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, Es Skhul, Shuqba (Shuqbah) and Kebara Cave. 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, although she worked with fellow archaeologist Francis Turville-Petre at Kebara Cave, the type-site for the Kebaran culture.

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. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1952. In 1965, she was awarded the CBE.

[edit] Selected publications

The Upper Palaeolithic Age in Britain (1926) Clarendon Press, Oxford
Garrod, D. A. E., Buxton, L. H. D., Elliot Smith, G. & Bate, D. M. A. (1928) "Excavation of a Mousterian Rock-shelter at Devil’s Tower, Gibraltar" Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 58, 91–113
"The Palaeolithic of Southern Kurdistan: Excavations in the Caves of Zarzi and Hazar Merd" (1930) Bulletin of American School of Prehistoric Research 6, 9-43
"The Stone Age of Palestine" (1934) Antiquity 8, 146
Garrod, D. A. E. and Bate, D. M. A. (eds) (1937) The Stone Age of Mount Carmel: Excavations at the Wady el-Mughara Vol. I Clarendon Press, Oxford
"The Upper Palaeolithic in the light of recent discovery" (1938) Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 4, 1-26
Garrod, D. A. E., Howe B. and Gaul J. H. (1939) "Excavations in the cave of Bacho Kiro, North-East Bulgaria" Bulletin of the American School of Prehistoric Research 15, 46-126

[edit] References

William Davies and Ruth Charles (eds) (1999) Dorothy Garrod and the Progress of the Palaeolithic: Studies in the Prehistoric Archaeology of the Near East and Europe Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Pamela Jane Smith (2000) "Dorothy Garrod as the First Woman Professor at Cambridge University" Antiquity 74(283), 131-6.
Pamela Jane Smith (2005) "From 'small, dark and alive' to 'cripplingly shy': Dorothy Garrod as the first woman Professor at Cambridge" (online at [1])
Pamela Jane Smith et al. (1997) "Dorothy Garrod in Words and Pictures" Antiquity 71(272), 265-70.