Katy A. Whitaker's spoken word piece imagines pioneering archaeologist Dorothy Garrod (1892-1968) talking about her war work and remembering inter-war excavations. It was inspired by a prehistoric necklace excavated by Garrod from Mount Carmel in Israel in the 1930s, now in the collection of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Katy writes,
"I was thinking about how varied Dorothy Garrod's life was during the period 1914-1945, during which the necklaces were excavated, and what she might have been thinking about while engaged on war work in each World War. I wanted to tie together these amazing strands of her life, and thought that a common thread could be her relationship with the women she worked with, albeit in such contrasting circumstances. She was at her very best working with teams of women, whether on site or in uniform. I saw the necklaces as a visual metaphor for links in and across her life. Objects aren't only about the people who made and used them, but are presented in museums divorced from their finders and from those people's rich, complex lives. That's a shame, because (archaeology) museum collections are there by reason of their excavators, not because of the people who made and used the objects."
