"Why was Kathleen Kenyon worth a biography?" Davis said, to open her speech on Kenyon. "She became an archeologist quite by accident."Indeed.
Kenyon was the daughter of Sir Frederic Kenyon, the director of the British Museum.
Many people thought that her upbringing made her predisposed to become an archeologist.
Kenyon graduated with a third-class degree from Oxford, which is low. Davis said Kenyon spent more time playing lacrosse and tennis than she did studying.
After graduating, Kenyon joined her first expedition to Great Zimbabwe, an ancient stone ruin in present-day Zimbabwe, with Gertrude Caton-Thompson, another important female archeologist.
It was there that Kenyon "fell in love with field archeology and became interested in methodology," Davis said.
On her second excavation, she worked with Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who developed a new method of digging that emphasized precision in order to gather more data about the artifacts that were discovered.
Kenyon followed his method that she later developed into her own method at her digs in Jerusalem.
She excavated in Jericho for seven field seasons.
"The discoveries she made were breath-taking," Davis said.
UPDATE (8 April): More on the biography (the book) here.
