John W. Crowfoot

John W. Crowfoot during excavations in the Tyropoion Valley, Jerusalem (1927)

John Winter Crowfoot (born July 28, 1873 in Wigginton, Oxfordshire , † December 6, 1959 in Geldeston, Norfolk ) was a British colonial administrator and archaeologist .

His father, John Henchman Crowfoot, was a missionary in India but fell ill and returned to Britain. Here he met Mary Bayly; the two married in 1872. As a member of the Anglo-Catholic movement , John Henchman Crowfoot took up a pastorate in Wigginton. It was here that John Winter Crowfoot was born as the eldest child, and shortly afterwards his sisters Margaret and May. John Henchman Crowfoot was soon appointed canon at Lincoln Cathedral , the center of Anglo-Catholicism. There he rose to the position of chancellor of the cathedral.

Like his father, John Winter Crowfoot studied classical philology at Oxford. His excellent academic achievements enabled him to study for a year at the British School of Archeology in Athens in 1897 . He traveled to Greece, Cyprus and Asia Minor, where he began to be interested in Byzantine mosaics and the way of life in the Eastern Mediterranean in general.

Returned to Great Britain, he initially took a lectureship as a classical philologist at the University of Birmingham from 1899 to 1900 . But he gave up his academic career when he got the opportunity to work in the Orient. From 1901 he worked in the Ministry of Education of the British civil administration in Egypt . After only two years he was transferred to Khartoum in Sudan , where he had to make inspection trips to schools and campaigned for the education of girls. After being transferred back to Cairo, he suddenly proposed marriage to Grace Mary “Molly” Hood, with whom he had been pen pals for ten years, and she agreed. The marriage was concluded in 1909 in Nettleham by the Bishop of Lincoln, whereupon the bride and groom immediately set off for Cairo.

The living conditions of the crowfoots in Cairo were pleasant, they lived with a view of the pyramids and participated in the social life of the British colony. Several children were born. John W. Crowfoot's profession meant that he traveled extensively and developed an archaeological interest in ancient Egypt. Each year the family moved to England for three months to escape the Egyptian summer heat.

With the outbreak of the First World War, some changes in this way of life occurred. Wife and children moved to England, where life was safer for them, but Molly Crowfoot immediately returned to her husband in Cairo without the children and also accompanied him to Sudan, where he worked in a managerial position. u. a. as director of Gordon College in Khartoum and director of the Sudanese antiquities administration in 1926 he retired.

In the same year he succeeded John Garstang as director of the British School of Archeology in Jerusalem , where he worked closely with the American School of Oriental Research . John W. Crowfoot organized larger excavations, starting with the Ophel excavation in Jerusalem in 1927. This was followed by a joint excavation with Yale University in Jerash ( Gerasa ) from 1928 to 1930. This was followed by excavations in Samaria- Bastia from 1931 to 1935 by the British School of Archeology in conjunction with Harvard University , the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Palestine Exploration Fund . In 1935 he finished his work as director of the British School of Archeology, whereupon he devoted himself to the final reports of his excavations, the last of which appeared shortly after his death.

John W. Crowfoot's archaeological work made a significant contribution to the ceramic typology of the Iron Age and to the understanding of late antique church architecture. He died at the age of 86, two years after his wife.

The daughter Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) was an eminent biochemist who received the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The daughter Elizabeth Crowfoot (1914-2005) initially worked as an actress and dressmaker, from 1959 she helped her parents with their archaeological work and became a specialist in antique textiles herself.

Publications (selection)

• Churches at Bosra and Samaria-Sebaste , London 1937
• The Christian churches . In: CH Kraeling: Gerasa. City of the Decapolis . New Haven 1938, pp. 171-262.
• Early churches in Palestine , London 1941.

literature

• KMK : Obituary John Winter Crowfoot . In: Palestine Exploration Quarterly 92, 1960, pp. 161-163 ( digitized version ).
• Elisabeth Crowfoot: John Winter Crowfoot . In: Encyclopedia of Archeology in the Near East , Volume 2, Oxford 1997, pp. 72-73.

Web links

• The Palestine Exploration Fund: John Winter Crowfoot, 1873-1959