Project Description:
This website gives research access to around 750 negatives taken by Dorothy Garrod (1892–1968) mostly relating to archaeological research in present-day Israel in the early 1930s. Garrod is a major figure, both in British archaeology and academia more generally, having been the first prehistorian, and first woman, to be elected to a professorship (Disney Professor of Archaeology) at Cambridge University, a post which she held from 1939 until 1952. Trained by R. R. Marett at Oxford and the Abbé Henri Breuil in France, she was famed for her excavations in Gibraltar, Palestine, Southern Kurdistan, Anatolia, and Bulgaria. She discovered the well-preserved skull fragments of 'Abel', a Neanderthal child, in Gibraltar, identified the Natufian culture while excavating Shukbah near Jerusalem, led long term excavations at Mt Carmel, established the Palaeolithic succession for that important region and then travelled, in 1938, to explore the important Palaeolithic cave of Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria.
Her important collection of original negatives was donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum by her prehistorian colleague and executor Suzanne Cassou de Saint Mathurin in 1986. A further important collection of Garrod's prints and documents exists in the Mathurin collection at the Musée des Antiquités Nationales, St Germain-en-Laye, France.
At present the collection is documented briefly according to original notes. It is hoped that this website will allow researchers to help improve the descriptions and interpretations of the material
