English archaeologist who distinguished two prehistoric cultures in the Al-Fayyūm depression of Upper Egypt, the older dating to about 5000 BC and the younger to about 4500 BC.

While a student at the British School of Archaeology in Egypt (1921–26), Caton-Thompson and Elinor Wight Gardner began the first archaeological survey of the Al-Fayyūm depression (1924–26 and 1927–28). In Southern Rhodesia (1928–29) she directed stratigraphic studies of the Zimbabwe architectural remains that pointed to indigenous African design and construction during the time of the European Middle Ages. Her findings, controverting a popular view that the ruins were the remains of biblical Ophir and of Phoenician origin, were reported in The Zimbabwe Culture (1931; reissued in 1969). Returning to Egypt (1930–33), she conducted excavations in Al-Wāḥāt al-Khārijah (the Kharga oasis). A fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge (1934–51), in 1948 she advanced the hypothesis that earliest civilization may have originated in central Africa. Her other publications included The Desert Fayum (1935) and Kharga Oasis in Prehistory (1952).