Beatrice de Cardi obituary

Award-winning archaeologist whose fieldwork circled the GulfArt Dubai, a fair in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), last year commissioned a performance featuring a monologue to “Beatrice”. The addressee was the archaeologist Beatrice de Cardi, who has died aged 102. She was, said the artists Fari Bradley and Chris Weaver, “the one woman who changed the way the world viewed UAE and other Gulf countries entirely in terms of archaeology”.De Cardi’s fieldwork circled the Gulf, starting in Baluchistan in 1947, moving in the 60s to Iran and the Arab Emirates, and on to Oman and Qatar in the 70s. When she stopped digging – unable to climb in and out of trenches, she said – she continued cataloguing artefacts at the Ras al-Khaimah emirate’s national museum, whose foundation went back to her pioneering discoveries. Her most pleasing find was a type of pottery used in Ras al-Khaimah in 2000BC, which analysis showed to have been imported from where she began, in Baluchistan. Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Archaeology Science United Arab Emirates Middle East and North Africa World news UK news Source Type: news