Dorothy Garrod
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Professor Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod (5 May 1892–18 December 1968) was a British archaeologist who was the first woman to hold an Oxbridge chair, partly through her pioneering work on the Palaeolithic period. Her father was Sir Archibald Garrod, the physician.
Born in Oxford, she attended Newnham College, Cambridge. Between 1925 and 1926 she excavated in Gibraltar and in 1928 led an expedition through South Kurdistan.
Following this, she held excavations at Mount Carmel in Israel where, working closely with Dorothy Bate, she demonstrated a long sequence of Lower Palaeolithic, Middle Palaeolithic and Epipalaeolithic occupations in the caves of Tabun, El Wad and Es Skhul. Her work contributed majorly to the understanding of the prehistoric sequence in the region. She also coined the cultural label for the late Epipalaeolithic Natufian culture following her excavations at Es Skhul and El Wad. The chronological framework established by her excavations in the Levant remain crucial to the present understanding of the prehistoric evolution in the region. Her excavations at the cave sites in the Levant were conducted with almost exclusively women workers recruited from local villages.
After holding a number of other academic posts she was made Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge in 1939, a post she held until 1952, aside from a gap towards the end of the Second World War when she served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Dorothy Garrod was the first female professor at Cambridge long before the admission of women to the university.
In 1965, she was awarded the CBE. Her publications include The Upper Palaeolithic age in Britain (1926) and (with Bate) The Stone Age of Mount Carmel (1937).
