The Garrod Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum

In July 1986 Professor Derek Roe of the Donald Baden-Powell Quaternery Research Centre at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, received a surprising gift from France: an old-fashioned leather hat-box with the letters "D.G." in gold on the front. Inside the hat-box proved to be Dorothy Garrod's collection of negatives relating to her archaeological fieldwork. The donor, Garrod's colleague, friend and executor Suzanne Cassou de Saint Mathurin, had sent the material to Oxford with a note to say that the photographs were "a remettre de ma part au Pitt Rivers Museum par l'intermédiare de l'Institute de Quarternaire, Oxford". Roe had worked on publishing Garrod's important excavations at certain cave sites in the southern Lebanon, including those of Adlun, carried out during the years 1958-63 (B.A.R. monograph, International Series, 159, i and ii, 1983), a work which Roe managed to hand personally to the person Garrod had wished it to be dedicated to, Gertrude Caton-Thompson.

In addition to the photographic collection the Museum houses over 3000 objects, mostly lithics, collected by Garrod during her excavations at Mount Carmel, but also from Algeria and Tunisia. For further information see the objects database.

Further reading

Davies, W. and R. Charles, 1999. Dorothy Garrod and the Progress of the Palaeolithic: Studies in Prehistoric Archaeology of the Near East and Europe. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Garrod, D. A. E. and D. M. A. Bate, 1937-9. The Stone Age of Mount Carmel: report of the Joint Expedition of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Research, 1929-1934. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Roe, D. A. (ed), 1983. Adlun in the Stone Age : the excavations of D.A.E. Garrod in the Lebanon, 1958-1963 (with contributions by L. Copeland et al.) Oxford: BAR.

Smith, P. J., J. Callander, P. G. Bahn, and G. Pinçon, 1997. 'Dorothy Garrod in words and pictures', Antiquity, 71, 265-70.

– 2000. 'Dorothy Garrod as the first woman professor at Cambridge University', Antiquity, 74, 131–6.

Stevenson, A., Hicks, D. and Coote, J. (eds.) forthcoming. World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: A Characterization. Oxford: Archeopress.

Weinstein-Evron, M. 1998. Early Natufian el-Wad Revisited. Liège: Etudes et Recherches Archéologiques de l'Université de Liège.

– 2009. Archaeology in the archives: unveiling the Natufian culture of Mount Carmel. Boston: Brill.

Credits

Photographs digitized by Fernando Calzada and Christopher Morton, 2009-2011. Catalogue by Alison Petch 2002, enhanced by Christopher Morton in 2011. Website design by Daniel Burt, 2011.

Christopher Morton wishes to thank Derek Roe, Pamela Jane Smith, Ruth Charles and Catherine Hills for information regarding the Garrod Collection.

The photograph of Dorothy Garrod on the homepage is used courtesy of Newnham College, Cambridge (archive reference PH/10/4 Chrystal Album 2).

For more information and for correspondence regarding the collection This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it the department.