Grace Mary Crowfoot


Grace Mary Crowfoot 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" and published short reports about textiles from the nearby Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo 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, :nb:Marta Hoffman|Marta Hoffman and Agnes Geijer. 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 in Leiden.
Her daughter Dorothy Hodgkin was a prominent chemist and crystallographer who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.
After her death obituaries were published by the archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon and her son-in-law, the Africanist Thomas Hodgkin.

Early years, 1879–1908

Born in Lincolnshire, England, in 1879 to Sinclair Frankland Hood, of Nettleham 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. Her nephew, Sinclair Hood, 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, and she became lifelong friends with Petrie's wife Hilda.
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 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 The work would not be published until 1926.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, Joan and Elisabeth. One who became acquainted with the Crowfoots during their years in Sudan, Babikr Bedri, 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.
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. 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.
Always quick to respond, she considered how an outsider, someone related to the colonial government, might best intervene. The result was the Midwives' Training School. It was set up in the early 1920s to train local midwives, improve conditions of childbirth and, at the same time, begin to tackle the practise of FGM. To head the school she summoned two fellow pupils from her Clapham days, the midwife sisters "Bee" and "Gee" 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. During his time there he ran a number of major excavations at Samaria-Sebaste, 1931-3 and 1935; the Jerusalem Ophel in 1927; and early Christian churches in Jerash, 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, an early work of ethno-botany.

An active retirement

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, 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. 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, and post-war chairwoman of its Labour Party.
In 1949 she attended the House of Commons when questions were raised about the continued prevalence of FGM in Sudan. Crowfoot approached the Colonial Secretary and the veteran Labour MP Leah Manning 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. 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

Botany

1. North Africa and Middle East
2. Europe and British Isles