Dorothy Garrod, 1892 — 1968

Dorothy Garrod passed away on December 18th in Cambridge, at the university to which so many memories bound her and where, thirty years earlier, she had been appointed to succeed Sir Ellis Minns in the Chair of Archaeology founded by John Disney. She came to prehistory by an indirect route. On both her father’s and mother’s sides, Dorothy Garrod belonged to a family of physicians. She was born in London, in the Harley Street district. In keeping with the customs of the time for young women from professional families, her education continued at home and through private instruction, in this case under Isabel Fry, one of the greatest educators of the early twentieth century. In her leisure moments, her father, Sir Archibald Garrod, Fellow of the Royal Society of London, instilled in her a love of the classics and of the past. With a tenacity that would remain one of the defining traits of her character, she decided to pursue her studies further, chose history, was admitted to the University of Cambridge, and entered Newnham College, with which she would remain associated in various capacities throughout her career.

Awarded her Bachelor of Arts degree in the midst of the war, she began to question her path. It was the year of the Franco-British offensive on the Somme; in this context, academic life seemed devoid of meaning to her. She enlisted and served in army canteens until 1919, moving from Camiers to the banks of the Rhine. Her three brothers fell on the battlefield.

After demobilization, Dorothy Garrod returned to her family in Oxford, where the vigorous personality of Robert Marett drew her toward comparative ethnography. In 1921, armed with a diploma in anthropology and a travel grant, she went to France, visited the decorated Pyrenean caves with Count Bégouën, met Abbé Breuil at Niaux, and under his guidance began the study of the Paleolithic at the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in Paris. There she formed a friendship with Father Teilhard de Chardin that would never waver.

At the demanding school of Breuil, she was initiated into the many disciplines required of a prehistorian, and, guided by Dr. H. Henri-Martin, she made her debut in excavation at La Quina, followed by a period of training at Les Eyzies on the sites directed by Denis Peyrony. Back in England, Dorothy Garrod set to work on her first book, The Upper Palaeolithic Age in Britain, traveling across the country from Victoria Cave to Kent’s Cavern, verifying all written sources through firsthand field observation. During these years, frequent journeys brought her back to France, first to the Saint-Périers, who were exploring sites around Lespugue.

In 1926 she was ready to undertake her first excavation. On the advice of Abbé Breuil, she explored the Devil’s Tower rock shelter at the foot of the Rock of Gibraltar, where she discovered the skull of a Neanderthal child associated with a Mousterian industry. Meanwhile, an affair belonging to the realm of “archaeological detective work” was making headlines: the fierce controversy surrounding Glozel. The commission in charge of the investigation invited Dorothy Garrod to represent her country. René Dussaud had been among the first to sense the hoax, and from that time onward Dorothy Garrod could often be found at the Thursday gatherings at the house in Neuilly. The report exposing the fraud appeared in January 1928 and caused an uproar, but in the days that followed Dorothy Garrod embarked for Palestine, leaving the Glozel storm behind. She liked to recount with a smile that the magic word had served her as a fast pass. At their first meeting in Jerusalem, Father Vincent, who would later be such a valuable adviser to her, greeted her with youthful enthusiasm: “Quickly, tell me about Glozel!”

That same year marked the beginning of Dorothy Garrod’s long and brilliant career in the Levant, to which, thirty-six years later, she would bid a final farewell after completing, in Lebanon and in collaboration with Diana Kirkbride, the excavation of Mugharet el-Bezez.

The British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem immediately recognized that Dorothy Garrod was the person best suited to undertake the exploration of the Palestinian Paleolithic. Until 1925, almost nothing was known about it, but the discovery of the Galilee skull by Turville Petre had fired imaginations and opened up a vast field of research.

Upon her arrival, Dorothy Garrod was entrusted with the task of exploring Shukbah Cave in the Judean hills, brought to attention by Father Alexis Mallon, S.J. There she discovered, among other things, the existence of the Palestinian Mesolithic, which she later named the Natufian, and unearthed numerous human remains lying within the layer. She also sensed for the first time the mechanisms of cave formation in the region and the importance of their suspended breccias. In the autumn of the same year, an expedition to Iraq, under her direction, carried out surveys until Christmas Eve. A number of sites were identified around Sulaymaniyah under police escort, and test excavations were opened in the caves of Hazar Merd and Zarzi, which yielded new Paleolithic industries. For reasons of political insecurity, southern Kurdistan had until then remained terra incognita in this field, and this archaeological expedition was the first officially to enter it. Along with her reconnaissance in Anatolia on the eve of the Second World War, this journey to the Zagros Mountains remained one of her most vivid memories, for deep within her survived the adventurous spirit of Gertrude Bell.

The following year marked the first season of a monumental undertaking: the excavations of the caves of Mount Carmel. The site was threatened with destruction by quarrying; swift action was required. Dorothy Garrod was appointed director, and over seven campaigns the British School of Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Research worked in close collaboration. At the time, there was no road; the camp was organized on site. Working hours were not regulated by social legislation; the twelve-hour day began at five in the morning.

It is to Dorothy Garrod that we owe the definitive establishment, in its broad outlines, of the stratigraphic succession of the Stone Age in Palestine, ranging from the Tabunian to the Natufian. On this face of Mount Carmel overlooking the sea, diverse populations lived for tens of millennia. Most of the industries they used were identified in these caves, and human skeletons were uncovered in the Levalloiso-Mousterian and Natufian layers. The former present a remarkable juxtaposition of characteristics that would long fuel anthropological debate. Dorothy Garrod entrusted the study of the fauna to Dorothea Bate. Together they sketched, in broad strokes, the climatic evolution of the region since humans first occupied the caves. The results of these investigations were recorded in the first volume of The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, a fundamental work that has now become almost unobtainable.

To her analytical mind, Dorothy Garrod allied a keen sense of synthesis. Her excavation and survey reports, which yielded such a rich harvest, might have sufficed to satisfy her, but she liked to step back and place her work in a broader perspective. Some of her essays—“The Relations between South-West Asia and Europe in the Later Palaeolithic Age,” among others—were landmark contributions and helped disentangle the complex succession of Paleolithic cultures in Europe and the Middle East.

After completing the Mount Carmel excavations, Dorothy Garrod left Jerusalem—the city for her, where she had so many friends—in order to seek, somewhere in Anatolia or the Balkans, the missing link between the Paleolithic cultures of the Near East and those of Central Europe. She undertook the excavation of Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria, but the material proved insufficient to establish the comparisons she had hoped for.

Back in England, she received a Doctor of Science degree at Oxford, then was appointed professor at Cambridge, becoming the first woman to hold a chair at one of the two universities. Her teaching was interrupted by the war. Once again, she enlisted—this time in the women’s section of the Royal Air Force—and worked at Medmenham in the Air Force’s Photographic Interpretation Centre until the end of hostilities. Seven years after her election to the chair, she delivered her inaugural lecture, “Environment, Tools and Man,” a subtle humanist response to the arguments of typologists of the early Stone Age. To a very large extent, she contributed to the reshaping of teaching in her field, and many students, now masters themselves, owed their training to her.

From 1948 onward, she kindly agreed to collaborate during her vacations on the excavation of the Roc-aux-Sorciers rock shelter in the Vienne, where a Magdalenian sculpted frieze dating to around 12,000 BCE was discovered. Soon, she realized how difficult it was to reconcile fieldwork with teaching, and in 1953 she resigned her post to devote herself entirely to research. She settled in Charente and had her house, Chamtoine, built there. Yet this new dwelling was less a retreat than a home port; Dorothy Garrod retained a deep nostalgia for the lands of the Levant. That same year, she boarded the Maréchal Joffre and traveled to Jerusalem, where she was the guest of the American School. There she completed work on the caves of Emireh and Kebarah, which her longtime collaborator Turville Petre had not had time to finish.

For a long time, however, one idea had haunted her. In the first volume on Mount Carmel, Dorothy Garrod had refrained from placing the stratigraphic succession of the Wady el-Mughara caves within the framework of Pleistocene geochronology. A few months before its publication, at the Chicago Symposium on fossil man, she had hypothesized an interglacial age for the Neanderthals of these caves. Father Teilhard had then said to her: “Suspend your judgment; work with the sea.” In 1958, she therefore devised a new research plan. With the authorization and support of Emir Maurice Chehab, Dorothy Garrod undertook test excavations at three coastal sites in Lebanon: the Zumoft’en rock shelter, the caves of Ras el-Kelb, and those of Bezez. There she discovered the raised beaches she was seeking, associated with Yabrudian and Levalloiso-Mousterian industries, which finally allowed her, after years of cautious waiting, to clarify the place of the earliest inhabitants of the Mount Carmel caves within relative chronology.

The French Institute of Beirut provided her with rest and excellent working conditions. Thanks to this hospitality and to loyal collaborators, she was able to bring her work to completion, despite already failing health.

In May of the previous year, she completed the catalogue of the Bezez industries at the Institute of Archaeology in London. She had to draw upon all the reserves of her indomitable energy, as her physical strength was failing her, to accomplish the task she had set herself.

She was not granted the joy of seeing this final book appear. On June 30, Dorothy Garrod was overcome by illness, which a few months later claimed her life. Her collaborators are now working to complete the publication she entrusted to them.

Dorothy Garrod was a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Society of Antiquaries of London, which awarded her its gold medal in April 1968. She was also an Honorary Doctor of the Universities of Pennsylvania, Poitiers, and Toulouse, and a member of several foreign societies.

By following the stages of Dorothy Garrod’s career, one can discern the dominant traits of her scientific personality. She possessed to the highest degree a sense of international collaboration and, supported by a will of iron, was a pioneer in the fullest sense of the word—both a trailblazer and a pathfinder.

The education she had received, her intellectual curiosity, and the breadth of her reading led her to reject any rigidly systematic approach and to fear excessive specialization. Accustomed to discussion from her youth through her country’s debating societies, she sought to provoke it; scrupulously honest, she bowed to the facts and never hesitated to retract.

Her kindness, combined with great gentleness and simplicity, her extreme discretion, and her loyalty earned her many friendships. Ever alert to new discoveries, aware of the fragility of so many provisional explanations, we may be certain that she would have wished to bequeath to her disciples and to all who mourn her the deep meaning of the message contained in one of her reflections:

“New knowledge has given a twist to the kaleidoscope, and the pieces are still falling before the bewildered eye.”