Quina, Les Eyzies, Isturitz, and Correge in central France, and she also became familiar with the French system for the classification of sites.

After returning to Oxford, Garrod applied her detailed knowledge of the French sequence to classifying all available Upper Paleolithic material from sites in Great Britain, which during the late Pleistocene age, had been no more than a marginal extension of France. Breuil encouraged this work and also suggested she excavate in Gibraltar, where in 1926 Garrod recovered remains of Neanderthals in association with a Mousterian culture, thus linking a particular fossil hominid with a particular technology and a plentiful residue of contemporary fauna.

Also in 1926, the remains of a Neanderthal in the context of Mousterian culture were found Zettupeh in what was then Palestine—the most eastern discovery of such material. Garrod was invited by Grant McCurdy, founder and director of the American School of Prehistoric Research, which was responsible for the discovery at Zettupeh, to find out just how much further east Mousterian culture had extended. Garrod made a preliminary visit to the Kirkuk region in Iraq and was able to demonstrate that the Mousterian culture had reached as far as northeastern Iraq. Excavations at the cave of Hazar Merd in Iraq not only confirmed the presence of the Mousterian but revealed an overlying Upper Paleolithic period, and other excavations at Zarzi confirmed the presence of an Upper Paleolithic level succeeded by microlithic industry.

Between seasons in Iraq Garrod began to dig in Palestine, and in the cave of Shukbah in the Wady en-Natuf she found a microlithic industry that was distinctive because it covered an eroded breccia containing a Levallois-Mousterian industry. This find demonstrated that there had been continuous occupation and local development of technology and inaugurated the excavation, with Theodore McCown, from 1929 to 1934 of the Mount Carmel caves. Garrod went on to prove that the French system of classification of the Paleolithic period was only valid for restricted parts of western Europe—that the Paleolithic period had different cultural manifestations in different parts of the world. She also demonstrated that the Solutrean and the Magdalenian phases in stone-tool production were the only ones indigenous to Europe—and that all the rest, such as the Chatelperronian, the Aurignacian, and the Gravettian, had originated outside Europe and spread to that continent.

In 1939, Garrod was elected to the Disney Chair of Archaeology at Cambridge, the first holder of that chair to be a prehistorian. During World War II, from 1942 to 1945, she was a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and interpreted air photographs of bomb damage for an intelligence unit. After the war, she worked at integrating prehistory and fieldwork, the history of archaeology, and world prehistory into the university curriculum.

She retired in 1952 and lived in France, continuing to excavate the rock shelter at Angles-sur-Anglin, Vienne, until 1963. She resumed excavations in the Near East in 1956, testing the stratigraphy of the Abri Aumoffen in southern Lebanon with the English archaeologist Diana Kirkbride. This work confirmed the presence of a stone-blade toolmaking industry, the Amudian (between the Acheulean and the Middle Paleolithic), underlying a Jabrudian (late Amudian) deposit with racloirs and bifaces. Two years before she died, Garrod summarized the Paleolithic archaeology of Egypt and southwestern Asia for the Cambridge Ancient History. The chronicle of southwestern Asian archaeology was, with a few exceptions, largely the outcome of her own fieldwork and her collaborations. More important, Garrod’s researches in southwestern Asia had shown that prehistory had to be pursued over widespread territories, indeed on a worldwide scale.

Based on an essay by

the late Sir Grahame Clark

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 410–412.