Dorothy Garrod

Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod, CBE, FBA (5 May 1892 – 18 December 1968) was an English archaeologist who specialised in the Palaeolithic period. She held the position of Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1939 to 1952, and was the first woman to hold a chair at either Oxford or Cambridge.

Early life and education

Garrod was the daughter of the physician Sir Archibald Garrod and Laura Elizabeth Smith, daughter of the surgeon Sir Thomas Smith, 1st Baronet. She was born in Chandos Street, London, and was educated at home. Her first teacher was Isabel Fry as governess. Garrod recalled Fry teaching her, at age nine, in Harley Street with the daughter of Walter Jessop. She later attended Birklands School in St Albans.

Garrod entered Newnham College, Cambridge in 1913, where she read ancient and classical history before archaeology was available as a subject, completing the course in 1916. By the time of her graduation in 1916 she had lost two brothers, Lt Alfred Noel Garrod and Lt Thomas Martin Garrod. Both were killed in action in WW I. Her third brother, Lt Basil Rahere died in France from Spanish influenza prior to demobilisation. It is rumoured that she lost her fiancé. She volunteered with the Catholic Women's League until 1919. She subsequently travelled to Malta, where her father was working as the Head of War Hospitals, and began to take an interest in the local antiquities.

Considerable disagreement exists over the date in which she become a Roman Catholic convert but Garrod apparently converted to Catholicism prior to coming up to Cambridge.

Career

thumb|Garrod in 1928 standing with George and Edna Woodbury of the American School of Prehistoric Research|left

On her family's return to England, where they settled in Oxford, Garrod read for a graduate diploma in Anthropology in 1921. It is clear from her lecture notes, which survive at Museum Antiquities Nationale, that the Diploma course was an intensive introduction to both archaeology and anthropology. She was taught by Robert Ranulph Marett, a Reader in Social Anthropology and an experienced excavator. She received a distinction on graduating in 1921, as one among a small number of female students. She had found an intellectual vocation: the archaeology of the Palaeolithic Age. Pamela Janes Smith discovered that Garrod states later as a tribute to him that "Marett the genial colleague, the brilliant talker, the beloved friend." Smith discovered that Mrs Chitty, née Mary Kitson Clark, one of Garrod's companions, during the Mount Carmel excavation of 1929, in an interview, that Garrod "experienced her conversion to prehistory with a religious depth of feeling [...] The determination to be a prehistorian and particularly in the Stone Age, came over her in one second, like a conversion." It was Marrett that introduced her to France and M. l'Abbé Breuil, her intellectual father. Garrod studied for two years, 1922 to 1924, with M. l'Abbé Breuil, the prehistorian, at the Institut de Paleontologie Humaine in Paris. and her declaration that "Europe was only after all a peninsula of Africa and Asia" (Clarke 1999:409) could be interpreted as Garrod being the intellectual child of the Abbé Breuil".

In 1926, Garrod published her first academic work, The Upper Paleolithic of Britain, for which she was awarded a B.Sc. degree by the University of Oxford.

Following an invitation from Breuil, she investigated Devil's Tower Cave, a site over a period of seven months in Gibraltar between 1925 and 1927. It was only 350 metres from Forbes' Quarry, where a Neanderthal skull had been found earlier. Garrod discovered in this cave in 1925, a second important Neanderthal skull now called Gibraltar 2. It was her first internationally recognized excavation. Garrod was to find many anomalous skeletons during her ensuing career, but the skull did not fit within the definition of Neanderthal.

In 1928, she led the first expedition to enter South Kurdistan. She was looking for evidence of Palaeolithic people migrating between Upper Mesopotamia and Syria. This work led to the test explorations of Hazar Merd Cave and Zarzi cave.

thumb|Display of material excavated by Dorothy Garrod, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Cambridge, March 2022. Objects relate to Mount Carmel excavations.

In 1929, Garrod was appointed to direct excavations at Wadi el-Mughara at Mount Carmel in Mandatory Palestine, as a joint project of the American School of Prehistoric Research and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. The series of 12 extensive fieldseasons was completed between 1929 and 1934. The results established a chronological framework that remains crucial to present understanding of that prehistoric period. The villages of Jeba and Ljsim were destroyed in 1948 and most members of the Palestinian team could not be traced. This continued to apply until 1948, when women became full members of the university.

After the war, Garrod returned to her position and made changes to the department, including the introduction of a module of study on world prehistory. Where previously prehistory had been considered particularly French or European, Garrod expanded the subject to a global scale. Garrod also made changes to the structure of archaeology studies, so turning Cambridge into the first British university to offer undergraduate courses in prehistoric archaeology.

In the summer of 1968, Garrod had a stroke while visiting relatives in Cambridge. She died in a nursing home there on 18 December, aged 76. and was instrumental in changing it into an integrated institution. As a result of her election to Professorship, women were granted full membership, and allowed to graduate with degrees from the University of Cambridge. She worked mainly with women as she lived in a segregated English society. In Palestine she was treated as member of the British ruling class and deeply loved by Palestinians. Garrod's relationships

with her Arab neighbours and employees "were warm. Garrod was often invited to weddings or other celebratory occasions. "She was called Sitt Miriam, Lady Mary.".

Her Mount Carmel expedition crew, which covered all of the excavations (Skhul, Kebara, el-Wad and et-Tabun), consisted mostly of local Arab women. Garrod was in complete charge of the many long-term excavations at Mount Carmel. In 1931, Francis Turville Petre, an openly gay man, participated very briefly in her excavations of Mount Carmel as part of Garrod's team at Skhul.

Awards and recognition

In 1937, Garrod was awarded Honorary Doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania and Boston College and a DSc. from the University of Oxford.

References

External links

The Dorothy Garrod photographic archive at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford
Dorothy Garrod (1892–1968): Eine Archäologin erobert die Eliteuniversität Cambridge