Diana Victoria Warcup Kirkbride-Helbaek

Diana Kirkbride was born in Southampton on 22 October 1915 and went to Wycombe Abbey School. As with many who survived it, the second world war provided the motivation she needed for peacetime life. While serving in the Women's Royal Naval Service she chanced upon a standard work on ancient Egypt in the base's tiny library; it aroused her interest in archaeology and settled her future career though, then in her late twenties and without academic qualifications, no one could have foreseen that she would become an authority on western Asiatic archaeology of the calibre of Dorothy Garrod and Kathleen Kenyon. After demobilisation Kirkbride studied for the postgraduate diploma in Egyptology at University College London (her war service having exempted her from taking a first degree) and was awarded it in 1950. She was one of the first students to be taught by Kathleen Kenyon and Max Mallowan at the Institute of Archaeology and in 1952 she joined Kenyon's first season of excavations at Jericho as a site supervisor. Work on the tombs began at the outset, while digging was in progress to reach the earliest levels of the mound, and Kirkbride followed James Mellart as tombs supervisor in 1953-4. Among her young colleagues on this dig were Tessa Verney Wheeler, Honor Frost, Dorothy Marshall and Arlotte Tushingham, all to become pre-eminent in their field and most to be elected F.S.A. Also in 1953 Kirkbride joined the staff of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities and began a series of important field projects. One that gave her great satisfaction and pleasure, was the restoration of the Roman South Theatre at Jerash, a remarkable achievement for a relatively inexperienced archaeologist. She then explored the southern region of the country and, after working at Petra, turned her attention to the area's Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites, at that time virgin territory for the archaeologist despite their proximity to Petra. She discovered early Neolithic remains at Beidha and between 1958-67 undertook large-scale excavations there, sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. Beidha was revealed as a small village of the late-eighth and early-seventh millenia B.C., specialising in the production of beads and other crafts; its sequence of superimposed levels providing the best evidence yet for the evolution of Neolithic vernacular architecture. A colleague at Beidha was Dr Hans Helbaek of the National Museum in Copenhagen, who was studying the domestication of food plants in western Asia. They married in 1969 and in the following year Kirkbride-Helbaek was appointed director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq in succession to Dr David Oates. Helbaek returned to Denmark while his wife, who loved the desert and the bedu tribes who worked on her digs, was not content to remain in Baghdad as a passive administrator of the School. She worked for four seasons at Umm Dabaghiyah in northern Mesopotamia where the four levels of the mound included domestic architecture with built-in chimneys and wall-paintings, and a series of small cellular structures at the core of the site, all evidence of a higher level of sophistication than anyone would have predicted for this time and place - not unlike Beidha. Kirkbride-Helbaek retired to Denmark in 1975 and among the many honours she received in recognition of her work was Oxford University's Wainwright Fellowship in Near Eastern Archaeology. Her husband died in 1981 and Kirkbride-Helbaek moved to Aarhus, supported by generous benefits from the Danish state. She paid regular visits to London, including Burlington House and, although incapacitated by a stroke, planned the excavation of a Nabataean temple in Wadi Rumm which, sadly, was not to be. She returned to Beidha for one more season of excavation in 1983 and her last years were spent in preparing reports on Beidha and Umm Dabaghiyah. The latter is now well advanced under the editorship of Dr Stuart Campbell. The first flowering of Kirkbride's talent, the restored Roman South Theatre at Jerash is now a popular tourist attraction and the scene of an annual arts festival. In 1988 she made a sentimental journey to the amphitheatre, accompanied by a party of friends, and watched a performance of Rigoletto in the dusk. She died at Aarhus on 13 August 1997.