Hilda Petrie and her husband Sir Flinders Petrie British School of Archaeology
Which employer did Olga Tufnell work for from 1922 to 1927?
Olga Tufnell Olga Tufnell ( 26 January 1905 – 11 April 1985 ) was a British archaeologist who assisted on the excavation of the ancient city of Lachish in the 1930s . She had no formal training in archaeology , but had worked as a secretary for Flinders Petrie for a number of years before being given a field assignment . Olga then went on to join James Leslie Starkey in the expedition to find Lachish in 1929 and remained part of the team for the following seasons . When Starkey was killed in 1938 , the team finished the season then closed the site . Olga volunteered to write up the report of the dig and spent the following twenty years researching and writing up the majority of the excavation report . Olgas work has been regarded as the pre-eminent source book for Palestinian archeology . Once the report was published , she turned her attention to cataloguing scarabs and other seals . Early life . Olga Tufnell was born on 26 January 1905 in Sudbury , Suffolk to a prominent landholding family . Her father , Beauchamp Le Fevre Tufnell had been a second lieutenant in the 4th Battalion of Essex Regiment , and her mother , Blanche , maintained a broad range of cultural interests , as well as working with the Anglo-Czech Society . Olga was a middle child with two brothers , Joliffe Gilbert Tufnell and Louis de Saumarez Tufnell . She spent her early life in Little Waltham , and was educated at schools in London and Belgium before going to finishing school in Italy . When Olga had completed her time at the finishing school in 1922 , she went to help her mothers close friend Hilda Petrie and her husband Sir Flinders Petrie , with an exhibition of their recent finds at University College London , before taking on a secretarial role at the British School of Archaeology in Egypt . She held the position of Hilda Petries secretary for five years , though she described it as dull and repetitive work in fundraising , but also spent some time drawing and repairing pottery . Olgas work evidently impressed Sir Flinders who , at the end of 1927 , offered her an opportunity to assist him in the field in 1928 . Expeditions . Although Sir Flinders himself did not join the expedition in 1929 , he sent Olga with a group of other archaeologists to Qau , where they spent two months recording the reliefs from the tombs of the ancient rulers . She and a few colleagues , including Gerald Lankester Harding , then joined the seasons primary expedition , which was being led by James Leslie Starkey at the Tell Fara tomb group in Palestine . During the time she would not only supervise the work of a team , but also ran an evening clinic for the Arab workers and families , as well as other local people . In all , she would help up to forty people per day with minor injuries or upset stomachs . Sir Flinders joined the group in 1930 and after reviewing Olgas work , allowed her to publish it under her own name . In 1931 , during the Petrie expedition to Tell el-Ajjul , Olga discovered a Hyksos tomb which included a horse burial . In 1932 , Starkey secured funding from Charles Marston and Henry Wellcome to start an expedition apart from the Petries , which Olga joined . The Wellcome-Marston expedition was to focus on the excavation of the ancient city of Lachish , a stronghold mentioned in the Bible . Over the next six years , the team made some important finds , including the Lachish letters , but the work was interrupted by the murder of Starkey , while he was en route to the opening of the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem . The remaining team finished during the 1938/9 season , then closed the site . Olga wrote the final report . Return to London . The Wellcome Foundation allowed Olga some rooms at St Johns Lodge in Londons Regents Park , where the University College Londons Institute of Archaeology had recently been established . Her work was almost immediately put on hold due to the outbreak of World War II , as Olga was co-opted to the BBC Arabic radio station due to her association with the Middle East . Around the same time , she also became an air raid warden . At the end of the war , she returned to her work on the report . She controversially published findings that held that the time period between two occupational levels , Level II ( preceding Babylonian conquest by Nebuchadnezzar ) and Level III ( preceding Assyrian conquest by Sennacherib ) was likely to be in the range of 100 years , rather than a decade , as Starkey had suggested . Although the majority held that Starkeys interpretation was more likely , in 1973 subsequent excavations vindicated her opinion . In 1951 , Olga became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London . She was proud of this award and called it one of her greatest achievements . Olga continued to study and to write up the Lachish report for 20 years , with the final publication ( Lachish IV ) in 1957 . Whilst writing the report , she dealt with requests related to the excavation , including distributing the Lachish finds and sending some unwanted pots to a school museum The multi-volume report was described as the pre-eminent source book for Palestinian archaeology . Later life . Once the full report had been published , Olga turned her attention to the study of scarabs , working with William Ayres Ward . Although many scholars dismissed the field of scarabs and seals as unreliable of chronology , Olga meticulously recorded the dimensions and styles of the artefacts . She was an early adopter of the use of computers for measurement of the scarabs and she was due to present a paper on that use of computers just days after her death in April 1985 . In 1983 , 50 years after the initial excavations , Olga was invited back to the site of Lachish , to see the more modern excavations by University of Tel Aviv . There she was greeted by 200 local archaeologists , who welcomed her enthusiastically .