Gertrude Caton Thompson, (1 February 1888 – 18 April 1985) was an English archaeologist at a time when participation by women in the discipline was uncommon. Much of her archaeological work was conducted in Egypt. However, she also worked on expeditions in Zimbabwe, Malta, and South Arabia. Her notable contributions to the field of archaeology include creating a technique for excavating archaeological sites and information on Paleolithic to Predynastic civilizations in Zimbabwe and Egypt. Caton Thompson held many official positions in organizations such as the Prehistoric Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Early life

Gertrude Caton Thompson was born to William Caton Thompson and Ethel Page in 1888 in London, England, and attended private schools in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

and in

Eastbourne Eastbourne () is a town and seaside resort in East Sussex, on the south coast of England, east of Brighton and south of London. Eastbourne is immediately east of Beachy Head, the highest chalk sea cliff in Great Britain and part of the la ...

, including the Links School, run by Miss Hawtrey. Her interest in archaeology began on a trip to

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Medit ...

with her mother in 1911, followed by a series of lectures on Ancient Greece given by Sarah Paterson at the British Museum. An inheritance received in 1912 helped ensure her financial independence and support her later excavations. Caton Thompson's first experience in the field came in 1915 working as a bottle washer in an excavation in France. During

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

, she worked for the British Ministry of Shipping as part of which she attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. In 1921 Caton Thompson embarked on studies at

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

where she was taught by

Margaret Murray Margaret Alice Murray (13 July 1863 – 13 November 1963) was an Anglo-Indian Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and folklorist. The first woman to be appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom, she work ...

Flinders Petrie Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie ( – ), commonly known as simply Flinders Petrie, was a British Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology and the preservation of artefacts. He held the first chair of Egyp ...

and

Dorothea Bate Dorothea Minola Alice Bate FGS (8 November 1878 – 13 January 1951), also known as Dorothy Bate, was a Welsh palaeontologist and pioneer of archaeozoology. Her life's work was to find fossils of recently extinct mammals with a view to underst ...

, excavating in Upper Egypt during the winter of that year . The following year she began attending courses at

Newnham College, Cambridge Newnham College is a women's constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1871 by a group organising Lectures for Ladies, members of which included philosopher Henry Sidgwick and suffragist campaigner Millicen ...

, before joining further excavations in Egypt with Petrie and

Guy Brunton Guy Brunton (1878 in London, England – 17 October 1948 in White River, Mpumalanga, South Africa) was an English archaeologist and Egyptologist who discovered the Badarian predynastic culture. He married Winifred Newberry on 28 April 1906. ...

in 1924.

Work in Malta

In 1921, along with

, Gertrude Caton Thompson helped in the excavation of the megalithic temple of Borg en Nadur near St. George's Bay in Malta. Her responsibilities included investigating the caves near the temple searching for neanderthal skulls as evidence for a land bridge between Malta and the continent of Africa. Though she did not find evidence to support this theory, the excavation yielded other notable artifacts, such as Bronze Age pottery that closely paralleled Sicilian styles of the same period.

Work in Egypt

During the 1920s she worked as an archaeologist, primarily in

for the British School of Archaeology Egypt, although she also conducted fieldwork in Malta. In Egypt she participated in excavations at a number of sites including Abydos, El-Badari, and Qau el Kebir. Caton Thompson took a special interest in all aspects of Prehistoric Egypt and was one of the first archaeologists to look at the full-time spectrum from the Palaeolithic through to Predynastic Egypt. Caton Thompson not only found a number of archaeological artifacts from Egypt, she also organized their display in the Egyptian Exhibition in England. Many of these finds are now in the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

's collection. While working in the Badari region 1923–24 she took the initiative to explore prehistoric settlement remains at Hemamieh. Caton Thompson's work at the site was distinguished by its meticulousness. Caton Thompson began her work by organizing the site into ten by thirty foot intervals. She carefully excavated in arbitrary six-inch levels, and recorded the exact position of each artifact. Along with her excavation techniques, Caton Thompson was also the first to use air surveys to locate archaeological sites. Such approaches to excavation were in many respects a generation ahead of her time and "sets her apart from her contemporaries and the majority of her successors". In 1925 Caton Thompson and the geologist

Elinor Wight Gardner Elinor Wight Gardner (24 September 1892, in Birmingham – 1980), a geology lecturer at Bedford College, London and research fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, is best known for her field surveys with Gertrude Caton–Thompson of the Kharga Oasis w ...

began the first archaeological and geological survey of the northern

Faiyum Faiyum ( ar, الفيوم ' , borrowed from cop, ̀Ⲫⲓⲟⲙ or Ⲫⲓⲱⲙ ' from egy, pꜣ ym "the Sea, Lake") is a city in Middle Egypt. Located southwest of Cairo, in the Faiyum Oasis, it is the capital of the modern Faiyum ...

, where they sought to correlate ancient lake levels with archaeological stratification. Caton Thompson found the earliest farming civilization to date in the Fayum region of Egypt, estimated to about 4000 B.C. They continued working in the Faiyum over the next two years for the Royal Anthropological Institute where they discovered two unknown Neolithic cultures, mainly based on evidence from their Kom K and Kom W excavations. Caton Thompson and Wight Gardner also worked on prehistoric sites at Kharga Oasis in 1930. Her publication of "Kharga Oasis in Prehistory" was the first publication of the new Athlone Press of the University of London. Also the flints she was allowed to bring back to London are permanently housed in the Institute of Archaeology in London. This led to research more broadly on the palaeolithic civilizations of north Africa, which Caton Thompson published in 1952. Caton Thompson made her first visit to the Kharga Oasis in 1928 during her expedition to the Zimbabwe excavations. There were three expeditions to the Kharga Oasis from 1930 to 1933. Elinor Gardner did the surveying for many of the excavations. Caton Thompson had to excavate only for Paleolithic artifacts because there was such a variety of prehistoric civilizations at the Kharga Oasis including Neolithic artifacts. Caton Thompson determined that the Kharga Scarp contained water without rainfall, which helped to supply water to a Neolithic civilization. Since the Kharga Scarp contained many Paleolithic sites, she was able to excavate many implements used by those civilizations.

Great Zimbabwe

In 1928, the British Academy invited Caton Thompson to investigate the origins of ruins in southeastern Zimbabwe near

Lake Mutirikwe Lake Mutirikwi, formerly known as Lake Kyle or Kyle Dam, lies in south eastern Zimbabwe, south east of Masvingo. It is thought to have been named Lake Kyle, from the Kyle farm which occupied most of the land required for the lake, which in turn w ...

. The site contained three sets of structures which contained multiple buildings. Known since the 16th century, Great Zimbabwe had been previously excavated by James Theodore Bent and

David Randall-MacIver David Randall-MacIver FBA (31 October 1873 – 30 April 1945) was a British-born archaeologist, who later became an American citizen. He is most famous for his excavations at Great Zimbabwe which provided the first solid evidence that the site was ...

and controversy raged as to whether the site was the work of Africans (MacIver's view) or of some other civilisation. Caton Thompson assembled an all female expedition for the Zimbabwe excavations, which was the first of its kind. Caton Thompson used ceramics, which were similar to what modern villagers were using, and structures like terrace walls to determine who built the structures from the site. Working with

Kathleen Kenyon Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon, (5 January 1906 – 24 August 1978) was a British archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She led excavations of Tell es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho, from 1952 to 1958, and has been called ...

, Caton Thompson's excavations led her to the unequivocal view that Zimbabwe was the product of a "native civilisation". The assertion attracted considerable negative press attention and was received negatively by many within the archaeological community. She received hate mail from

Victor Loret Victor Clement Georges Philippe Loret (1 September 1859 – 3 February 1946) was a French Egyptologist. Biography His father, Clément Loret, was a professional organist and composer, of Belgian origin, who had been living in Paris since ...

and

Alfred Charles Auguste Foucher Alfred Charles Auguste Foucher (1865–1952), was a French scholar, who argued that the Buddha image has Greek origins. He has been called the "father of Gandhara studies", and is a much-cited scholar on ancient Buddhism in northwest Indian subconti ...

, whose views on the Great Zimbabwe she challenged. Caton Thompson claimed to keep hostile letters from local experts in a file marked "insane". Modern archaeologists now agree that the city was the product of a Shona-speaking African civilisation.

Later life

In 1932, she employed

Mary Leakey Mary Douglas Leakey, FBA (née Nicol, 6 February 1913 – 9 December 1996) was a British paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised ''Proconsul'' skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also disc ...

to illustrate her book ''The Desert Fayum,'' greatly influencing her later career in paleoanthropology. Towards the end of 1937 Caton Thompson and Elinor Gardner, accompanied by

Freya Stark Dame Freya Madeline Stark (31 January 18939 May 1993), was a British-Italian explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as several autobiographical works and essays ...

, initiated the first systematic excavation in the

Yemen Yemen (; ar, ٱلْيَمَن, al-Yaman), officially the Republic of Yemen,, ) is a country in Western Asia. It is situated on the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, and borders Saudi Arabia to the Saudi Arabia–Yemen border, north and ...

Hadhramaut Hadhramaut ( ar, حَضْرَمَوْتُ \ حَضْرَمُوتُ, Ḥaḍramawt / Ḥaḍramūt; Hadramautic: 𐩢𐩳𐩧𐩣𐩩, ''Ḥḍrmt'') is a region in South Arabia, comprising eastern Yemen, parts of western Oman and southern Saud ...

. However, relations between Caton Thompson and Stark were notoriously strained, with Stark deriding an anonymous but identifiable female archaeologist in her book ''A Winter in Arabia'' in 1940. Caton Thompson retired from fieldwork after the Second World War. A long time friend of Dorothy Hoare, a colleague from Cambridge, Caton Thompson bought and shared a house with Hoare. After Hoare married Jose "Toty" M. de Navarro, another Cambridge lecturer in archaeology, the Navarros continued to share the house with Caton Thompson. When she and the Navarros retired from academic life in 1956, Caton Thompson moved with them to their home in Broadway, Worcestershire - Court Farm. Caton Thompson went on to have her memoirs release as an autobiography entitled "Mixed Memoirs" in 1983. She would reside with them and their son, Michael for the rest of her life. She died in 1985, in her 97th year at

Broadway, Worcestershire Broadway is a large village and civil parish in the Cotswolds, England, with a population of 2,540 at the 2011 census. It is in the far southeast of Worcestershire, close to the Gloucestershire border, midway between Evesham and Moreton-in-Mars ...

Honours and accolades

In 1938 she was offered the post of

Disney Professor of Archaeology The Disney Professorship of Archaeology is an endowed chair in archaeology at the University of Cambridge. It was endowed by John Disney in 1851 with a donation of £1,000, followed by a further £2,500 bequest upon his death in 1857. Disney Pro ...

at Cambridge but rejected the role which was subsequently accepted by

Dorothy Garrod Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod, CBE, FBA (5 May 1892 – 18 December 1968) was an English archaeologist who specialised in the Palaeolithic period. She held the position of Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1 ...

. However, she was a research fellow at

in 1923 and honorary fellow from 1934 to 1945, receiving an honorary LittD in 1954. She was the first female President of the

Prehistoric Society The Prehistoric Society is an international learned society devoted to the study of the human past from the earliest times until the emergence of written history. Now based at University College London in the United Kingdom, it was founded by V. ...

from 1940 to 1946, whilst also being elected a fellow of the

British Academy The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars spa ...

in 1944. Caton Thompson was also elected to the vice presidency of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1944. She received the Huxley Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1946. In 1934 Caton Thompson was also the first woman to receive the Rivers Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute. In 1961 she was a founding member of the British School of History and Archaeology in East Africa and was made an honorary fellow after serving on the council for 10 years.

Publications

*Guy Brunton, G. Caton Thompson, ''The Badarian civilisation and predynastic remains near Badari'', British School of Archaeology in Egypt, London 1928. *''The Zimbabwe Culture'', 1931; F. Cass, 1970 *Gertrude Caton Thompson, Elinor Wight Gardner ''The Desert Fayum'', Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1934. *''The Tombs and Moon Temple of Hureidha (Hadhramaut)'', Oxford for the Society of Antiquaries, 1944 *''Kharga Oasis in Prehistory'', University of London, 1952 *''Mixed memoirs'', Paradigm Press, 1983

Notes and references

External links

Gertrude Caton Thompson (1888–1985), Archaeologist
papers at the Cambridge University Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

, ''Distinguished Women'' 1997
"Gertrude Caton Thompson: Society Girl, Suffragist and Scientific Archaeologist"
''TrowelBlazers''2013 {{DEFAULTSORT:Caton Thompson, Gertrude 1888 births 1985 deaths 20th-century archaeologists 20th-century British scientists 20th-century British women scientists British archaeologists Fellows of the British Academy Fellows of Newnham College, Cambridge English archaeologists British women archaeologists