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.

[1] 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.

Joan Crowfoot Payne participated in archaeological excavations in the U.K., Palestine, and Iraq studying lithics (chipped stone), and working with her father John Winter Crowfoot, Dorothy Garrod, John Garstang, Mortimer Wheeler, and Kathleen Kenyon among other archaeologists.

Crowfoot Payne died in 2002, aged 90, and is buried with her parents and sister Elisabeth next to the church tower in Geldeston, the village in Norfolk where the family had its English base from 1921 onwards.