Avraham Biran/Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
Kathleen Mary Kenyon (1906–1978), shown here visiting Tel Dan, was born in London and received her field training in Zimbabwe under the direction of Gertrude Caton-Thompson. She is known for introducing the Wheeler-Kenyon method into Near Eastern archaeology; unlike her predecessors, who cut wide trenches with little attention to the interrelation of debris, Kenyon dug smaller trenches and concentrated on layers of deposits and their relationship to structures and small finds. Today she is still known as “the mistress of stratigraphy.” Kenyon helped found the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London and became the director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem in 1951. Excavating Jericho, she found that no walled city stood at the time when Joshua is said to have conquered it; in her excavations in Jerusalem during the 1960s, she discovered a portion of a city wall dating to 1800 B.C.