'Beatrice Eileen de Cardi ....achieved the remarkable feat of filling in many of the gaps in our knowledge of the archaeological record over a vast area which stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Khyber Pass. She was able to do this mainly by survey, and then went on to establish the relative chronology of some of the new [pottery] wares she identified by means of judicious excavation. In addition, she traced some of the connections between her new sites and other better-known ones which provided absolute dates for the new material. She achieved all this without the benefit of permanent institutional backing and never held an academic post, although she was generally acknowledged to be a talented and professional archaeologist. ....
'Beatrice was born, just before the outbreak of the First World War, ....to a Corsican father and an American mother. She was the second of two daughters....Ill health forced her to leave St Paul’s [Girls School] before she reached the top form, and she became an invalid for some years until she outgrew a problem with her heart. When her health improved she was accepted at University College London (UCL) to read for a general arts degree as she was unsure what she wanted to do in life. While there she attended some lectures by Dr R. E. M. (later Sir Mortimer) Wheeler on Roman Britain. It seems to have been these lectures and several seasons digging at Maiden Castle during her vacations that triggered the love of archaeology which was to shape much of her working life.... Sadly, just before she graduated, Beatrice’s father died unexpectedly, leaving the family with no income and a heavily mortgaged house. The staff at UCL suggested that she took [sic] a secretarial course in order to improve her employment prospects, and it was while she was completing the course that Wheeler invited her to become his secretary at the Museum of London....
'There are perhaps three areas for which she will be specially remembered. She played an important part in...[ transforming] the Council for British Archaeology (CBA) ...[where she was employed after].... her mother had become seriously ill and de Cardi wished to return to London.... Her twenty-four years at the CBA saw it develop from a small, largely unpaid group of people concerned about the state of British monuments of all sorts after the war, into a fully professional body, with professional staff, which today [is]... an integral part of the British heritage sector...[De Cardi] ... was responsible in large measure for the rediscovery of the prehistory of the southern Gulf and for its preservation. More broadly, she played her part in beginning to clarify the complex network of connections over an area which stretched from Arabia to the Indus valley....
'In 2002 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, sealing her acceptance by the academic establishment, something she must have relished. ...De Cardi was a brave, determined, fiercely independent and somewhat formidable woman. She maintained her interest in her field all her life and was attending lectures until shortly before her death. She also had highly developed managerial and diplomatic skills, but there was another side to her. After the death of her elder sister she lived alone in a flat just off Kensington High Street where she entertained her circle of friends of all ages with cake and conversation. She wrote a pamphlet about Corsica where her father was born, and asked for the Corsican ‘anthem’ to be played at her funeral. ....She loved cooking and cats, and had an extensive collection of recipe books. She also made many of her own clothes with material usually bought from souks in the Gulf. ...'
Beatrice de Cardi, was her own role model.
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