Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod, CBE, FBA (5 May 1892 – 18 December 1968) was an English archaeologist who specialised in the Palaeolithic period. She held the position of Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1939 to 1952, and was the first woman to hold a chair at either Oxford or Cambridge. Early life and education Garrod was the daughter of the physician Sir Archibald Garrod and Laura Elizabeth Smith, daughter of the surgeon Sir Thomas Smith, 1st Baronet. She was born in Chandos Street, London, and was educated at home. Her first teacher was Isabel Fry as governess. Garrod recalled Fry teaching her, at age nine, in Harley Street with the daughter of Walter Jessop. She later attended Birklands School in St Albans. In 1913, Garrod entered Newnham College, Cambridge, and in that year became a Roman Catholic convert. She read history there, completing the course in 1916. She had three brothers, two of whom were killed in action in WW I and the youngest of whom died in France from pneumonia shortly before demobilisation. She undertook war work with the Catholic Women's League, until she was demobilised in 1919. She then went to Malta, where her father was working, and began to take an interest in the local antiquities. Career On her family's return to England, where they settled in Oxford, Garrod read for a graduate diploma in anthropology at the Pitt Rivers Museum. There she was taught by Robert Ranulph Marett and received a distinction on graduating in 1921, as one among a small number of female students. She had found an intellectual vocation: the archaeology of the Palaeolithic Age. She then studied for two years, 1922 to 1924, with the French prehistorian Abbé Breuil at the Institut de Paleontologie Humaine in Paris. On completing her studies, Garrod began to excavate in Gibraltar. Following a recommendation from Breuil, she investigated Devil's Tower Cave, which was only 350 metres from Forbes' Quarry, where a Neanderthal skull had been found earlier. Garrod discovered in this cave in 1925, a second important Neanderthal skull now called Gibraltar 2. In 1926, Garrod published her first academic work, The Upper Paleolithic of Britain, for which she was awarded a B. Sc. degree by the University of Oxford. In 1928, she headed an expedition through South Kurdistan that led to the excavation of Hazar Merd Cave and Zarzi cave. In