In addition to being the first woman in history to obtain a professorship at the University of Cambridge, and coining terms such as Gravettian or chatelperronian To designate cultural phases of prehistory, archaeologist Dorothy Garrod made a sensational discovery in 1928.
In that year she was excavating at the Shuqba cave, a site located in the mountains on the north bank of the Wadi en-Natuf in the West Bank, about 28 kilometers northwest of Jerusalem. The place had been briefly investigated by Reverend Alexis Mallon in 1924.
Four years later, the site was taken over by the British Jerusalem School of Archaeology, which put Garrod in charge of the work at the request of Mallon, who personally showed him around.
In a single campaign and with a team of local workers, Garrod identified a layer from the late Mousterian (about 40,000 years ago), but also another layer interspersed between the Upper Paleolithic and the Bronze Age deposits, which contained traces of charcoal and remains of microlithic stone industry tools, as well as worked bone objects.
Next to it, the remains of 45 highly fragmented human skeletons. She identified this layer as Mesolithic, a transitional period between the Paleolithic and Neolithic that had not yet been found in the Near East.
This Mesolithic layer was named by Garrod as Natufian (because it was found in Wadi en-Natuf), and it was found to correspond to a hitherto unknown culture that spread throughout the Near East between 10,800 and 8,300 BC.
The following year, and in collaboration with Dorothea Bate and the American School of Prehistoric Research, he excavated for 22 months at the Terrace el-Wad and 11 other sites, where he found similar materials. For the next two decades he continued to excavate sites in the Mount Carmel area (Tabun caves, El Wad, Es Skhul, Kebara), bringing to light the Natufian culture.
Among the elements recovered, Garrod noticed the presence of stone sickles, which would indicate the presence of very early agriculture. In fact, as we saw in a previous article dedicated to the place where evidence of the passage of humans from hunter-gatherers to farmers was found, the Natufian culture is immediate to the Younger Dryas period, the period of climatic cooling at the end of the Pleistocene (a few years ago). between 12,700 and 11,500 years ago) that could have been caused by the impact of the Clovis comet in North America, and which is supposed to have been one of the causes of the development of agriculture.
Evidence of early deliberate cultivation of cereals exists at Natufian sites, and the 14,500-year-old Shubayqa 1 site (north-eastern desert of Jordan) has the world's oldest evidence of bread-making.
Not only that, but at another Natufian site, Raqefet Cave on Mount Carmel near Haifa, the oldest known evidence of brewing was found, approximately 15,000 years ago.
In 1938 Garrod published his work on the discovery of the Natufian culture, entitled The Stone Age of Mount Carmel , a work considered pioneering in his field. In the previous two decades, her training with Henri Breuil in France, and her excavations and discoveries in Gibraltar, Palestine, Anatolia and Bulgaria, had made her one of the UK's foremost specialists. For this reason, in 1939 she became the first woman to be appointed professor of archeology at Cambridge.
She only interrupted her teaching work during World War II to serve in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force directing an aerial photography analysis and interpretation unit.
Dorothy Garrod continued to carry out archaeological excavations until a few years before her death in 1968, even though she had already retired from her Cambridge professorship in 1952. One of her customs was to hire only women for the main jobs. This is how Kitson Clark, who participated in the excavations of Mount Carmel, remembered it:we were extremely feminist because all the executive and interesting part of the excavation was done by women and all the servile part… by men .
In the following decades, the Natufian culture continued to surprise researchers, such as the oldest evidence of dog domestication, found in Ain Mallaha (Israel), in a burial of an old man with a puppy around 12,000 BC
And in 2008 the tomb of a priestess was discovered or Natufian shaman, whose burial contained the complete shells of 86 tortoises, possibly remains of the funerary banquet. A recent study published in 2019 presents evidence of advanced knowledge of gypsum production in a Natufian necropolis at the 12,000-year-old Nahal Ein Gev II (Upper Jordan Valley) site, something that was thought to have only been achieved 2,000 years later.
In the words of María del Carmen Poyato, the Natufian extends throughout the Levant, from the Negev to the Middle Euphrates and represents a stage of explosive and revolutionary changes at the end of the Recent Upper Paleolithic and before the Neolithic .