Garrod, Dorothy

Garrod was raised at her parents' house in Melton, Suffolk, by several governesses. ^[5] In 1913, she entered Newnham College in Cambridge , where she was one of the few female students. Garrod left Newnham after completing her second year and entered the military service, having converted to Catholicism before that, as part of a volunteer Catholic Women's League and was organizing field kitchens for French soldiers; was demobilized in 1919. By this time, she had lost two of her brothers on the fronts of the First World War , the third died in 1919 from the Spanish flu . Then she went to Malta , where her father worked and where she became interested in local antiquities ^[6] .

When her father was appointed royal professor of medicine at Oxford in 1921, Garrod decided to get an anthropology diploma at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University, where Robert Reynalf Marett became her teacher. It was Marett who was believed to have inspired Garrod to become an archaeologist and study the prehistoric era, and subsequently she worked for two years with the leading French archaeologist in the field of the prehistoric era, Abbot Henri Braille ^[7] . By then Braille had already visited Gibraltar and recommended that Garrod begin research in the cave of the Devil's Tower , which was just 350 meters from Forbes Querrey, where a Neanderthal skull was discovered earlier. The Devil's Tower Cave was discovered by Braille during his previous expedition ^[6] .

It was Garrod who discovered the important Neanderthal skull for science, now called Gibraltar 2, in the early 1920s ^[8] . She arrived in Gibraltar to conduct research on the advice of Abbot Braille and discovered a skull in a cave of the Devil's Tower with William Willoughby Cole Werner ^[9] .

In 1925-1926, she was engaged in excavations in Gibraltar, and in 1928 led an expedition to Southern Kurdistan , which was engaged in the excavation of the Khazar-Merd and Zarzi caves. In 1938, the scientific term “Gravettian culture” was introduced to refer to the Paleolithic culture that existed 19-26 thousand years ago, samples of which were discovered in many countries of Western and Central Europe.

The importance of Mount Carmel as an archaeological site of the prehistoric era was discovered only because the British considered it a good source of quality stone for the realization of their plans to turn Haifa into the main port in Palestine . In the course of preliminary research, however, not only samples of Natufi culture were found, but also prehistoric art objects, which were published in the influential publication Illustrated London News . In London, they decided that no quarry would be arranged here, and Garrod was invited to conduct further research in the three surrounding caves ^[6] .

Harrod excavated Mount Carmel in Palestine, where, working closely with paleontologist Dorothea Beit , she discovered layers of the Lower Paleolithic, Middle Paleolithic, and Epipaleolithic periods in the caves of Tabun , El Wad, Shul , Shugba and Kebara . Her work has become an important contribution to understanding the change of prehistoric eras in the region. She also came up with an approved name for the Natufi culture of the late epipaleolithic (from Wadi al-Natuf, the area of ​​the Shugba cave) after her excavations in Skhul and El Wade. The chronological framework established by her during excavations in Lebanon remains to date fundamental for understanding this prehistoric period ^[6] . Her excavations in the caves of Lebanon were carried out almost exclusively by female workers recruited from local villages, although she worked with the male archaeologist Francis Turville-Petre in the excavations of the Kebara Cave , a monument to the Kebara culture .

After working in a number of other academic positions, she became a Disney professor of archeology at Cambridge in 1939, holding this position until 1952, with the exception of a break at the end of World War II , when she served in the British Air Force Auxiliaries in the Photographic Analysis Unit. In 1949, she went to France to participate in excavations on the Atlantic coast and subsequently, almost until the end of her life, despite retiring, participated in archaeological expeditions in France and southern Lebanon .

Dorothy Garrod became the first female professor in Cambridge . The first women teachers appeared at the University of Cambridge in 1921, and in 1926 the University of Cambridge first awarded women degrees, but without the attendant privileges (that is, without the right to participate in the university administration). This state of affairs continued until 1947, when women at Cambridge University were granted full membership in all matters.

Garrod was elected a member of the British Academy of Sciences in 1952. In 1965, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire . In 1969, the Fund of Expeditions of her name, created to financially help archaeological expeditions, was founded at her expense ^[10] .