Amanda Adams

by Ladies of the Field: Early Women Archaeologists

  CHRISTIE’S FAMOUS LITERARY creation, the detective Hercule Poirot, explains his approach to crime solving in Death on the Nile:

  Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition— and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do—clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth—the naked shining truth.”31

  Christie’s love and knowledge of archaeology—such a little known fact about her life—shaped much of her writing. You could say that the archaeological process was at the heart of things. Cleaning away the fluff and confusion that clouds a good story, Christie stabbed at the moment of discovery with all the precision of a carefully wielded spade. She honed her trade through the typewriter while hip-deep in the excavation trenches.

  All archaeologists are detectives of the past: they reconstruct events from the clues given in crumbling foundations, a lost gold earring, or the fragment of an inscription. To decipher what happened in a place thousands of years ago requires all the skill and cunning of a private investigator. For what is archaeology if not mystery? And where would archaeology be without the deft literary hand of a great mystery writer?

  Agatha Christie was never a proper archaeologist per se; she was never a field director and had no academic publications or university affiliation. But she was its champion and its practitioner. She introduced her readers to the thrills of archaeology—its landscape and its ruins. She also brought her readers into the mind of archaeology, inviting them to interpret the evidence and think critically about a sequence of events, about how one thing leads to another. Christie always felt that she and Max were an excellent match, personally and professionally. The mystery writer and the archaeologist had a lot in common.

  The field, the Orient, was where Christie felt she belonged. Although she delighted in spending time back home in England, a bowl of cream in easy reach and a white porcelain tub with hot water at her ready, the desert was her happiness. The stuff of her dreams. Archaeology made her life more beautiful than before. One gray winter in London, still enchanted by the memory of soft desert colors, Christie commissioned a special pair of pajamas for herself. Made of crêpe de chine, the bottoms were apricot like sand and the top was blue like sky.32 The mystery writer who devoted thirty years of her life to archaeological fieldwork wrapped herself up in the beauty of a Middle Eastern desert and slept in the colors of its sunrise.

  ABOVE : The accomplished Dorothy Garrod, 1913

  1892 - 1968

  DOROTHY GARROD

  LIKE A GLASS OF

  Stony White Wine

  By the late 1920s, archaeology had evolved from a passionate (even personal) pursuit of the past to a purer science. The field had matured since Amelia Edwards boarded her dahabeeyeh and Gertrude Bell explored uncharted deserts alone. The lush travel narratives that described archaeological expedition as adventure were fading away. They became less popular, less useful to a science reaching for ever more precise answers. In the early twentieth century there was a new voice for archaeology, and it was Dorothy Garrod.

  Take the following as an example. In the passage below Garrod offers a technical description of wind-borne sands that would have inspired Amelia’s pen to heady prose musing on those bits of ancient earth snatched by a swinging gale, bound in heavenly light. Garrod was a little more straightforward: “The sands and travertines at Devil’s Tower are clearly wind-borne. Apart from their contents the way in which layer 1 was driven up against the face of the rock and into the roof of the fissure demonstrates this beyond question.”1

  Here was the new tone of archaeology—concise and clear, grounded in facts, leanly expressed. Objective. The older accounts of the field that melded travelogue and discovery in equal measure were laid to rest, relegated to literary artifact. They were appreciated to be sure (they were the written foundations of the field), but personal memoir no longer had a place in an archaeological survey report.

  In the beginning archaeology served the personal taste of the researcher; it was a kind of intellectual pursuit sidesaddled to the exotic. Now archaeology was the thing served; served by scientists willing to leave out any mention of themselves. The spotlight shone exclusively on a site, the evidence found, and the conclusions drawn. Archaeology was suddenly selfless. People were still proud to put their names on reports, build reputable careers, and drum up recognition for their scholarly finesse, but the stories of individual experience and romance were relegated to the discipline’s backwaters. The goal had shifted from entertainment to information testing and building.

  Archaeology had at last dug out its place as a credible international science. With so much evidence coming to light, ranging from buried towns like Gournia to ancient bones that revealed the intricacies of our human evolution, the questions archaeology could ask were becoming more pointed. The stakes were higher, the answers more complex yet increasingly within reach. A new generation of archaeologists set aside the once colorful tales of adventure and got down to a different kind of business.

  ONE OF THESE ARCHAEOLOGISTS was Dorothy Garrod. She tackled archaeology the way a physicist might break down the structure of a proton; she was thorough and methodical and had an eye fastened to detail. Her good friend, Gertrude Caton-Thompson (1888–1985), another notable early woman archaeologist, referred to a “Garrod tradition of eminence in the advancement of scientific learning.”2 Garrod came from brainy stock—a family of important scientists. Though a woman, she matched precedent and eventually won recognition as a “towering figure” in archaeological history, one who exerted an “enormous intellectual legacy.”3 Her lasting influence in the field was as deep as the sites she dug. Standing on the edge of an excavation unit in the Paleolithic cave site of Tabun in Palestine, Garrod gazed down at a cleared span of nearly 600,000 years of human history, a layer cake of history made of old hearth ash, tools, bones, and crumbled red ocher, all cascading beneath her boots in varying shades of soil.

  Her quest was prehistory—human origins and the first seeds of agriculture, to be specific—and she considered the revolutionary new discoveries of early man (yes, women too) throughout Europe and beyond to be “the very life-blood of our science.” She seized the opportunities available in new dating methods (radiocarbon), constructed new and reliable chronologies, led complicated field excavations, found some of the earliest evidence for domestication of the dog, and became the first female professor at Cambridge University. She worked with leading men of the day as a highly respected colleague, if not a leader. Her training was tough—one mentor made her place her hand in a bag, feel the stone tools, and identify them by touch alone4—and she traveled far and wide to work in the cave sites where our ancestors once lit warm fires during a dark and cold Ice Age.

  Like the women archaeologists who came before her, Garrod traveled to remote corners of the earth under harsh conditions—in some regions she couldn’t go anywhere without an armed escort—yet this legendary woman remains a little opaque to the public eye. Highly reserved, she didn’t showcase her personal life or write a string of gushing letters home, and until recently, very few photographs of Garrod were known to exist. So little personal information was available that for years rumors claimed she had burned everything—notebooks, pictures, letters, and sketches.

  “DOROTHY WAS UNIQUE , rather like a glass of pale fine stony French white wine.”5 That was the way one colleague characterized her. Another gave a nod to her “sound judgment,” explaining that Garrod was “a good mixer, with a genuine interest in people, whatever their age, status, or diversified affairs. Her retentive memory, wide reading and interest outside her own subject, such as music (she played the violin and flute), fitted her to contribute somethi
ng of interest, fun, or wit to most type of conversation.” But,“if bored or displeased she could be devastatingly silent, sultry, abrupt, or unco-operative.”6

  Yet another portrait of Garrod gives us a woman both “reserved, assured, delightful” in the field, and “frightened, ill at ease” in hierarchical situations or when giving public lectures.7 Evidently, she was tricky to read and sensitive to circumstance.

  An obituary written for her noted that “partly through natural reticence, partly through social conventions of earlier life, she seldom alluded in general conversation, professional circles apart, to her own work and position, or to the international community of distinguished scientists in which, by inheritance and personal achievement she moved so easily.” She was quiet, modest, some said shy. By the list of her extensive publications, she was busy too.

  Garrod was born on May 5, 1892. Her grandfather was knighted Sir Alfred Garrod. He was a professor at King’s College Hospital and was later endowed with the fancy title of Physician Extraordinary to Queen Victoria. He had three sons, two of whom became outstanding scientists and the third a poet. Garrod had a zoologist uncle, and her father, Sir Archibald Edward Garrod, was famous for pioneering a new field of medicine dealing with metabolic troubles. He was Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and honorary member of countless medical institutions, clubs, and organizations at home and abroad. The Garrod household kindled the scientific spirit, which, in the words of Dorothy Garrod’s famous father, acts as a check as well as a stimulus, a spirit “restraining too eager flights of the imagination and too hasty conclusions.”8 This spirit of restraint deeply influenced Garrod’s approach to archaeology.

  By the grace of so many clever minds in the family, the Garrods enjoyed social prestige and upper class wealth and comfort. Although little information exists about Garrod’s mother, Laura Elizabeth Smith, it is known that she had a scientific upbringing also. Her father was a surgeon famed for the dexterity of his hands. That attribute was passed onto Garrod, holding her in good stead when she would one day gently lift fragile human bones out of clingy clay-rich earth.

  Vignettes of Garrod’s childhood are scare. She studied with a governess and received a sound drumming in math, history, and Latin.9 She went to a boarding school and entered Cambridge as an undergraduate in 1913, though, like all women at the time, she was not recognized as a full student and could not receive a degree. One of the most formative aspects of Garrod’s early life was tragedy: the unexpected loss of three brothers, one at a time. All were star-bound in their respective careers, promising futures almost guaranteed, but Alfred (already a doctor) was killed in France while serving for the Army Medical Corps; Thomas died of wounds while serving in France as well; and Basil, the youngest, died in a flu pandemic on the eve of his demobilization. World War I ripped through the lives of the Garrod family, and the heartbreak was not confined to just kin. It is rumored that the man Garrod was to marry died too, “swept away”10 by war’s terror. A piercing grief left Garrod alone as an only child, bereft of her lover, and staring down a life where her chosen career—still undetermined—would now fill massive amounts of empty space. She told a friend during that dark time that she had resolved “to try and compensate her parents, as far as lay in her power, by achieving a life they could feel worthy of the family tradition.”11 No wonder her writing was devoid of self. She was stiff with loss, determined to prove her own worth as the equal not just to a man but rather to three.

  LIKE SOLDIERS RETURNING home from war, Garrod was shell-shocked. The trauma of losing her brothers led her to join her parents in Malta, an island nation off the coast of Italy, where her father was engaged in medical work. To help ease his daughter’s distracted mind, Sir Archibald suggested that she tour the scenic ruins of Stone Age agriculturalists and all the other successors who built their temples and roads there. Garrod wandered alone, mulling over what she might do with the rest of her life. At the time, she was considering architecture.12 Yet something in the history she was surrounded by pushed her toward archaeology. When she returned home she enrolled in Oxford’s anthropology program. From there, a quick sequence of events catapulted her into the field where she belonged.

  University connections introduced her to L’Abbé Henri Breuil. A priest-cum-prehistoric archaeologist with a great interest in cave paintings, the Abbé Breuil became a formative teacher in Garrod’s life. Working in the ancient caverns by an acetylene lamp, exploring “impossible caves in a Roman collar and bathing dress,”13 he would decipher the shapes of galloping horses and bison from a mess of scribbled lines. Whenever a new decorated cave was found, the Abbé Breuil was called in first. He believed that the masterful depictions of animals (think Lascaux, the first page in almost any art history textbook), rendered in ocher shades of red and yellow, outlined in blacks, highlighted in chalky whites, and all mixed with lustrous animal fat, symbolized magic rituals for hunting. Many of his theories about why cave paintings were made have not stood the test of time, and his interpretations have been questioned, but during his heyday he was the authority in Paleolithic archaeology. Under his tutelage, Garrod was taken to see the ancient caves of Niaux and others. They crawled on their bellies to get through tight, slippery cave tunnels and squeezed through crevices to find “all sorts of wonders; bison modelled in clay, and portraits of sorcerers, and footprints of Magdalenian man.”14

  In the galleries of these pitch-black caves, paintings estimated to be as old as eighteen thousand years were illuminated by candlelight. Animals sketched in charcoal danced in flickering light. Garrod’s excitement about Paleolithic archaeology, very deep history, and human origins was similarly ignited. She would be a prehistorian. One of Garrod’s good friends stated in an interview that “the determination to be a prehistorian and particularly in the Stone Age, came over her in one second, like a conversion. She was, after the War, in turmoil, what was she to do with her life? And, it came over her in a flash, that was what she was to do.”15 Her direction now sure, she became the Abbé Breuil’s full-time pupil in 1922. They would remain friends and respected colleagues for the next forty years.

  The Abbé Breuil was a teacher who didn’t bother to lecture; on the contrary, he waited until smart questions were asked and then he answered them at length. Garrod absorbed knowledge through dialogue. If she couldn’t conjure up an intelligent question, there was silence. Like the Abbé Breuil, Garrod was a Roman Catholic, and their conversations included subject matter both scholarly and spiritual. Garrod had converted to the church at the time of her brothers’ deaths during World War I. Both archaeologists were confronted with a history—an evolutionary history of vast time—that did not jibe with their shared religious beliefs. Did they wrestle with this conflict as they worked together excavating the cave floors? Did they try to reconcile the bones they unearthed with the biblical account of creation they believed in?

  As the evidence continued to suggest a very ancient world, one that extended far beyond the estimated age of the planet that the Church espoused (4000 BC), Garrod struggled with the issue. She even withdrew from her work until she could make peace with her intellectual and spiritual quandary.16 Resolution was found through the influence of French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who abandoned the Book of Genesis for a looser interpretation of change over time. He aligned that change with the cosmos and his notion of ever progressing “centeredness.” Whatever the details of his now obscure philosophy, it was a balm to Garrod, and she felt comfortable from that point on to dig into the question of who we are and where we came from. It was likely one of the first debates between creationist and evolutionist points of view.

  LEFT: A variety of early stone tools

  RIGHT: Ancient stone tomb and assorted religious relics

  At the Abbé Breuil’s persuasion, Garrod took on a gigantic research project. She pulled together all the loose strands of information— the scattered site reports, artifacts stored in di
fferent museums, and partial field notes from numerous Paleolithic excavations throughout Britain—and made sense of them all by organizing the disparate bits of information, resolving discrepancies, and folding the whole package into a large, clear picture of early human development, published as The Upper Paleolithic in Britain. Still considered a classic, the work helped align understandings of human evolution in Britain with what was already recorded in mainland Europe, a long-time goal of archaeologists who had longed to make connections between the two places. For her effort, Garrod was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree from Oxford in 1924, and the road to some high-profile digs was paved.

  From the start, Garrod’s intellectual quest was to throw light on the Upper Paleolithic as a whole.17 At the turn of the century, the question of human origins was cutting-edge stuff. Take into account the fact that in previous centuries artifacts found in a freshly plowed farmer’s field were believed to be supernatural, celestial, or organic. Stone tools were thought to be the by-product of thunder; ancient pottery was believed to grow naturally in the earth, bowls taking rounded shape in soft soil, narrow jugs in the walls of rodent holes.18 There were times when no distinction could be made between fossilized seashells, sparkling crystals, and ivory carved with decorations by a human hand; they were just strange pretty things come from above. Angel craft. Solidified stardust. Now, it was these very stone tools that Dorothy was so expert in identifying. She could pick up a chert flake, date it by style alone, set it within a chronology, and draw conclusions about our human ancestry tool by tool.