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.

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.

Pamela Jane Smith writes of Garrod as follows: "Garrod was a solid member of Britain's intellectual aristocracy. Her father, Sir Archibald Garrod, had been Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford and is regarded as the founder of biochemical genetics; her grandfather was Sir Alfred Garrod of King's College Hospital, Physician Extraordinary to Queen Victoria and a leading authority on rheumatic diseases."

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.

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. Smith argues that Garrod's interest in the origin, distribution and classification of Middle and Upper Palaeolithic assemblages; her fascination with the questions of the origin of the modern humans and the demise of the Neanderthals; the concern with relative dating by geochronology 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 ensuring 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.

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. Working closely with Dorothea Bate, she demonstrated a long sequence of Lower Palaeolithic, Middle Palaeolithic and Epipalaeolithic occupations in the caves of Tabun, El-Wad, Es-Skhul, Shuqba (Shuqbah) and Kebara Cave. She also coined the cultural label for the late Epipalaeolithic Natufian culture (from Wadi Natuf, the location of the Shuqba cave) following her excavations at Es-Skhul and El-Wad. Her excavations at the cave sites in the Levant were conducted with almost exclusively women workers recruited from local villages, such as Jeba and Ljsim. One of these women, Yusra, is credited with the discovery of the Tabun 1 Neanderthal skull. The villages of Jeba and Ljsim were destroyed in 1948 and most members of the Palestinian team could not be traced. In 1937, Garrod published The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, considered a ground-breaking work in the field. In 1938, she travelled to Bulgaria and excavated the Palaeolithic cave of Bacho Kiro.