Dorothea Bate

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Dorothea Bate

archaeozoologist
Known forDiscovery and identification of animal fossils
AwardsWollaston Fund[1]
Scientific career
InstitutionsNatural History Museum, London

Dorothea Minola Alice Bate

recently extinct mammals with a view to understanding how and why giant and dwarf forms evolved.[3]

Early and family life

Born at Napier House,[4] Carmarthen, Carmarthenshire, Bate was the daughter of Police Superintendent Henry Reginald Bate (born in Co. Wexford, Ireland) and his wife Elizabeth Fraser Whitehill. She had an older sister and a younger brother.[2] She had little formal education and once commented that her education "was only briefly interrupted by school".[2] When she was 34 her brother broke his leg and she spent around 18 months looking after her parents. She was later disinherited by her parents in order to provide a dowry for her brother to marry a wealthy woman.[5]

Career

In 1898, at the age of nineteen, Bate got a job at the

palaeontology, geology and anatomy. She was a piece-worker, paid by the number of fossils she prepared.[2]

In 1901 Bate published her first scientific paper, "A short account of a bone cave in the Carboniferous limestone of the Wye valley", which appeared in the Geological Magazine, about bones of small Pleistocene mammals.[2]

The same year, she visited

Eurasian Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes cypriotes).[2]

She later undertook expeditions to many other Mediterranean islands, including

Cretan dwarf hippopotamus.[9] In Crete, she got to know the archaeologists then excavating Knossos and other sites on the island, who were throwing light on the Minoan civilisation,[3] such as Arthur Evans
.

Finding herself sexually harassed by the British Vice-Consul in

Majorca, Bate commented: "I do hate old men who try to make love to one and ought not to in their official positions."[10]

According to The Daily Telegraph[3]

Her days were spent on foot or mule, traversing barren and bandit-infested terrains and sleeping in flea-ridden hovels and shacks. She would wade through turbulent swells to reach isolated cliff caves where she scuffled about, covered in mud and clay, never without her collecting bag, nets, insect boxes, hammer and – later – dynamite.

In the late 1920s Bate travelled to the

archaeozoology, especially in the field of climatic interpretation.[6]

Bate also worked alongside the archaeologist

Canis familiaris to have lived in the Ice Age, based on a skull that had been found. Decades later more remains of Natufian dogs were found. Her pioneering research was published in 1937,[13] 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.[2][14] Among other finds, they reported remains of the hippopotamus.[15]

Bate also worked with Percy R. Lowe on fossil ostriches in China.[2] She compared the relative proportions of Gazella and Dama remains.[6]

Later life, death, legacy

Many archaeologists and anthropologists relied on her expertise in identifying fossil bones, including

John Desmond Clark.[2]

During the

Christian Scientist was cremated. Her personal papers were destroyed in a house fire shortly after her death.[6] On her desk at Tring was a list of 'Papers to write'. By the last in the list she had written Swan Song.[2]

Her estate at death amounted to £15,369.[16]

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 exhibit tells stories and anecdotes of her life and discoveries.[6]

In her biography Discovering Dorothea: the Life of the Pioneering Fossil-Hunter Dorothea Bate, Karolyn Shindler describes Bate as "witty, acerbic, clever and courageous".[6] Shindler is also the author of the biography in the 2004 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography.[2]

Selected publications

  • A short account of a bone cave in the Carboniferous limestone of the Wye valley, Geological Magazine, new series, 4th decade, 8 (1901), pp. 101–6
  • Preliminary Note on the Discovery of a Pigmy Elephant in the Pleistocene of Cyprus (1902–1903)[7]
  • Further Note on the Remains of Elephas cypriotes from a Cave-Deposit in Cyprus (1905)[17]
  • On Elephant Remains from Crete, with Description of Elephas creticus (1907)[18]
  • Excavation of a Mousterian rock-shelter at Devil's Tower, Gibraltar (with Dorothy Garrod, L. H. D. Buxton, and G. M. Smith, 1928)[19]
  • A Note on the Fauna of the Athlit Caves (1932)[20]
  • 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)[14]

Honours

  • 1940: Wollaston Fund of the Geological Society[1]
  • 1940: Elected fellow of the Geological Society[4]
  • 6 December 2017: a
    Blue Plaque was erected on Bate's birthplace, by the Carmarthen Civic Society.[21]

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.[2]

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b "Wollaston Fund". Award Winners Since 1831. The Geological Society of London. Retrieved 20 May 2014.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Bate, Dorothea Minola Alice (1878–1951), palaeontologist by Karolyn Shindler in Dictionary of National Biography online (accessed 23 November 2007)
  3. ^ a b c d Making no bones about hunting fossils at telegraph.co.uk dated 4 July 2005 (accessed 5 March 2013)
  4. ^ a b c "Dorothea Bate: Carmarthen scientist gets blue plaque". BBC News. 6 December 2017. Retrieved 6 December 2017.
  5. .
  6. ^ a b c d e f Review by Miles Russell of Discovering Dorothea: the Life of the Pioneering Fossil-Hunter Dorothea Bate by Karolyn Shindler at ucl.ac.uk (accessed 23 November 2007)
  7. ^ a b Bate, Dorothy M. A.: Preliminary Note on the Discovery of a Pigmy Elephant in the Pleistocene of Cyprus in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol. 71 (1902–1903), pp. 498–500
  8. ^ Dorothea Bate, Cyprus work diary 1901–02, 3 volumes, Natural History Museum's earth sciences library, palaeontology MSS
  9. ^ Evans, Arthur: The Early Nilotic, Libyan and Egyptian Relations with Minoan Crete in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Vol. 55, Jul. – Dec. 1925 (Jul. – Dec. 1925), pp. 199–228
  10. ^ Shindler, Karolyn: Discovering Dorothea: the Life of the Pioneering Fossil-Hunter Dorothea Bate (2005)
  11. .
  12. .
  13. .
  14. ^ a b D. A. Garrod, D. M. A. Bate, Eds., The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, Volume 1: Excavations at the Wady El-Mughara (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1937)
  15. ^ On the Occurrence of Hippopotamus in the Iron Age of the Coastal Area of Israel (Tell Qasileh) by Georg Haas in Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 132 (Dec. 1953), pp. 30–34
  16. CGPLA
    England & Wales
  17. ^ Further Note on the Remains of Elephas cypriotes from a Cave-Deposit in Cyprus by Dorothea M. A. Bate in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character, Vol. 197 (1905), pp. 347–360
  18. ^ Bate, D.M.A. 1907. On Elephant Remains from Crete, with Description of Elephas creticus sp.n. Proc. zool. Soc. London. pp. 238–250.
  19. ^ Garrod, D. A. E., Buxton, L. H. D., Elliot Smith, G. & Bate, D. M. A. (1928) Excavation of a Mousterian Rock-shelter at Devil's Tower, Gibraltar in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 58, pp. 91–113
  20. ^ A Note on the Fauna of the Athlit Caves by Dorothea M. A. Bate in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 62, Jul. – Dec. 1932 (Jul. – Dec. 1932), pp. 277–279
  21. ^ "Pioneering scientist Dorothea Bate receives blue plaque recognition | Natural History Museum". Natural History Museum. Retrieved 8 December 2017.

References

External links