Career
Following her father's appointment as the Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford, Garrod and her family settled in Oxford in 1920. The following year, Garrod began studying for the Oxford Diploma in anthropology under Robert Ranulph Marett. One among a small number of female students, the course provided Garrod with an intensive introduction to both archaeology and anthropology. Garrod later told Mary Kitson Clark during the 1929 excavation of Mount Carmel that Marett had inspired her to become a prehistorian of the palaeolithic.
Graduating with distinction in 1921, Garrod travelled to France on a travelling scholarship from Newnham College and carrying letters of introduction from Marrett. Meeting Henri Breuil at the house of Henri Begouën, Garrod visited the Cave of Niaux. Breuil agreed to take Garrod as his pupil at the Institut de paléontologie humaine in Paris, where she subsequently studied from 1922 to 1924. The historian Pamela Jane Smith argues that Garrod's interest in the origin, distribution and classification of Middle and Upper Palaeolithic assemblages; her fascination with the questions of the origin of the modern humans and the demise of the Neanderthals; the concern with relative dating by geochronology and her declaration that "Europe was only after all a peninsula of Africa and Asia" (Clarke 1999:409) could be interpreted as Garrod being the intellectual child of the Abbé Breuil".
In 1926, Garrod published her first academic work, The Upper Paleolithic of Britain, for which she was awarded a B.Sc. degree by the University of Oxford.
Following an invitation from Breuil, she investigated Devil's Tower Cave, a site over a period of seven months in Gibraltar between 1925 and 1927. It was only 350 metres from Forbes' Quarry, where a Neanderthal skull had been found earlier. Garrod discovered in this cave in 1925, a second important Neanderthal skull now called Gibraltar 2. It was her first internationally recognized excavation. Garrod was to find many anomalous skeletons during her ensuing career, but the skull did not fit within the definition of Neanderthal. In 1928, she led the first expedition to enter South Kurdistan. She was looking for evidence of Palaeolithic people migrating between Upper Mesopotamia and Syria. This work led to the test explorations of Hazar Merd Cave and Zarzi cave.
In 1929, Garrod was appointed to direct excavations at Wadi el-Mughara at Mount Carmel in Mandatory Palestine, as a joint project of the American School of Prehistoric Research and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. The series of 12 extensive fieldseasons was completed between 1929 and 1934. The results established a chronological framework that remains crucial to present understanding of that prehistoric period. Working closely with Dorothea Bate, she demonstrated a long sequence of Lower Palaeolithic, Middle Palaeolithic and Epipalaeolithic occupations in the caves of Tabun, El-Wad, Es-Skhul, Shuqba (Shuqbah) and Kebara Cave. She also coined the cultural label for the late Epipalaeolithic Natufian culture (from Wadi Natuf, the location of the Shuqba Cave) following her excavations at Es-Skhul and El-Wad. Her excavations at the cave sites in the Levant were conducted with almost exclusively women workers recruited from local villages, such as Jeba and Ljsim. One of these women, Yusra, is credited with the discovery of the Tabun 1 Neanderthal skull. In 1937, Garrod published The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, considered a ground-breaking work in the field. In 1938, she travelled to Bulgaria and excavated the Palaeolithic cave of Bacho Kiro.
After holding academic positions, including Newnham College's Director of Studies for Archaeology and Anthropology, she became the Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge on 6 May 1939, a post she held until 1952. Her appointment was greeted with excitement by women students and a "college feast" was held in her honour at Newnham, in which every dish was named after an archaeological item. In addition, the Cambridge Review reported, "The election of a woman to the Disney Professorship of Archaeology is an immense step forward towards complete equality between men and women in the University." Gender equality at the University of Cambridge at the time was still remote: as a woman, Garrod could not be a full member of the university, so that she was excluded from speaking or voting on University matters. This continued to apply until 1948, when women became full members of the university.
From 1941 to 1945, Garrod took leave of absence from the university and served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) during the Second World War. She was based at the RAF Medmenham photographic interpretation unit as a section officer (equivalent in rank to flying officer).
After the war, Garrod returned to her position and made changes to the department, including the introduction of a module of study on world prehistory. Where previously prehistory had been considered particularly French or European, Garrod expanded the subject to a global scale. Garrod also made changes to the structure of archaeology studies, so turning Cambridge into the first British university to offer undergraduate courses in prehistoric archaeology. During the university summer vacations, Garrod travelled to France and excavated at two important sites: Fontéchevade cave, with Germaine Henri-Martin, and Angles-sur-l'Anglin, with Suzanne de St. Mathurin.
