Karen Frifelt
Danish archaeologist and librarian
Karen Frifelt (15 September 1925 — 6 December 2012) was a Danish archaeologist and librarian who took a prominent role in the definition of three major cultures in the early history of the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
Frifelt was a pioneer of Arabian Gulf Archaeology. In 1959 she was the first woman to participate in Peter Glob’s Archaeological expedition to Bahrain. Later she directed the expedition's field operation in Abu Dhabi from 1966 becoming the first female archaeologist to work in the Trucial States (later to become the United Arab Emirates). In 1972 Frifelt became the first archaeologist to lead an expedition into the Sultanate of Oman.
In Abu Dhabi she was for years in charge of Moesgaard Museum's excavations at the now UNESCO World Heritage Site of Hili. During a meeting between Frifelt and the ruler and founding father of the United Arabi Emirates Sheikh Zayed al Nahyan the latter expressed admiration for Karan Frifelt's courage. Zayed commended how Frifelt as a female had left her own country to travel to an unknown and distant place such as Abu Dhabi to explore its prehistory. Zayed told Karen he wished women of his nation would someday display the same kind of enterprise.
In Oman the 1972 expedition led by Frifelt discovered the archaeological landscapes of Bat later also inscribed as a UNESCO world heritage site.
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This entry incorporates text from “Karen Frifelt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.