Diana Kirkbride

Diana Victoria Warcup Kirkbride-Helbæk (born October 22, 1915 , † August 13, 1997 in Aarhus ) was a British archaeologist who specialized in the prehistory of the Middle East .

Life

Kirkbride attended Wycombe Abbey School in High Wycombe and served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II . She studied Egyptology at University College London and graduated successfully in 1950. She then specialized in the archeology of Mesopotamia and Palestine . Her teachers were Sir Max Mallowan and Dame Kathleen Kenyon . Between 1952 and 1955 Kirkbride participated in excavations in Jericho , which she directed for Kenyon. In 1953 she also began fieldwork in Jordan , including the reconstruction of the Jerash Theater . She was also involved in the excavations at Petra in 1956. During her studies of the Paleolithic and Neolithic in the region, she discovered the Wadi Madamagh site and made excavations in Ard Tlaili in Lebanon . She also discovered the Neolithic site at Beidha , where she led the excavations for the British School of Archeology in Jerusalem from 1958 to 1967. Their excavations in Beidha turned out to be groundbreaking, because they were the first to use the site to reconstruct a Neolithic village in the region as a whole, thus providing valuable information about village life in the desert.

During this work she met the Danish paleobotanist Hans Helbæk , whom she married in the late 1960s. In 1970, Kirkbride became director of the British School of Archeology in Iraq. She worked in Iraq until the 1970s, where she uncovered the Neolithic site of Umm Dabaghiyah . After her husband died of a stroke in the late 1970s, she returned to Beidha for excavation work until 1983, and then worked on publications of her excavations in Beidha and Umm Dabaghiyah. In the 1990s she wanted to start excavating a Nabatean temple in Wadi Rum , but died shortly after the funding commitment in August 1997 in Aarhus, Denmark.

Kirkbride was a fellow of Oxford University's Gerald Avery Wainwright Fellowship in Middle Eastern Archeology and the Society of Antiquaries of London .

Fonts

Kirkbride published more than 60 papers on the archeology of the Middle East. Including:

• with Kathleen Kenyon: Excavations at Jericho 1957–58 . Palestine Exploration Fund, London 1960.
• with Dorothy Garrod : Excavation of the Abri Zumoffen, a paleolithic rock-shelter near Adlun, South Lebanon . Beirut 1961
• Five seasons at the pre-pottery neolithic village of Beidha in Jordan . In: Palestine Exploration Quarterly. Volume 98, 1966, number 1, pp. 8-72.
• with Kathleen Kenyon : Scarabs . British School of Archeology, London 1969.
• Early Byblos and the Beqa'a . Beirut 1969.
• Umm Dabaghiyah 1971: A Preliminary Report . In: Iraq. Volume 34, 1972, pp. 3-19.
• Umm Dabaghiyah 1972: A Second Preliminary Report . In: Iraq. Volume 35, 1973, pp. 1-8.
• Umm Dabaghiyah 1973: A third preliminary report . In: Iraq. Volume 35, 1973, pp. 205-209.
• Umm Dabaghiyah: A Trading Outpost? In: Iraq. Volume 36, 1974, pp. 85-92.
• Umm Dabaghiyah: A Fourth Preliminary Report . In: Iraq. Volume 37, 1975, pp. 3-10.
• Umm Dabaghiyah . In: John Curtis (Ed.): 50 Years of Mesopotamian Discovery. The work of the British School of Archeology in Iraq, 1932-1982. The British School of Archeology in Iraq, London 1982, ISBN 0-903-47205-8 , pp. 11-21.

literature

• Brian F. Byrd: Diana Kirkbride-Helbæk (1915–1997) . In: Neo-Lithics. Volume 3, 1997, p. 1.
• Brian F. Byrd: Early Village Life at Beidha, Jordan; neolithic spatial organization and vernacular architecture: the excavations of Mrs Diana Kirkbride-Helbæk . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005, ISBN 0-19-727013-1 .
• JN Postgate: Diana Kirkbride-Helbæk (1915–1997) . In: Iraq. Volume 59, 1997, pp. III-IV ( digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Katherine I Wright: Obituary: Diana Kirkbride-Halbaek. In: The Independant of September 5, 1997.
2. ↑ Steven Mithen: After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC . Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2003, p. 72 f.