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Elinor Wight Gardner: Pioneer Geoarcheologist, Quaternary Scientist and Geomorphologist

“…Gardner's field notebook recounts the visibility and details of the flight path as well as the camera settings (f stops and apertures), altitudes, viewshed aspects and locations depicted for the aerial photographs she took [35] (pp. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Many of these photographs are among the first aerial photographs published from Egypt, and are included in the plates of the book Kharga Oasis in Prehistory and other publications.…”

“…It seems clear that Gardner was the first university trained and degreed geologist to work as a geoarcheologist in Egypt. Gardner began collaborating with Caton Thompson, who was a well-established archeologist with a focus on Nile Valley and predynastic and prehistoric archeology [2,3], in the Fayum in 1924, conducting extensive research there through 1926, then again in 1928-1929. Around this timeframe, many archeologists were beginning to recognize the importance of linking landscapes with cultural resources; the archeologist and chemist Edmond Vignard worked on sourcing of lithic assemblages in the Kom Ombo plain [4] and around 1925 the Jesuit priest and prehistorian Paul Bovier-Lapierre found lithic artefacts in gravel quarries at Abbasiya, near Cairo [5].…”

“…Gardner's research presented her geological observations regarding landscape form with the processes that created them, such as fossil artesian vents, dunes and fluvial terraces, and she related these with the locations of archeological sites. Gardner drew inferences about the paleoecology and former climates of sites; she was a "pioneer of the pluvial theory" [3] that described global hydrological changes as a function of glaciation cycles during the most recent geological period, the Quaternary. She was one of the first researchers to study desert regions and reconstruct water balance changes and relate them to global glaciations [12].…”