In the 20th century, women who chose to enroll in archaeology were few and far between. Indeed, the trio of women whose portraits I am going to sketch here were among the first in Hungary to graduate with a degree in this major. Each of them hailed from a middle-class family, spoke several foreign languages and lived a long life encompassing most of the century. Their early childhood years were framed by the collapse of the Monarchy, the losses of World War I and the relative calm of the Horthy era. They faced the bitter tribulations of World War II as young women. The decades of communism after 1945 dominated much of their creative period, when they filled various senior positions and strove to build good relations with colleagues in the West, to the extent this was possible from behind the Iron Curtain. They witnessed the tryst between the natural sciences and archaeology, the “revolution in chronology” sparked by the invention of radiocarbon dating. These women, always open to new trends in their field, must be regarded as the forerunners of complex archaeological analysis. Their professional achievements meant that they could not be circumvented by anyone pursuing research with implications for paleontology in Hungary or abroad. Sadly, they did not live to experience the new era of bioarchaeology and to exploit the advantages of the digital technologies prevalent today.