Her breakthrough moment came at the site of Devil’s Tower in Gibraltar. The Abbé Breuil had advised her to look at the site, and it proved to be a career maker. The Rock of Gibraltar is a giant mass of limestone bursting up through the sea off the coast of Spain. Human bones were picked up on site as early as 1770, and for years following, a few teeth would appear now and then, a femur, a jawbone, and eventually some more bones of a “very primitive type” seeming to belong to that “period before the age of ‘polished stone.’”19 In 1917, the Abbé Breuil had spotted some more bones tucked into a small cave at the foot of a steep vertical rock peak. Garrod arrived several years later and stayed to excavate for a total of seven months. It was during this time that she made the monumental discovery of a Neanderthal child, and pieced it together from well-preserved broken skull fragments. In the mid-1920s, the impact of this discovery was explosive. Here was new evidence for the growing tree of evolution. Sealing the deal for Garrod’s career, she matched her huge find with a perfect report—perfectly readable to other professionals, though almost impossibly dry and technical for the layperson. “Few documents of comparable importance” wrote a friend of Garrod “have been more tersely and coolly written by a beginner who has just added a chapter to history.”20 Her careful excavations and meticulous analysis of every soil layer, bird bone, tool type, and worn tooth were intensely thorough and put her in good stead with the scientific community.
In 1997 a scholar named Pamela Jane Smith found a lost archive in the Musée des Antiquités nationales outside Paris. The rumors about the burned papers were false. In it was a lifetime of Garrod’s handwritten field notes, photo albums, and site documents. One photograph in particular gives a telling glimpse of Garrod’s work and her love for it. She named the remains of the Neanderthal child, assessed to be male, about five years old, Abel. The picture shows a thirty-four-year old Dorothy smiling, sitting above the excavation trenches, cupping the small skull in her hands. She looks really happy. In her personal album this photo was given pride of place, decorated on each corner by a little red star.21
While Jane Dieulafoy had Susa and Harriet Boyd Hawes had Gournia, Garrod’s fieldwork extended all over the map. Because she was tracing human origins, she moved through the Old World as our ancestors might have: full of curiosity and with deliberation. During her career, field explorations took her to Palestine, Kurdistan, Anatolia, Bulgaria, France, Spain, and Lebanon. With the exception of one excavation at a French site called Glouzel that left a bitter taste in her mouth (the site was a hoax, salted with fake artifacts and highly publicized to embarrassing degree), all of her sites were major. The Abbé Breuil provides a good summary of the string of her accomplishments that drew attention to Ms. Garrod’s capacity for more distant undertakings, and was the means of her being appointed to the direction of researches in caves of the Near East, to which, in 1928 onwards, she gave all her time. “With various collaborators she explored in 1928 the cave of Shukba (27 kilometers north of Jerusalem), and those of Zarzi and Hazar Merd in Southern Kurdistan. After that she explored the group of caves and rock-shelters of the Wady el-Mughara near Haifa . . . These last excavations were particularly lucky, admirably conducted and excellently described.”22
Garrod’s work in the caves of the Wady el-Mughara at Mount Carmel—where she was the director of joint excavations undertaken there by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Research—lasted from 1929 to 1934 and produced some of the most important human fossils ever found—more Neanderthals and a rare, nearly complete female burial.
Garrod was responsible for designing the excavation strategies for several, sometimes simultaneous, excavation sites during seven seasons, soliciting and budgeting finances, setting up camps, choosing, hiring, training and supervising her co-workers, arranging for equipment and supplies, dealing with British Mandate officials, and maintaining cordial relationships with the local Arab employees and their community. She was notified of all finds and made the decisions on how to preserve and to catalogue the abundant archaeological remains. The analysis of artifacts required an extraordinary effort . . . Garrod was responsible for analysis of all this material, writing field reports and publication of results. She handled these formidable tasks expertly.23
ABOVE : Dorothy Garrod and two of her field colleagues
The archaeological remains from the Wady el-Mughara included an astonishing 87,000 stone tools alone. Garrod undertook all of the classifying and cataloging of these artifacts by herself.24 It was a task that could have lasted a less able person a lifetime.
The results of her work eventually produced a detailed chronological understanding of the Stone Age in the Levant region, published in The Stone Age of Mount Carmel (1937). The book was a triumph, and Garrod was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania, Boston College, and Oxford University. Thanks to her, the Levant had become the best understood area of human evolution in the world at the time, unmatched in its clarity of sequence. Garrod was not just a woman making advances in science but an archaeologist taking giant strides through the field, and her influence was legendary. By 1939, she was considered one of Britain’s finest archaeologists.
WHEN WORKING IN the field, Garrod was regularly in the company of male colleagues, students, and assistants who were all smart and commendable professionals. But more often than not, her field crews were composed exclusively of women. Whether it was by chance (the best qualified people all happened to be female) or outright preference (to advance a feminist agenda), it was no longer the “boys’ club” that reigned unquestioned. There was now a sort of recognized ladies’ club in the fields of archaeology, all of whom were conducting groundbreaking research.
The “ladies’ club” had existed as only a fleeting entity until Garrod formalized it. Its spirit harks back to a vignette that Margaret Murray, an archaeological predecessor of Garrod who taught hieroglyphics and excavated in Egypt in 1902, wrote while delighting in feminine companionship on a site. There had been a suspicious noise in the camp one night, a sign that some looters might be causing trouble. Murray suggested they have a look:
ABOVE : Garrod and her all-female excavation team at the Mount Carmel Caves, 1929
“Oh, yes, go if you like.” But Mr. Stannus was shocked at the idea of three defenceless women ‘going into danger’ without a man to protect them, so he gallantly came too. He got the shock of his life when we three women joined hands and danced with a great variety of fancy steps all the way from the camp to the dig. The joining of our hands was precautionary, for fancy steps on those tumbled sand-heaps in the uncertain light of the moon is a tricky business. Poor Mr. Stannus, he had always been accustomed to the Victorian man’s ideal of what a lady should be, a delicate fragile being who would scream at the sight of a mouse.25
The little moonlit dance in which three women linked arms to buck the conventional view of ladylike meekness foreshadowed a larger movement. Garrod’s decision to create a work force almost entirely of women was unusual for her day, and it certainly commanded attention from the establishment. She hired local Arab women to assist on her excavations, since they worked extremely well and the money she paid them went directly to the needs of their families.26 During her first season at Mount Carmel her excavation team was nearly all female: the Arab girls did the basic digging, and four university-educated women—Elinor Ewbank, Mary Kitson, Harriet Allyn, and Martha Hackett— assisted her. The really heavy physical work was taken on by local men.27 Garrod’s actions gave field feminism a push, and as one of her crew, a woman named Yusra, explained: “We were extremely feminist you see because all the executive and interesting part of the dig was done by women and all the menial part . . . by men.”28 The tables had turned.
Whether or not Garrod and her women colleagues ever danced by moonlight is their secret, but they definitely enjoyed a ritual glass of sherry. “Sabbath” sherry was at 6:00 PM sharp, and even the “mud, muck, ooze upon
the floor, torn tents and thunder—all were forgotten as the sherry bottle was opened.”29 Archaeological field conditions remained as challenging as ever, and the women were exposed to heat, murderous humidity, dirty drinking water, storms, and disease. Some became quite ill. But sherry was a cheering curative, a reason to toast the hardships of the field—so rough in the moment, so good when told as stories later on.
Garrod’s camaraderie with other pioneering women archaeologists (though she was normally regarded as “the boss”) extended throughout her career. Her most enduring relationships— both as professionals and as close friends—were with two women: Germaine Henri-Martin, the daughter of an archaeologist whose site Garrod had worked on in her post-graduate days, and Suzanne de St. Mathurin. All three excavated together at different sites; all were prehistorians. Many of the excavations they conducted were in France, and as their achievements were increasingly recognized in the press and within academic circles, the French affectionately nickname them Les Trois Grâces (The Three Graces). The three pioneers remained together even in death—their archives at the Musée des Antiquités nationales are kept together. Each woman left the others her favorite photos and keepsakes. And so they remain bound.
Les Trois Grâces joined together late in their careers to aid a significant site in peril, a cave called Ras el-Kelb in Lebanon. The year was 1959, and two tunnels were being blasted through the rock; the integrity of the Paleolithic cave would be destroyed. Damage had already been done to the site years before when a railway had been laid down adjacent to it, and now the Director of Antiquities in Lebanon had requested that Garrod come out immediately and conduct a rescue dig. Les Trois Grâces arrived on the scene.
What they encountered was a new and fairly unprecedented ingredient in the field of archaeology: modern development. Construction projects pose a serious threat to archaeological sites—a blast of dynamite here or grading bulldozer there can erase evidence of thousands of years of human history in a moment’s time. Whereas once the biggest hurdle to accessing an archaeological site was distance (permissions were also tricky), now the graver concern was how much time do we have before the site is gone? Today, the rescue of sites slated for destruction is called salvage archaeology. Archaeologists excavate what they can and do their best to understand the cities and structures of yesterday before tomorrow’s skyscrapers and highways take their place.
For Garrod and her two collaborators, in addition to sandstorms and lice; there were now ear-splitting drills, construction dust, and relentless hammers banging metal all day. The women worked for seven weeks straight in an environment of deafening jackhammers. Wet tents and snakes would have been preferable. Some of the site’s strata, or the soil layers, were also as hard as cement. No shovel stood a chance. Garrod decided that the only way to truly assess what the prehistoric site contained was to cut out blocks of the cement-like earth called breccia with high-power drills and send them to the National Museum in Beirut for analysis. At least it would be quiet there.
DOROTHY GARROD IS a little like a calmer and more introverted Gertrude Bell. The ferocity of their intellect and the intensity, the sheer volume of their life’s achievements unites them. Both women had lost men important to them and subsequently threw themselves unconditionally into their work. Both had exceptionally close relationships to their fathers. Bell was the first woman to take a First in history at Oxford, thereby changing the academic terrain for other women and proving that ideas about a woman’s supposed intellectual inferiority were nonsense, and Garrod ratcheted the ladder even higher. In 1939 she became Disney (nothing to do with Walt) Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. It was an electrifying event, and female students at all English universities were overjoyed by the news.
Her application for the position at Cambridge began, “I beg to submit myself as a candidate.” She didn’t think she would get it. There were very few women in teaching positions at the university in 1939, and Dorothy’s application was in competition with those of a large number of accomplished male scholars. Full membership for women in the university system still had not been granted, and archaeology—especially prehistory—was seen as manly territory. Women might make headway in literature and poetry, but in the field?
It was precisely Garrod’s unmatched excellence in the field that brought her victory. No other applicant had her credentials for original site discoveries. Many of her competitors were “armchair archaeologists” whose greatest contributions to archaeology were born from library books and pipe smoke. When she was elected professor, women scholars and students throughout Europe were elated. The Garrod tradition of scientific achievement continued, and a woman now held one of the most respected and esteemed positions in science. Although she shied away from all the publicity that descended upon her (actually devoured her), Garrod had done what she set out to do. She had proven herself the worth of a man, of even three men, and of all the male archaeologists who had come before her and who worked beside her. Right after the announcement of her professorship, Garrod confided to her friend Gertrude, “I wish my father had been alive, and the others.” Her father had died recently. The men in her life—father, brothers, fiancé—must have cheered from on high. Courage and perseverance had brought her to her goal.
Here she is at age fifty, a portrait that captures the newly appointed professor’s physical presence:
Although 50 years old, her upright, well-knit figure, moving quietly and unselfconsciously, gave an impression of controlled energy of mind and body. . . She appeared taller than her 5 ft. 2 in., with noticeably small, delicate, but strong hands which seldom fumbled. Her steady eyes were dark brown and when greeting people flickered momentarily; the lids seemed to curtsey. Her thick crisply waving dark hair was worn short. The pleasant quiet voice, pitched rather low, had a tendency to drop at the end of a sentence. Her movements were unhurried but not slow, and even under pressure she imparted an air of repose. This paradox of tranquility combined with a life of sustained energy, was a characteristic rarely met with to such a degree.30
Garrod had worked through the complications of field life and had always loved teaching small groups and classes, yet within the ivory tower she hit her biggest challenge yet. Simply becoming one of the first women professors did not eradicate centuries of discrimination. From out of the wide-open field and into the windowless meeting rooms of Cambridge, she felt stifled and clipped. Her associates proved to be cagey and self-aggrandizing.
The faculty committees and boards were mired in hierarchy and personality conflicts. Her task as Disney Professor was to help reorganize the archaeology department and enhance its studies in prehistory. Although she enjoyed this aspect of her work, the rigmarole of university life and policy sucked her dry. Even her lectures suffered. Naturally reserved, she delivered lectures that were notoriously tedious and dull. One student complained of presentations with “never a light or bright moment.”31 University life was oppressive to Garrod. She stayed on as faculty until 1954, continuing her fieldwork and research when possible, but at age sixty she retired, happily, and like some bird that had once been caged, she bolted, wings spread, toward her “years of fulfillment” back in the field.
She began work on the coasts of Lebanon and Syria, which contained earthy ribbons of evidence showing late Pleistocene sea levels, and began a search for ancient shorelines. In determining the contours of the former Ice Age sea, she could locate inland sites that had once been coastal. These were the ideal spots where a person would want to make camp: caves with ocean views (and good fishing) surrounded by land where plants could be gathered and animals caught. Garrod also had a new tool up her sleeve.
With the advent of radiocarbon dating, she could obtain certain dates for some of the artifacts she uncovered. Her chronologies of the Paleolithic period in Palestine and Lebanon grew more robust, more comprehensive, more invaluable to archaeological understandings of how humans became human.
ABOVE : Garrod, always devoted
to conducting excellent fieldwork
THE SOCIETY OF Antiquaries of London was founded in 1707, and its Royal Charter (the same today as it was then) is to enable “the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other countries.” For its first two hundred years of operation, women were denied any role in the society. Even those who had advanced archaeological knowledge in England and abroad were ignored. In 1968 that pattern was reversed when the society awarded Dorothy Garrod its grand Gold Medal. She was seventy-six years old. In her acceptance speech Garrod made a point of mentioning the historical absence of women within the society; she issued a soft reprimand. She also proclaimed to the society fellows a new truth—one directed specifically at the society but applicable to the entire field of archaeology. She summarized the unstoppable arrival of women to a field once denied them by remarking that, at last, here was “the long-awaited and by some, long-dreaded day, when the gates of the citadel were finally opened to the Amazons.”32
Garrod had secured entry into the field of archaeology to a degree no woman before her had. As she tore down those gates, a rush of other women followed. Some ran alongside her. It was in the post–World War I climate that several women gained a stronger foothold in the sciences they loved. Garrod just happened to be, perhaps, the most outstanding and certainly one of the most trenchant figures.
Why Garrod chose archaeology as her life’s passion is a question that harks back to her younger days when she lost her three brothers, and perhaps her future husband, and thereon decided to make her life a worthy thing. To decide on a scientific field was almost a foregone conclusion, but archaeology veered significantly from medicine or zoology. Could Garrod have found some attraction in selecting the “ultra-masculine” scientific field least accessible to her, one that required her to forsake the daily comforts of a clean desk and clothes for work more physically rigorous and demanding? She may have felt that archaeology offered her more room to prove something, to venture into territory where history was not just the subject studied but something she could harness herself, change the direction of. By breaking into the field as a woman, she could make history.
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