Grace Mary Crowfoot (' Hood; 1879–1957) was a pioneer in the study of archaeological textiles. During a long and active life Molly—as she was always known to friends, family and close colleagues—worked on a wide variety of textiles from North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the British Isles. Returning to England in the mid-1930s after more than three decades spent in Egypt, Sudan and Palestine, Crowfoot co-authored a 1942 article on the "Tunic of
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun (, egy, twt-ꜥnḫ-jmn), Egyptological pronunciation Tutankhamen () (), sometimes referred to as King Tut, was an Egyptian pharaoh who was the last of his royal family to rule during the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty (ruled ...
" and published short reports about textiles from the nearby Anglo-Saxon ship burial at
Sutton Hoo (1951–1952) in Suffolk.
Molly Crowfoot trained a generation of textile archaeologists in Britain, among them
Audrey Henshall and her daughter Elisabeth, and developed close contacts with textile archaeologists in Scandinavia such as
Margrethe Hald
Margrethe Hald (10 February1897 - 19 May 1982) was a Danish textile historian and curator at the National Museum of Denmark. A major contributor to international textile research, she received a D.Phil. in 1950 for her thesis ''Olddanske tekstiler' ...
,
Marta Hoffman and
Agnes Geijer
Agnes Geijer (26 October 1898 – 17 July 1989) was a Swedish textile historian and archaeologist.
Life
Geijer became the head of the textile conservation atelier ''Pietas'' in 1930. She received a doctoral degree from Uppsala University in 193 ...
. Together they established a new field of study, ensuring that textile remnants found at any site were henceforth preserved for analysis, instead of being cleaned from the metal and other objects to which they remained attached.
Much of Crowfoot's collection of textiles, spinning and weaving implements is now held at the
Textile Research Centre
The Textile Research Centre (TRC), Leiden, Netherlands, is an independent research institute working in the field of textiles and dress. It is housed at Hogewoerd 164 in Leiden and includes exhibition space, storage rooms, a lecture room and ot ...
in
Leiden
Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wi ...
.
Her daughter
Dorothy Hodgkin was a prominent chemist and crystallographer who won the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
)
, image = Nobel Prize.png
, alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then "M ...
in 1964.
After her death obituaries were published by the archaeologist
Kathleen Kenyon
Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon, (5 January 1906 – 24 August 1978) was a British archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She led excavations of Tell es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho, from 1952 to 1958, and has been called ...
and her son-in-law, the Africanist
Thomas Hodgkin
Thomas Hodgkin RMS (17 August 1798 – 5 April 1866) was a British physician, considered one of the most prominent pathologists of his time and a pioneer in preventive medicine. He is now best known for the first account of Hodgkin's disease, ...
.
Early years, 1879–1908
Born in Lincolnshire, England, in 1879 to Sinclair Frankland Hood, of
Nettleham
Nettleham is a large village and civil parish within the West Lindsey district of Lincolnshire, England, north-east from the city of Lincoln between the A46 and A158.
The population of the civil parish was 3,437 at the 2011 census.
History ...
Hall, Lincolnshire, and his wife Grace, daughter of Rev. Charles Trollope Swan, rector of
Welton le Wold, Lincolnshire, Grace Mary Hood was the oldest of 6 children— two girls and four boys. The Hood family were landed gentry, originally from Yorkshire.
[https://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Crowfoot_Grace.pdf ] Her nephew,
Sinclair Hood
Martin Sinclair Frankland Hood, FBA (31 January 1917 – 18 January 2021), generally known as Sinclair Hood, was a British archaeologist and academic. He was Director of the British School of Archaeology at Athens from 1954 to 1962, and led t ...
, would become an eminent archaeologist.
Her grandfather, Rev. William Frankland Hood,
collected Egyptian antiquities, which were displayed in a wing added for the purpose to the main building of Nettleham Hall. The family interests put her in contact with many archaeologists, among them
William Flinders Petrie
Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie ( – ), commonly known as simply Flinders Petrie, was a British Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology and the preservation of artefacts. He held the first chair of Egypt ...
, and she became lifelong friends with Petrie's wife
Hilda
Hilda is one of several female given names derived from the name ''Hild'', formed from Old Norse , meaning 'battle'. Hild, a Nordic-German Bellona, was a Valkyrie who conveyed fallen warriors to Valhalla. Warfare was often called Hild's Game. Th ...
.
Dame
Elizabeth Wordsworth
Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth (1840–1932) was founding Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and she funded and founded St Hugh's College. She was also an author, sometimes writing under the name Grant Lloyd.
Life
Wordsworth was born in 1 ...
offered Hood a place at her newly founded women's college in Oxford,
Lady Margaret Hall. However, Hood's mother did not see the need for women to attend university and she ultimately turned it down.
Hood's earliest venture into archaeology was in 1908–1909 when she excavated the prehistoric remains in the cave at Tana Bertrand, above
San Remo on the
Italian Riviera
The Italian Riviera or Ligurian Riviera ( it, Riviera ligure; lij, Rivêa lìgure) is the narrow coastal strip in Italy which lies between the Ligurian Sea and the mountain chain formed by the Maritime Alps and the Apennines. Longitudinall ...
where her family often stayed. She found 300 beads and signs of early occupation. The work would not be published until 1926.
In 1908, determined to make a useful contribution to society, she trained to become a professional midwife at
Clapham Maternity Hospital in London. The contacts made then proved invaluable later when she was living in the Sudan.
Life and work in Egypt and Sudan
In 1909 Hood married
John Winter Crowfoot, whom she had met years before in Lincoln. He was now the Assistant Director of Education in Sudan and she joined him in Cairo where their eldest daughters were born:
Dorothy
Dorothy may refer to:
*Dorothy (given name), a list of people with that name.
Arts and entertainment
Characters
*Dorothy Gale, protagonist of ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' by L. Frank Baum
* Ace (''Doctor Who'') or Dorothy, a character playe ...
,
Joan Joan may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Joan (given name), including a list of women, men and fictional characters
*:Joan of Arc, a French military heroine
* Joan (surname)
Weather events
*Tropical Storm Joan (disambiguation), multip ...
and Elisabeth. One who became acquainted with the Crowfoots during their years in Sudan,
Babikr Bedri
Babikr Bedri was a Mahdist warrior who later became a social activist and laid the foundations for women's education in the Sudan. (His name is variously transcribed in Latin letters as "Babiker Badri" or similar ways.) Bedri began with a small ...
, refers to Mrs Crowfoot as "that gracious, unassuming, well-educated lady".
Activities
Crowfoot learned to take photographs and these illustrate the first of several botanical volumes she produced during their years in Egypt, Sudan and Palestine. In subsequent publications she reverted to line-drawings of her own, feeling that photographs could not represent with sufficient accuracy and clarity the detail of particular plants and flowers. (After her death many of her field drawings of wild plants from North Africa and the Middle East were deposited with
Kew Gardens
Kew Gardens is a botanic garden in southwest London that houses the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world". Founded in 1840, from the exotic garden at Kew Park, its living collections include some of the ...
in London.)
In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, Crowfoot and her husband moved to the Sudan, far from the fighting and remote from the expatriate society of Cairo. There were few white people in Khartoum, none of them women. Her husband was in charge of education and antiquities in the region, becoming Director of
Gordon College (today Khartoum University). Crowfoot immersed herself in the life of the local women across the Nile in
Omdurman.
To engage them in conversation she took up the spinning and weaving that occupied much of their time and became a proficient weaver herself, learning to weave cloth on primitive looms. Later she published two papers on this topic. At the request of Flinders Petrie, she compared these methods with the model illustrating Ancient Egyptian methods of spinning and weaving then recently discovered in an 11th dynasty tomb. The techniques and equipment, she found, had changed little since those times.
An early campaign against FGM
Learning their handicrafts was Crowfoot's way of getting to know the Sudanese women and understand their lives. Through these contacts she also learned, with horror, of the local tradition of
Female Genital Mutilation which in Sudan took the most severe form,
infibulation
Infibulation is the ritual removal of the external female genitalia and the suturing of the vulva, a practice found mainly in northeastern Africa, particularly in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan. The World Health Organization refer ...
.
Always quick to respond, she considered how an outsider, someone related to the colonial government, might best intervene. In 1921, Molly attended a dinner party with the British Governor-General Sir
Lee Stack
Major-General Sir Lee Oliver Fitzmaurice Stack, (15 May 1868 – 20 November 1924) was a British Army officer and Governor-General of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. On 19 November 1924, he was shot by assassins while driving through Cairo, and d ...
where she spoke loudly and insistently about FGM. As he later told a colleague, he was embarrassed to hear this shocking topic over dinner but Crowfoot would not be silenced.
This interaction led to approval to set up the first school of midwifery in Sudan in 1921: Omdurman Midwifery Training School. It aimed to train local midwives, improve conditions of childbirth and, at the same time, begin to tackle the practise of FGM. To head the school Crowfoot summoned two fellow pupils from her Clapham days, the midwife sisters "Bee" and "Gee" (Beatrice and Mabel) Wolff.
The family re-united
Following the birth of their fourth daughter Diana and the end of World War I she and her husband John returned for some months to England, where they were re-united with their three older girls and took a lease on a house in
Geldeston, Norfolk. It was to be the family home for the next sixty years. Soon they returned to the Sudan.
Life and work in Palestine, 1926–1935
In 1926 John Crowfoot was offered the Directorship of the
British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem
The Kenyon Institute, previously known as the British School of Archaeology at Jerusalem (BSAJ), is a British overseas research institute supporting humanities and social science studies in Israel and Palestine. It is part of the Council for Bri ...
. During his time there he ran a number of major excavations at
Samaria-Sebaste, 1931-3 and 1935; the Jerusalem
Ophel
''Ophel'' ( he, עֹ֫פֶל ''‘ōp̄el''), also Graecised to ''ophlas'', is the biblical term given to a certain part of a settlement or city that is elevated from its surroundings, and probably means fortified hill or risen area. In the Hebr ...
in 1927; and early Christian churches in
Jerash
Jerash ( ar, جرش ''Ǧaraš''; grc, Γέρασα ''Gérasa'') is a city in northern Jordan. The city is the administrative center of the Jerash Governorate, and has a population of 50,745 as of 2015. It is located north of the capital city ...
, 1928–1930.
Molly Crowfoot was in charge of living and feeding arrangements on site for large, mixed groups that contained archaeologists from the UK, Palestine and US universities. She and her husband were admired for their diplomatic and organisational skills in the smooth running of these collaborative ventures. Molly took a keen interest in the finds and was among the authors and editors of the final three large volumes on Samaria-Sebaste.
While living in Jerusalem Molly Crowfoot gathered folk-tales with her friend Louise Baldensperger, whose missionary parents had settled in the country in 1848. Together they produced ''From Cedar to Hyssop: A study in the folklore of plants in Palestine'' (1932), an early work of
ethno-botany. (Many years later the tales gathered by the two women were translated back into Arabic and re-published.)
An active retirement
![Women of Artas](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Women_of_Artas.jpg)
John and Molly Crowfoot returned to England in the mid-1930s, in time to see their two eldest daughters married and the arrival of the first of their 12 grandchildren.
The family home in Geldeston, the Old House, had a great many visitors over the next 20 years. One would be
Yigael Yadin
Yigael Yadin ( he, יִגָּאֵל יָדִין ) (20 March 1917 – 28 June 1984) was an Israeli archeologist, soldier and politician. He was the second Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces and Deputy Prime Minister from 1977 to 1981.
B ...
, the son of their friend and collaborator on the Samaria-Sebaste excavations, the Jewish archaeologist
Eleazer Sukenik.
Molly Crowfoot always took an interest in village activities on their long summer visits in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1925 she set up a local branch of the
Girl Guides
Girl Guides (known as Girl Scouts in the United States and some other countries) is a worldwide movement, originally and largely still designed for girls and women only. The movement began in 1909 when girls requested to join the then-grassroot ...
. She remained actively involved in her retirement and, as well as being a regular churchgoer, served as wartime secretary of the new Village Produce Association (see
"Digging for Victory"), and post-war chairwoman of its Labour Party.
In 1949 she attended the
House of Commons
The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. T ...
when questions were raised about the continued prevalence of FGM in Sudan. Crowfoot approached the Colonial Secretary and the veteran Labour MP
Leah Manning
Dame Elizabeth Leah Manning DBE (''née'' Perrett; 14 April 1886 – 15 September 1977) was a British educationalist, social reformer, and Labour Member of Parliament (MP) in the 1930s and 1940s. She organised the evacuation of orphaned or at ...
to inform them of her experience and views on the subject. An outright ban would merely drive the practise underground, she believed, and undo over two decades of careful work by the Midwives' School to reduce its incidence and harmful effects among Sudanese women.
During Molly Crowfoot's last years she was often bed-ridden as she battled, first, childhood tuberculosis and then leukaemia.
Her daughter Elisabeth helped her examine and analyse the numerous textile samples sent to the Old House from a variety of excavations. As doyenne of the study of ancient Middle-Eastern textiles, Molly was invited in 1949 to examine the linen wrappers of the
Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls (also the Qumran Caves Scrolls) are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts discovered between 1946 and 1956 at the Qumran Caves in what was then Mandatory Palestine, near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the ...
. A vivid preliminary account was published in 1951; a full description and analysis appeared in 1955.
She died in 1957 and is buried, with her husband John, next to the tower of the parish church of St Michael and All Saints in Geldeston.
Papers, photos and textile collection
* The unpublished papers of Molly Crowfoot relating to her time in Egypt, Sudan and Palestine, and many of the photos she took then, are held, respectively, i
the Sudan Archiveat
Durham University Library
The Durham University Library is the centrally administered library of Durham University in England. It was founded in January 1833 at Palace Green by a 160 volume donation by the then Bishop of Durham, William Van Mildert, and now holds over ...
(se
the catalogue of her papersthere) and the
Palestine Exploration Fund archives in London.
* Many of Crowfoot's drawings of the flora of North Africa and the Middle East were lodged after her death with
Kew Gardens
Kew Gardens is a botanic garden in southwest London that houses the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world". Founded in 1840, from the exotic garden at Kew Park, its living collections include some of the ...
. Some of the Palestinian costumes she collected were given to the now defunct
Museum of Mankind
Ethnography at the British Museum describes how ethnography has developed at the British Museum.
Within the Department of Natural History and Curiosities
The ethnographical collection was originally linked to the Department of Natural History a ...
. Crowfoot's collection of textiles, spinning and weaving implements is today preserved at the
Textile Research Centre
The Textile Research Centre (TRC), Leiden, Netherlands, is an independent research institute working in the field of textiles and dress. It is housed at Hogewoerd 164 in Leiden and includes exhibition space, storage rooms, a lecture room and ot ...
in Leiden (Netherlands).
[
]
Publications
Botany
* ''Some desert flowers collected near Cairo'' (1914). 35 plates.
* ''Flowering Plants of the Northern and Central Sudan'' (1928), 163 line drawings.
* ''From Cedar to Hyssop: A study in the folklore of Plants in Palestine'' (1932). 76 plates.
* The text of ''From Cedar to Hyssop'' (1932) is no
available online
* ''Some Palestine Flowers: 64 line drawings'' (1933)
Textiles, other crafts and folk-tales
1. North Africa and Middle East
* ''Models of Egyptian Looms'' (1921)
* ''A tablet woven band, from Qau el Kebir'' (1924). From 6th-century A.D. wrapping of a Coptic body.
* ''Methods of hand spinning in Egypt and the Sudan'' (1931). Earlier versions of this text were published in ''Sudan Notes and Records'', issues 3 (1920) and 4 (1921).
*''Pots, ancient and modern'' (1932)
* ''Ramallah embroidery'' (1935)
* ''Samaria-Sebaste 2: Early Ivories'' (1938)
* ''The tunic of Tut'ankhamun'', (1942)
''Palestine Exploration Quarterly'', 1865 to present, online
* ''Handicrafts in Palestine, Primitive Weaving I: Plaiting and finger-weaving'' (1943)
* ''Handicrafts in Palestine, 2: Jerusalem hammock cradles and Hebron rugs'' (1944)
* ''Folk Tales of Artas—I'' (1951)
* ''Folk Tales of Artas—II'' (1952)
* ''The linen textiles'' (1955). Description and analysis of the linen wrappers from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
2. Europe and British Isles
* ''Anglo Saxon Tablet Weaving'' (1952)
* ''Textiles, Basketry and Mats'' (1954). Entry in ''History of Technology''.
* ''The braids'' (1956). Tablet-woven braids from the vestments of St Cuthbert at Durham.
* ''The textiles'' (1983). Finds from Sutton Hoo ship burial by Elisabeth Crowfoot, expanding on earlier joint publications in 1951-2 by her mother and herself.
About Molly Crowfoot
* Kathleen Kenyon, obituary
* Thomas Hodgkin, obituary
* Elisabeth Crowfoot, "Grace Mary Crowfoot", ''Women in Old World Archaeology'', 2004. For the complete text, with a full list of Crowfoot's publications, see the linked pdf file. A summary and selected photos are available online.
* Amara Thornton (2011), ''British Archaeologists, Social Networks and the Emergence of a Profession: the social history of British archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, 1870–1939'' (PhD in Archaeology, UCL Institute of Archaeology). The thesis focuses on five British archaeologists—John Garstang
John Garstang (5 May 1876 – 12 September 1956) was a British archaeologist of the Ancient Near East, especially Egypt, Sudan, Anatolia and the southern Levant. He was the younger brother of Professor Walter Garstang, FRS, a marine bi ...
, John Winter Crowfoot, Grace Mary Crowfoot, George Horsfield George Horsfield (1882-1956) was a British architect and archaeologist. He was Chief Inspector of Antiquities in Transjordan in 1928–36. Horsfield began the initial clearance and conservation of Jerash in 1925, and excavated at Petra with his f ...
and Agnes Conway.
* John R. Crowfoot (2012), "Grace Mary Crowfoot", entry in Owen-Crocker G., Coatsworth E. and Hayward M. (eds), ''Encyclopaedia of Mediaeval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles'', Brill: Leiden, 2012, pp. 161–165.
"Grace Mary Crowfoot (1877–1957), a Grande Dame of Archaeological Textiles", The Textile Research Centre, Leiden (Netherlands)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Crowfoot, Grace
British women scientists
British archaeologists
British women archaeologists
1879 births
1957 deaths
Activists against female genital mutilation
British health activists
Palestine ethnographers
Textile historians