Nancy Sandars

Nancy Katharine Sandars (29 June 1914 – 20 November 2015) was a British archaeologist and prehistorian. As an independent scholar, she wrote a number of books and a popular version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Early life and education Sandars was born on 29 June 1914 in The Manor House, Little Tew, Oxfordshire, England. Her father was a British Army officer who had served in the Boer War and during the First World War, and her mother served with the Voluntary Aid Detachment.

From 1930 to 1937, Sandars travelled extensively throughout western Europe: she visited Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Spain. She was in Austria with her mother during the events of the February Uprising, before they escaped to Budapest and then to England. Her mother died in June 1934. In 1939, Nancy joined Kenyon to work at her excavation of an Iron Age hill fort at The Wrekin, Shropshire. For the first few months of the war, she was a volunteer nurse at various hospitals in Oxfordshire. She was posted to Abbotscliffe during the D-day (6 June 1944) landings across the English Channel. Working in tandem with other listening stations, they also used direction finding to establish the location of the enemy vessels. The course covered the Palaeolithic, and Iron Age periods, and also the archaeology of the Celts.

Sandars spent a year at the British School at Athens. She had received a grant from St Hugh's College, Oxford (her alma mater) to research the European Neolithic. Her version proved very popular and sold over one million copies.

Sandars continued her travels and research tours across Europe and the Middle East, visiting sites and museums. In 1984, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).

Selected works