Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon, DBE, FBA, FSA (5 January 1906 – 24 August 1978) was a British archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent.

[6] After graduation Kenyon's first field experience was as a photographer for the pioneering excavations at Great Zimbabwe in 1929, led by Gertrude Caton Thompson.

[citation needed] In the years 1931 to 1934, Kenyon worked simultaneously at Samaria, then under the administration of the British Mandate for Palestine, with John and Grace Crowfoot.

In addition to providing crucial dating material for the Iron Age stratigraphy of Palestine, she obtained key stratified data for the study of Eastern terra sigilata ware.

[9] These were published in the Illustrated London News 1937 with pioneering reconstruction drawings by the artist Alan Sorrell whom she had happened to notice sketching her dig.

[10] In the years leading up to the Second World War work in the Middle East became increasingly difficult, so she excavated in Leicester, on the site of the Roman bath complex.

The initial findings were first viewed by the public in the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain 1951 with a reconstruction drawing by Alan Sorrell.

Kenyon focused her attention on the absence of certain Cypriot pottery at City IV, arguing for an older destruction date than that of her predecessors.

[citation needed] Kenyon's legacy in the field of excavation technique and ceramic methodology is attested to by Larry G. Herr, one of the directors of the Madaba Plains Project.

Here, they combined Wright's interest in ceramic typology in the best Albright tradition with Kenyon's methods of excavation, which allowed the isolation of clear, stratigraphically determined pottery assemblages".

Indeed her method of digging, which most of us have subsequently adopted, causes a proliferation of loci that excavators often have difficulty keeping straight long enough to produce coherent published stratigraphic syntheses.

Moreover, her insistence that excavation proceed in narrow trenches denies us, when we use the Jericho reports, the confidence that her loci, and the pottery assemblages that go with them, represent understandable human activity patterns over coherently connected living areas.

[7] In the 1973 New Year Honours, following her retirement from Oxford, she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) "for services to archaeology".