Dorothea Bate

Career In 1898, at the age of nineteen, Bate got a job at the Natural History Museum in London, sorting bird skins in the Department of Zoology's Bird Room and later preparing fossils. She was probably the first woman to be employed as a scientist by the museum. While in Cyprus she also observed—and trapped, shot and skinned —living mammals and birds and prepared a number of other papers, including descriptions of the Cyprus Spiny Mouse (Acomys nesiotes) and a subspecies of the Eurasian Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes cypriotes). In Crete, she got to know the archaeologists then excavating Knossos and other sites on the island, who were shedding light on the Minoan civilisation,

According to The Daily Telegraph In the 1930s Bate studied the animal bones Garrod had excavated in the Mount Carmel caves, which contained a succession of Upper Pleistocene levels. Instead of just inferring climatic conditions from the presence or absence of cold- or warm-loving animals, she was an early pioneer of the approach to take large samples of fauna of a succession of archaeological strata. These provided a series of plots. Bate worked on the basis that alterations in the frequency of species of animal hunted by early man reflected naturally occurring changes. This work made her an early pioneer of archaeozoology, especially in the field of climatic interpretation. when Bate and Garrod published The Stone Age of Mount Carmel volume 1, part 2: Palaeontology, the Fossil Fauna of the Wady el-Mughara Caves, interpreting the Mount Carmel excavations. Among other finds, they reported remains of the hippopotamus.

Bate also worked with Percy R. Lowe on fossil ostriches in China.

In 2005, a 'Dorothea Bate facsimile' was created at the Natural History Museum as part of a project to develop notable gallery characters to patrol its display cases. Along with those of Carl Linnaeus, Mary Anning, and William Smith, the exhibition tells stories and anecdotes of her life and discoveries. On Elephant Remains from Crete, with Description of Elephas creticus (1907) Excavation of a Mousterian rock-shelter at Devil's Tower, Gibraltar (with Dorothy Garrod, L. H. D. Buxton, and G. M. Smith, 1928) A Note on the Fauna of the Athlit Caves (1932) The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, volume 1, part 2: Palaeontology, the Fossil Fauna of the Wady el-Mughara Caves (with Professor Dorothy Garrod, 1937) 1940: Elected fellow of the Geological Society

Portrait A watercolour portrait of Bate as a young woman, drawn by her sister, is at the Natural History Museum. In it she wears a black dress trimmed with white lace, and a large pink rose.

Footnotes