Blackman spent much of the 1920s and 1930s living and conducting fieldwork in rural Egypt, including leading the
Percy Sladen Expedition to Egypt between 1922 and 1926. She and her brother Aylward often collaborated, such as during a study of ancient burial sites at
Meir. She was also a contemporary of the German ethnographer Hans Alexander Winkler and encouraged him to pursue his work in Upper Egypt, despite others discouraging him and his "radical" views. Unusually for the time, she chose to focus on the habits, beliefs and customs of contemporary (rather than ancient) Egyptians. She had a particular interest in the "
magico-religious" ideas and practices of Upper Egypt She recorded women's fertility rituals, belief in the healing properties of tattoo marks (made by instruments of 7 needles fixed to the end of a stick) and methods for treating spirit possession. In 1927 she published
The Fellahin of Upper Egypt, which became a standard work on the
ethnography of the region She also wrote about the notion of southern Egyptian liminality and how both Muslims and
Copts shared many of the same saints. Later in 1927 Blackman also began collecting folk medicine items for the wealthy pharmaceutical magnate and collector
Sir Henry Wellcome of
Burroughs Wellcome and Co. (BWC). She collected an estimated 4,000 individual items, such as amulets, charms and figures, The items are now held in collections of the
Garstang Museum of Archaeology, the
Pitt Rivers Museum, the
Science Museum and the
Wellcome Collection. She was a member of the
Folklore Society,
Royal Anthropological Institute,
Royal Asiatic Society and Oxford University Anthropological Society. After the
Second World War broke out in 1939, Blackwood returned to Britain. In 1950 she was committed to a mental hospital after suffering a mental and physical breakdown after the death of her younger sister Elsie. She died shortly afterwards, aged 78. == Works ==