologist — a professional, trained, working scientist — who made the initial discovery and conducted the initial excavation of one of the most important ancient human burials in North America.

She did this in 1940, at a time when women in professional scientific fields operated within significant constraints, and she did it with the systematic competence that the subsequent decades of research would validate.

The Wheelers’ survey of Nevada caves was not glamorous work.

It involved physically demanding travel through remote desert terrain, the careful excavation and documentation of often unrewarding sites, and the patient accumulation of data whose significance might not become clear for years or decades.

Georgia Wheeler brought to this work a meticulous attention to the details of what she found — the specific construction of the burial wrappings, the form of the moccasins, the position of the body, the contents of the cave floor — that made the subsequent scientific analysis of the burial possible.