Diana Kirkbride

She attended Wycombe Abbey School in High Wycombe and served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during the Second World War. She completed a postgraduate diploma at University College London in 1950 studying Mesopotamian and Palestinian archaeology under Sir Max Mallowan and Dame Kathleen Kenyon. Kirkbride went to work on the excavations of Jericho from 1952 to 1955. In 1953, she began fieldwork in Jordan, including the restoration of the Jerash Theatre and excavations at Petra in 1956. During her studies of the Paleolithic and Neolithic of the area, she excavated a small rock shelter called Wadi Madamagh and made excavations at Ard Tlaili in Lebanon. She also discovered a major Neolithic site at Beidha where she led the excavations for the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem from 1958 until 1967.

It was during this work that she met Danish paleobotanist Hans Helbæk whom she married at the end of the 1960s. She continued work in Iraq in the 1970s where she made another discovery of another Neolithic site called Umm Dabaghiyah. After her husband died of a stroke in the late 1970s she returned to Beidha for a season of excavations in 1983. She also finished work compiling the results from Beidha and Umm Dabaghiyah and started planning a new excavation of a Nabataean temple at Wadi Rum which was not completed before her death in August 1997 at Aarhus, Denmark.

• Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq.
• Oxford University's Gerald Avery Wainwright Fellowship in Near Eastern Archaeology
• Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries

• Kirkbride, Diana & Garrod, Dorothy Anne Elizabeth. Excavation of the Abri Zumoffen, a paleolithic rock-shelter near Adlun, South Lebanon, s.n., 1961{{cite book|author1=Dorothy Anne Elizabeth Garrod|author2=Diana Kirkbride|title=Excavation of the Abri Zumoffen, a paleolithic rock-shelter near Adlun, South Lebanon, 1958|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9hwRHAAACAAJ|year=1961|publisher=s.n.}}{{Dead link|date=January 2024 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}
• Kirkbride, Diana & Kenyon, Kathleen Mary, Scarabs, British School of Archaeology, 1969.{{cite book|author1=Diana Kirkbride|author2=Kathleen Mary Kenyon (Dame.)|title=Scarabs|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IvHbPgAACAAJ|accessdate=24 March 2011|date=1969|publisher=British School of Archaeology}}
• Kirkbride, Diana, Early Byblos and the Beqa'a, Beyrouth, 1969.{{cite book|author=Diana Kirkbride|title=Early Byblos and the Beqaa|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yazFGwAACAAJ|accessdate=24 March 2011|year=1969}}
• Kirkbride, Diana, Five seasons at the pre-pottery neolithic village of Beidha in Jordan, in: Palestine Exploration Quarterly; 1966.{{cite book|author=Diana Kirkbride|title=Five seasons at the pre-pottery neolithic village of Beidha in Jordan|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=S3eWSwAACAAJ|accessdate=24 March 2011|year=1966}}
• Kirkbride, Diana & Kenyon, Kathleen Mary, Excavations at Jericho 1957-58, Palestine Exploration Fund, 1960.{{cite book|author1=Kathleen Mary Kenyon (Dame)|author2=Diana Kirkbride|title=Excavations at Jericho 1957-58|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3lmENAAACAAJ|year=1960|publisher=Palestine Exploration Fund}}

{{Portal|History|United Kingdom}}

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• Byrd, Brian F. (2005) Early Village Life at Beidha, Jordan; neolithic spatial organization and vernacular architecture: the excavations of Mrs Diana Kirkbride-Helbæk. Oxford: Oxford University Press {{ISBN|0-19-727013-1}}

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Category:1915 births

Category:1997 deaths

Category:Academics of University College London

Category:Alumni of the University of London

Category:British women archaeologists

Category:English archaeologists

Category:People educated at Wycombe Abbey

Category:20th-century British archaeologists