ABSTRACT
One of this century’s key pioneers is Dorothy A.E.Garrod, the first female professor at Cambridge, who laid the basis for modern studies of the UpperPalaeolithic/Epipalaeolithic both in the Zagros and in the Levant. In the highly risky, unsettled conditions of Iraq in the late 1920s, Dorothy Garrod, with a small team that comprised the zoologist Dorothea M.A.Bate and Mr F.Turville-Petrie, based themselves near the RAF camp at Suleimaniya. The first site they investigated from there, a small cave in the Surdash area on the drainage of the lesser Zab river in southern Kurdistan, gave its name-Zarzi-to what Braidwood and Howe (1960:180) saw as ‘the terminal aspect of the pure food-collecting way of life (if it is conceived of as an ideal type) in Iraqi Kurdistan’. Forced to move about with an armed escort, Garrod’s team managed to excavate for only nine days at Zarzi cave, with another nine spent excavating one of the caves at Hazar Merd. Despite this, her excavations of 1927-8, were not followed up until 1948, when a team led by Robert J.Braidwood began work on what became the ‘Iraq Jarmo Project’, sponsored by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (the major world centre for ancient Near Eastern research), in association with the American Schools of Oriental Research.1
