Beatrice De Cardi (1914–2016)

Beatrice de Cardi was born in London, England. Her parents were Edwin de Cardi, a Corsican aristocrat, and his wife Christine Berbette Wurfflein, an American heiress of German origin. Beatrice was educated at St. Paul's Girls' School and then attended University College London, where she studied archaeology with the famous archaelogist Sir Mortimer Wheeler. For her first dig, she joined Sir Mortimer and his wife Tessa at the Iron Age fort of Maiden Castle in southern England. There she learned to classify pottery, which became her lifelong interest. In 1936, after graduating, she got the job of Wheeler's secretary and later his assistant at the London Museum. During World War II, she worked for the Foreign Office in China, and after the war, she became the UK's Assistant Trade Commissioner in Karachi, Delhi, and Lahore. She persuaded Wheeler, now Director General of Archaeology in India, to allow her to go exploring archaeological sites in the Baluchistan province of Pakistan. Together with his foreman, Sadar Din, she located some 47 archaeological sites, many of which contained distinctive pottery that she named Quetta Ware and later dated to the 4th-3rd millennium BC. After an absence of several years from the region due to political unrest, in 1966 Beatrice returned to Baluchistan, and investigated sites along the Bampur River. There she discovered some very distinctive grey pottery that led to a new understanding of trade links between the Persian Gulf states and the Indus Valley civilization during the Bronze Age. She then launched a number of expeditions in the Gulf States and discovered more than 20 tombs from the second millennium B.C. In 1973, the government of Qatar established a national museum and appointed Beatice to lead an archaeological expedition that would illustrate Qatar's history. This work led to the publication of a 1978 book on the excavations in Qatar. She then worked in Oman and the United Arab Emirates. At around the age of 93, she stopped conducting fieldwork and began to focus on writing and categorizing her work. In 1973, she was awarded the OBE for services to archaeology. In 1993, she received the Burton Memorial Medal from the Royal Asiatic Society. Beatrice de Cardi never married; her first fiancé died in World War II, and her second fiancé died in a riding accident in Qatar while working there with her.