Joan Crowfoot Payne

Joan Crowfoot Payne (16 January 1912 – 4 October 2002) was a British archaeologist specialising in the study of lithics (stone tools and chipped stone) from the Ancient Near East and worked as Cataloguer of the Ancient Egyptian collection at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Early life and education The second of four sisters, Joan Crowfoot was born in 1912 in Giza (Egypt) to the educationalist and archaeologist John Winter Crowfoot (1873–1959) and Molly Crowfoot (née Hood) (1877–1957). She and her older sister, the future Nobel-prize-winning chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, attended the Sir John Leman Grammar School in Beccles, Suffolk.

From 1929 to 1932 Crowfoot Payne studied at the London School of Medicine for Women but was unable to complete her medical training due to an eye condition. The following year, in 1932–1933, she attended the University of Cambridge as a Research Student on the Diploma Course in Archaeology. Her lack of Latin meant she could not sit the qualifying exam for the course. publishing an update to Baumgartel's Petrie's Naqada Excavations: A supplement (1970). In 1965 she was promoted to a Departmental Assistantship at the Ashmolean.

She retired in 1979 and a year later was awarded an Honorary Master of Arts degree by the University of Oxford. 'Lapis Lazuli in Early Egypt', Iraq 30:1, pp. 58–61 (1968) 'The Chronology of Predynastic Egyptian Decorated Ware', Eretz-Israel. Archaeological, Historical and Geographical Studies. 21 pp. 77–82 (1990) 'Tomb 100: The Decorated Tomb at Hierakonpolis Confirmed', Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. 59, pp. 31–35 (1973)