Born in 1892, Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod was the daughter of an English physician. She studied at both Newnham College Cambridge starting in 1913, and later Oxford University under Abbe Breuil, where she studied Paleolithic France. Garrod did fieldwork in England, Palestine, Kurdistan, Bulgaria, Gibraltar and Lebanon. She spent considerable time at excavations in the Near East, her most notable being twenty-two months at Mount Carmel. The Mount Carmel cave sites covered over two hundred thousand years of occupation. There she found thousands of stone tools and many Neanderthal skeletons. This excavation is regarded as a pioneering effort as no Neanderthal skeletons had been discovered outside of Europe till this time.
Garrod found the first Neanderthal skeleton from outside of Europe here, in addition to ninety-two thousand stone tools. The female Neanderthal’s skeleton led her to discover ten more, consisting of men, women and children. She was able to conclude that Neanderthals in Europe and the Near East existed at the same time, though the ones in Europe were more primitive. This, of course, caused some excitement (not all good), as it didn’t relate to the currently popular theory of linear evolution. Garrod studied the remains of fauna of various areas, and was able to relate them clearly to ancient climatic and ecological conditions. She made major advances in a number of areas, as well, including Paleolithic art, prehistoric migrations of man, prehistoric irrigation methods, prehistoric hunting techniques and others.
In addition to Garrod’s archeological leadership, she also was a pioneer for women, becoming the first woman professor at Cambridge University in 1939. The Disney Professorship of Archaeology at Cambridge became vacant. Garrod didn’t believe she had much of a chance in a time when women had been accepted as lecturers for barely ten years, and were still not admitted for degrees, but as she told a friend, Glyn Daniel: “I shan’t get it, but I thought I’d give the electors a run for their money”. On May 6, 1939, she was given the news that she had been elected to the professorship. This made Garrod the first female professor at either Cambridge or Oxford.
Garrod was the first to incorporate aerial photography into excavations. She was the first female recipient of the Gold Medal of the Society of Antiquaries in London, and made numerous donations of artifacts to Museums throughout the country. In 1952, four years after women became full members of the University, Garrod retired. She continued fieldwork in the Near East and France until her death in 1969.
She taught at Cambridge until 1952 when she retired. She continued fieldwork in archaeology until her death in 1969.
http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/univ/newsletter/1999/jun-jul/6.html
Former Link, http://cumaa.archanth.cam.ac.uk/garrod.html (October 2006)
Former Link, http://www.netsrq.com/~dbois/garrod.html (October 2006)
http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/~pjs1011/garrod.html (October 2006)
Written by: Karl Anderson 2001