Garrod, D. A. E. (Dorothy Anne Elizabeth), 1892-1968

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.[1][2][3]

Garrod was the daughter of the physician Sir Archibald Garrod and Laura Elizabeth Smith, daughter of the surgeon Sir Thomas Smith, 1st Baronet.[4] She was born in Chandos Street, London, and was educated at home. Her first teacher was Isabel Fry as governess.[5][6] Garrod recalled Fry teaching her, at age nine, in Harley Street with the daughter of Walter Jessop.[7] She later attended Birklands School in St Albans.[6]

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."[8]

Garrod entered Newnham College, Cambridge in 1913, where she read ancient and classical history before archaeology was available as a subject,[9] 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.[10] Both were killed in action in WW I. Her third brother, Lt Basil Rahere[11] died in France from Spanish influenza prior to demobilisation.[12] It is rumoured that she lost her fiancé.[13] 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,[14] and began to take an interest in the local antiquities.[15] 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.[16]

Career

Garrod in 1928 standing with George and Edna Woodbury of the American School of Prehistoric Research
On her family's return to England, where they settled in Oxford, Garrod read for a graduate diploma in Anthropology in 1921.[17] 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.[18] She was taught by Robert Ranulph Marett, a Reader in Social Anthropology and an experienced excavator.[19] She received a distinction on graduating in 1921, as one among a small number of female students.[20] 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."[21] 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."[22] It was Marrett that introduced her to France and M. l'Abbé Breuil, her intellectual father.[23] Garrord studied for two years, 1922 to 1924, with M. l'Abbé Breuil, the prehistorian, at the Institut de Paleontologie Humaine in Paris.[6] 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[24] 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".[25]

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.[26]

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.[27] 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.[28] It was her first internationally recognized excavation.[29] Garrod was to find many anomalous skeletons during her ensuring career, but the skull did not fit within the definition of Neanderthal.[30] 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.[31] This work led to the test explorations of Hazar Merd Cave and Zarzi cave.[32]


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.[33] The results established a chronological framework that remains crucial to present understanding of that prehistoric period.[15] 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.[26] 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.[34] The villages of Jeba and Ljsim were destroyed in 1948 and most members of the Palestinian team could not be traced.[34] In 1937, Garrod published The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, considered a ground-breaking work in the field.[35] In 1938, she travelled to Bulgaria and excavated the Palaeolithic cave of Bacho Kiro.[1][2]


Garrod at the International Symposium on Early Man, Philadelphia, March 1937
After holding a number of academic positions, including Newnham College's Director of Studies for Archaeology and Anthropology, she became the Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge on 6 May 1939, a post she held until 1952.[1] Her appointment was greeted with excitement by women students and a "college feast" was held in her honour at Newnham, in which every dish was named after an archaeological item. In addition, the Cambridge Review reported, "The election of a woman to the Disney Professorship of Archaeology is an immense step forward towards complete equality between men and women in the University."[1] Gender equality at the University of Cambridge at the time was still remote: as a woman, Garrod could not be a full member of the university, so that she was excluded from speaking or voting on University matters.[36] This continued to apply until 1948, when women became full members of the university.[36]

From 1941 to 1945, Garrod took leave of absence from the university and served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) during the Second World War. She was based at the RAF Medmenham photographic interpretation unit as a section officer (equivalent in rank to flying officer).[35]

After the war, Garrod returned to her position and made a number of 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.[26] During the university summer vacations, Garrod travelled to France and excavated at two important sites: Fontéchevade cave, with Germaine Henri-Martin, and Angles-sur-l'Anglin, with Suzanne de St. Mathurin.[35]

Later life
On her retirement in 1952, Garrod moved to France, but continued to research and excavate. In 1958, aged 66, she excavated on the Aadloun headland in Lebanon, with the assistance of Diana Kirkbride.[35] The following year she was asked urgently to excavate at Ras El Kelb, as a significant cave had been disturbed by road and rail construction. Henri-Martin and de St. Mathurin assisted Garrod for seven weeks, with the remaining material being removed to the National Museum of Beirut for more detailed study. She returned to Aadloun again in 1963, with a team of younger archaeologists, but her health began to fail and she was often absent from the sites.[35]

Garrod appeared as a panellist in a 1959 episode of the game show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? held at the Musée de l'Homme.[37]

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.[35]