Francis Turville-Petre

Francis Adrian Joseph Turville-Petre (born March 4, 1901 ; died August 16, 1942 in Cairo ) was a British archaeologist . He is best known for his discovery of the skull of a Homo heidelbergensis in the Zuttiyeh Cave north of the Sea of ​​Galilee in present-day Israel in 1925. In terms of literary history, the rather eccentric Turville-Petre is through his friendship with the writers WH Auden , Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender , who make him appear as a more or less fictionalized character in several of her works.

View of the Zuttiyeh Cave (around 1900)

Copy of the skull of the "Galilee Man" found in the Zuttiyeh Cave, Israel Museum . The original is in the Rockefeller Museum , the former Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem , opened in 1938 .

life and work

Francis Turville-Petre came from a wealthy Catholic family who owned lands in Warwickshire , Lincolnshire and Leicestershire ; he had three sisters and a brother, Gabriel Turville-Petre , who later became famous as a specialist in Medieval Icelandic literature and was professor at Oxford University from 1941 to 1975 . Francis Turville-Petre also studied at Oxford and was supported in particular by Robert Ranulph Marett , who introduced him to the study of anthropology and prehistory . However, he did not complete his studies; Turville-Petre was treated badly by his fellow students for his homosexuality, which he made no secret of his life, and when his student room at Exeter College was vandalized, he left Oxford for Palestine , which was a League of Nations mandate under British administration in 1920 had become.

Inspired by Paul Karge's work on the prehistory of Palestine , he first began on his own to explore some sites north of the Sea of ​​Galilee in Galilee. In March 1925 the British School of Archeology in Jerusalem awarded him a grant of £ 20 for excavations in Zuttiyeh Cave, which began in April of that year. On June 16, he found fragments of a skull here, which he initially believed to be that of a Neanderthal man . The bones were sent to Arthur Keith , who in his first assessment suggested that it was an even older hominid . Since then, the skull has been classified as that of a Homo heidelbergensis and has been dated to an age of around 250,000, making it one of the oldest hominid finds in the Middle East to this day. After the excavations were completed in 1926, Turville-Petre first returned to England and presented his findings in two publications in 1927, one in a short article in the magazine Antiquity and the other in a monograph published by the British School. After his return to Palestine in 1928, he then accompanied Dorothy Garrod on an expedition in northern Iraq; here they jointly excavated some of the caves of the Hazar-Merd complex . He then went to Berlin to have Magnus Hirschfeld treat his syphilis infection, which was becoming more and more difficult for him.

In 1930 he returned to Palestine and began - again with the support of the British School - with excavations in the dolmen field east of Kerazeh ( Chorazin ), which, however, were hardly productive. In October of that year he returned to Zuttiyeh Cave for a while; some Middle Paleolithic artefacts came to light here in the course of two months of excavation . In the summer of 1931 he began digging with Dorothy Garrod in the Kebara Cave in the Carmel Mountains, but he left this expedition after three months; apparently there had been a falling out between the excavation leaders, possibly because Turville-Petre was increasingly promoting alcohol. He left Palestine and settled in Greece and leased a plot of land on Agios Nikolaos , a tiny island in Euripos , for ten years . Originally, his plan was to explore a tumulus on the mainland from here , which he believed not only to be Mycenaean , but also to be Aulis , the place where, according to Greek mythology, Iphigenia was sacrificed. Nothing came of this plan, however, as the Greek authorities refused to grant him an excavation license, possibly because of rumors about his dissolute lifestyle. After the Wehrmacht invaded Greece in 1941 , Turville-Petre was only persuaded to leave the country with hardship and was finally evacuated to Egypt on the last British ship that could leave Piraeus unscathed. Here he apparently died a year later from the long-term effects of syphilis.

Publications

• Pre-historic Remains in the Vicinity of et-Tabghah, Lake of Tiberias . In: Bulletin of the British School of Archeology in Jerusalem 3, 1923, pp. 32-33.
• Excavation of Two Palaeolithic Caves in Galilee . In: Bulletin of the British School of Archeology in Jerusalem 7, 1925, pp. 99-101.
• Prehistoric Galilee . In: Antiquity 1: 3, 1927, pp. 299-310.
• (with Dorothea M. Bate, Charlotte Bayne and Sir Arthur Keith): Researches in Prehistoric Galilee, 1925-1926 . Council of the British School of Archeology in Jerusalem, London 1927.
• Dolmen Necropolis near Kerazeh, Galilee: Excavations of the British School of Archeology in Jerusalem, 1930 . In: Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 63, 1931, pp. 155-166.
• Excavations in the Mugharet el-Kebarah . In: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 62, 1932, pp. 271-76.

Secondary literature

• Ofer Bar-Yosef and Jane Callander: A Forgotten Archaeologist: The Life of Francis Turville-Petre . In: Palestine Exploration Quarterly 129: 1, 1997, pp. 2-18.