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The British archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson (1888-1985) is one of the most important scholars in the subject of Egyptian prehistory, having studied under William Matthew Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray at University College London in the early 1920s.
Caton-Thompson worked with Petrie and another of Petrie’s students, the Egyptologist Guy Brunton, at the Upper Egyptian site of Qau el-Kebir from 1923 to 1925. While in Egypt a century ago, in 1924, she was determined to seek out a settlement site dating to the Predynastic Period, to provide evidence from domestic contexts to support Brunton’s work at the Predynastic cemeteries at nearby Badari. Petrie approved of this idea, and said he would give Caton-Thompson ‘three good workmen’, if she was able to find a worthwhile village site to excavate.
Caton-Thompson succeeded in her aim: after finding some Predynastic pottery sherds in the area between the cliffs and the floodplain, she began directing excavations on 8 February 1924 at the settlement site of Hemamieh. Here, she teamed up with geologist Elinor Wight Gardner and a small Egyptian workforce in one of the earliest, ground-breaking interdisciplinary projects in prehistoric archaeology. This important site yielded the remains of seven ephemeral huts, each around 2m in diameter, which could be dated to the Amratian (Naqada I) Period. Wattle-and-daub superstructures with mud-plastered floors were excavated, but it was not clear whether these were human residences, or shelters for food supplies and animals. The significance of this site lay in its preserved stratigraphy, and Caton-Thompson’s deep knowledge of archaeological practice gained through years of study with Flinders Petrie meant that this was one of the first sites in Egypt successfully excavated in levels.
Caton-Thompson’s main aim at the site was to find evidence for the relationship between the Badarian and the Naqada cultures. The results from her methodical excavations at Hemamieh were clear: the Badarian levels at the site lay below those of the Naqada culture, thus they were unequivocally earlier. This achievement changed the landscape of prehistoric studies for subsequent generations, and continues to impact our understanding of early peoples in the Nile Valley today. An assemblage of finds from Caton-Thompson’s excavations at Hemamieh was distributed to the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, University College London, where, on the centenary of her work at Hemamieh, they are displayed to tell the story of prehistoric Egypt. Caton-Thompson’s own story and achievements are not as well known to Egyptologists as they should be, particularly her role as an early pioneer of women’s involvement in field archaeology. She walked, so that many of us are now able to run.
Anna Garnett, Curator, Petrie Museum, University College London
