John Winter Crowfoot

John Winter Crowfoot CBE (28 July 1873 – 6 December 1959) was a British educational administrator and archaeologist. He worked for 25 years in Egypt and Sudan, serving from 1914 to 1926 as Director of Education in the Sudan, before accepting an invitation to become Director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem.

John Winter Crowfoot was the eldest of three children, and the only son, of clergyman John Henchman Crowfoot (1841-1927) and his wife Mary (née Bayly). A Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford and later the Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral, John Henchman lived with his wife Mary in Lincoln for most of their married life, retiring to Worthing before World War I.

By tradition, the Crowfoots were a medical family. Between 1783 and 1907 they provided five generations of surgeons and doctors to the market town of Beccles in Suffolk. John's Crowfoot uncles William Miller (1837-1918) and Edward Bowles (1845-1897) were doctors in Beccles, as was his cousin William Bayly Crowfoot (1878-1907). In 1921 John and his wife Molly leased a house at Geldeston, near Beccles, which became the family home for the next sixty years.

John was educated at the Fauconberge School before entering Marlborough College and then Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Greats and was Senior Hulme Exhibitioner in 1896.

On graduating Crowfoot studied from 1896 to 1897 at the British School at Athens. He excavated on Cyprus between 1897 and 1898. Lacking private means or other funding to continue an archaeological career, John accepted an appointment in 1899 as lecturer in Classics at Birmingham University, the first "red-brick university" to gain a royal charter in the United Kingdom.

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