Gertrude Caton Thompson

Gertrude Caton Thompson was born to William Caton Thompson and Ethel Gertrude Page in 1888 in London, England. She attended private schools in Paris and in Eastbourne, including the Links School, run by Miss Hawtrey. Her interest in archaeology began on a trip to Egypt 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. and worked at Petrie’s excavations in Upper Egypt at Abydos and Oxyrhynchus during the winter of 1921-1922. The following year she began attending courses at the University of Cambridge, before joining further excavations at Qau in Egypt with Petrie and Guy Brunton in 1924. ==Work in Malta==

In 1921, Margaret Murray was invited to excavate at Borg en Nadur, a megalithic temple near St George's Bay in Malta, by Themistocles Zammit. This work formed part of her wider research in southern Malta, and Gertrude Caton-Thompson was part of the all-female team that accompanied her. Gertrude's responsibilities included investigating a prehistoric cave near the temple at Għar Dalam, 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 Egypt 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. with smaller collections in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. In 1925, Caton Thompson and the geologist Elinor Wight Gardner began the first archaeological and geological survey of the northern 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 previously 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 during three expeditions from 1930 to 1933. Caton Thompson had made her first visit there in 1928 during her expedition to the Zimbabwe excavations. Since the Kharga Scarp contained many Paleolithic sites, Caton Thompson was able to excavate many implements used by those civilizations using meticulous soil scrutiny and how she noted where objects were positioned in relation to each other. This approach revolutionised how archaeological sites were surveyed and studied. The flints she bought back to London are permanently housed in the Institute of Archaeology in London. Her publication of "Kharga Oasis in Prehistory" was the first publication of the new Athlone Press of the University of London. She determined that the Kharga Scarp contained water without rainfall, which helped to supply water to a Neolithic civilization. This led to research more broadly on the palaeolithic civilizations of North Africa, which Caton Thompson published in 1952. ==Great Zimbabwe==

In 1928, the British Academy invited Caton Thompson to investigate the origins of ruins in south-eastern Zimbabwe, near Lake Mutirikwe. The site contained multiple buildings within three sets of structures. Caton Thompson used ceramics, which were similar to what modern villagers were using, and structures such as terrace walls to determine who built the structures from the site. Working with Kathleen Kenyon, Caton Thompson's excavations led her to the view that Zimbabwe was the product of a "native civilisation", publishing her results in a book called "The Zimbabwe Culture" in 1931. The assertion attracted considerable press attention and was received negatively by many within the archaeological community. She received hate mail from Victor Loret and Alfred Charles Auguste Foucher, whose views on the Great Zimbabwe she challenged. Caton Thompson claimed to keep hostile letters from local experts in a file marked "insane". ==Later life==

In 1932, she employed Mary Leakey to illustrate her book The Desert Fayum, greatly influencing her later career in palaeoanthropology. Towards the end of 1937 Caton Thompson and Elinor Gardner, accompanied by Freya Stark, initiated the first systematic excavation in the Yemen at Hadhramaut (coincidentally, also a region explored by Theodore Bent). 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. Nonetheless, she continued to engage with her interest in African history, playing an active role in the Third Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, held in Livingstone in 1955. She died in 1985, in her 97th year at Broadway, Worcestershire. == Awards and honours ==

Caton Thompson was awarded the Cuthbert Peek award of the Royal Geographical Society in 1932. However, she was a research fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1923 and declared an honorary fellow from 1934 to 1945, receiving an honorary Litt. D. in 1954. She was the first female President of the Prehistoric Society from 1940 to 1946. In 1944, she was elected both as a fellow of the British Academy, to which she gifted 20,000 guineas in 1968, and as the vice president of the Royal Anthropological Institute. She received the Huxley Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1946 and the Burton Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1954. 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. She also served as Governor of Bedford College for Women and the School of Oriental and African Studies. Publications • Guy Brunton, Gertrude 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 ==References==