Artas is a Palestinian village located four kilometers southwest of Bethlehem in the Bethlehem Governorate of Palestine, in the central West Bank. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the town had a population of 5,745 in 2017.

Grace Mary Crowfoot was a British archaeologist and a pioneer in the study of archaeological textiles. During a long and active life Molly—as she was always known to friends, family and close colleagues—worked on a wide variety of textiles from North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the British Isles. Returning to England in the mid-1930s after more than three decades spent in Egypt, Sudan and Palestine, Crowfoot co-authored a 1942 article on the "Tunic of Tutankhamun" and published short reports about textiles from the nearby Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo (1951-1952) in Suffolk.