Grahame Clark

Sir John Grahame Douglas Clark (28 July 1907 – 12 September 1995), who often published as J. G. D. Clark, was a British archaeologist who specialised in the study of Mesolithic Europe and palaeoeconomics. He spent most of his career working at the University of Cambridge, where he was appointed Disney Professor of Archaeology from 1952 to 1974 and Master of Peterhouse from 1973 to 1980.

Born in Kent to an upper-middle-class family, Clark developed an early interest in archaeology through his collection of prehistoric flint tools. After an education at Marlborough College, he proceeded to Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge, there attaining both his undergraduate and then doctoral degree. For the latter, he produced a thesis and published monograph focusing on Mesolithic Britain. In 1932, he co-founded the Fenland Research Committee, through which he excavated several prehistoric sites in the East Anglian Fens. He was also a senior member of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia and played an instrumental role in transforming it into The Prehistoric Society in 1935. He served as the editor of its academic journal, the ''Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society'', from 1933 until 1970.

During the Second World War, Clark was drafted into the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. He remained in Britain, working on aerial reconnaissance, and wrote further archaeological research articles in his spare time. After the war he returned to Cambridge University, where he was employed as a full-time lecturer. Over the course of 1949, 1950, and 1951, he excavated the important Mesolithic settlement site of Star Carr in North Yorkshire. Other excavations carried out under his directorship included that of an Iron Age settlement on Micklemoor Hill, Norfolk, and the Neolithic site of Hurst Fen, Suffolk. In 1951 he was made a Fellow of the British Academy, in 1952 appointed to Cambridge's Disney Chair, and in 1959 elected President of the Prehistoric Society. In later life he travelled the globe more extensively, often as a visiting professor. In these years, he also wrote more prolifically, although these books typically received a less enthusiastic reception than his earlier work.

Clark was not a popular figure among the British archaeological community, being regarded as a competitive and remote individual who craved recognition. He was nevertheless regarded as one of the most important prehistorians of his generation. He was particularly noted for his emphasis on exploring the economies and environmental conditions of prehistoric Europe. His career was recognised by a number of accolades, including the Dutch Erasmus Prize and a British knighthood, and he was the subject of a posthumous biography by Brian Fagan.

Biography

Early life: 1907–27

John Grahame Douglas Clark was born on 28 July 1907. He was the eldest son of Maude Ethel Grahame Clark (née Shaw) and Charles Douglas Clark, the latter being a stockbroker and a reserve officer in the British Army. The family were upper middle-class and moderately prosperous. They lived in the village of Shortlands, near to Bromley in West Kent. At the outbreak of the First World War, Charles Clark joined the West Kent Regiment and was sent to fight overseas. He survived the war, but during his return to Britain in 1919 succumbed to the influenza pandemic and died mid-journey. Grahame Clark grew up without a father, instead being raised by his mother and an uncle for whom he had great affection. According to the available evidence, Clark's childhood was a happy one. His family moved to Seaford, a coastal town on the edge of the Sussex Downs, with the young Clark developing a fascination with the prehistoric flint tools that he collected on the Downs.

In 1921 Clark began an education at Marlborough College in Wiltshire, where he joined the school's Natural History Society. Aside from his interest in prehistoric tools—which earned him the school nickname "Stones and Bones"—he was also fascinated by the butterflies and moths that could be found in Wiltshire. During his time at the college he visited the archaeological excavation of Windmill Hill run by Alexander Keiller, and became an early subscriber to the archaeological journal '' Antiquity''. His interest in archaeology was encouraged by ''Antiquitys editor, O. G. S. Crawford, and he published articles on prehistoric tools in the Natural History Society's ''Reports''. Having familiarised himself with much of the literature on prehistory, including V. Gordon Childe's influential 1925 book ''The Dawn of European Civilisation'', in his final year at Marlborough Clark gave a talk on the subject of "Progress in Prehistoric Times". By the time that he left the school he was committed to the idea of becoming a professional archaeologist. In this period most prehistoric archaeologists were non-professional hobbyists, and of the few archaeological jobs available most were in museums.

University education: 1927–34

In 1920s, Britain there were few universities that taught courses in prehistory or archaeology. One was the University of Oxford, although Clark was unsuccessful in attaining a scholarship to attend St John's College, Oxford. Turning to the University of Cambridge, he applied to join Peterhouse and while they too turned him down for a scholarship, they admitted him as a "pensioner", or a student who pays for their own tuition. He began his degree in 1927, and during his first two years was enrolled on the history tripos. He attended lectures by economic historians like Michael Postan, which would influence his later archaeological approach to the economies of prehistoric societies. During these years he had continued his research into archaeology on an independent basis, producing articles on prehistoric stone tools that were published in the journals ''Sussex Archaeological Collections'' and the '' Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia''.

In 1928, Clark began his studies in archaeology, which was then taught alongside physical anthropology and social anthropology within the university's anthropology department. The department was run by the Disney Professor Ellis Minns—whose ideas influenced Clark—while the archaeology curriculum was largely organised by Miles Burkitt, an unpaid lecturer of private means. Providing himself with a broad-based grounding in archaeology, Clark sat in on lectures given by archaeologists like Gertrude Caton Thompson, Dorothy Garrod, Leonard Woolley, and Childe. Although the Cambridge syllabus did not provide opportunities for excavation, Clark assisted the non-professional archaeologist Eliot Curwen during his excavations of the Whitehawk Neolithic causewayed camp near Brighton and then The Trundle, an Iron Age hillfort and Neolithic causewayed enclosure near Chichester. It was at the latter that he befriended two fellow excavators, Stuart Piggott and Charles Philips, who became lifelong friends. He also visited a number of Mortimer Wheeler's excavations, although never worked on them. Clark graduated in 1930 with a first-class honours degree.

Clark then registered as a doctoral student, being awarded a Hugo de Balsham studentship at Peterhouse from 1930 to 1932, and then a Bye Fellowship from 1932 to 1935. At Burkitt's suggestion, he devoted his thesis largely to the Mesolithic—or 'Middle Stone Age'—period of British prehistory. At the time little was known about Mesolithic Britain as few scholars had paid attention to it, and most of the archaeological evidence for it consisted of scattered flint tools. Burkitt served as his supervisor, although largely left Clark to his own devices. Clark initially familiarised himself with the evidence for Mesolithic society in continental Europe by travelling to Denmark and Sweden in 1929, where he had a chance meeting with Sophus Müller. On his return to Britain he began a systematic examination of Mesolithic stone tool collections that were held in both museums and private collections across the country, listing these many artefacts within a database. From this he was able to map the distribution of such Mesolithic tool assemblages across the island.

On the basis of this research he wrote ''The Mesolithic Age in Britain'', which was published to critical acclaim by Cambridge University Press in 1932. The book took a conservative approach to the subject by being heavily artefact-focused, although reflected Clark's growing interest in ecology and the role of Mesolithic society in adapting to climate change by discussing the technique of pollen analysis—which had recently been developed in Scandinavia—as a means of understanding ancient changes in the vegetation. Influenced by Childe, the book was rooted in the theoretical perspective of culture-historical archaeology, presenting different styles of Mesolithic tool as representations of different 'cultures', which in turn represented different peoples. ''The Mesolithic Age in Britain'' formed the core of Clark's completed thesis, which was titled "The Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Early Metal Age Industries in Britain" and submitted in January 1934.
After passing his oral exam, which was conducted by Thomas Kendrick at the British Museum in London, Clark was awarded his PhD in 1934.

While conducting his research, he published a number of research articles in scholarly journals such as ''Antiquity''. In 1932, he co-founded the Fenland Research Committee with the botanists Harry and Margaret Godwin; it represented a loose association of specialists in different academic fields who all had an interest in the East Anglian Fenlands. Clark served as the group's honorary secretary, and under him all of the Committee's research projects would be promptly written up and published. The group excavated at Plantation Farm near Shippea Hill, helping to establish a basic stratigraphic chronology of the Fenland's development. In 1934 they then carried out a second excavation at Peacock's Farm, which was very important for demonstrating the advantages of interdisciplinary research and for placing British prehistory within an environmental framework.

In February 1932, Clark was elected to the council of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, and in May 1933 became acting editor of the society's ''Proceedings'' at Childe's recommendation. In February 1934 he was made a permanent council member and honorary editor of the ''Proceedings''. By 1934, both Clark and contemporaries like Piggott had become increasingly influential within the British archaeological community. Previously, in February 1933, Burkitt had ensured that Clark was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Clark himself was however unpopular in many archaeological circles, a result of what his later biographer Brian Fagan described as Clark's tendency to be "extremely critical, even cruel" toward others. During his doctoral studies, he entered a relationship with an archaeology student at Girton College, Cambridge named Gwladys Maud "Mollie" White. In June 1933 the couple assisted Philips' excavation of the long barrow atop Giant's Hill near Skendleby, Lincolnshire.

Early career: 1935–39

In July 1935, Cambridge University's Department of Anthropology and Archaeology employed Clark as an assistant lecturer to teach a course on "geochronology and climatic history", and the following year his position was upgraded to that of a faculty member. In this position he trained an influential coterie of undergraduates in archaeology between 1935 and 1939, among them Charles McBurney, Bernard Fagg, and J. Desmond Clark. In 1935, he helped to set up the Cambridge University Archaeology Field Unit and was appointed its honorary vice president. He arranged for undergraduate members of the Field Unit to assist him in his March 1935 excavations at Mildenhall Fen, where they discovered a wealth of Bronze Age material. Over the course of 1937 and 1938, he co-ran an excavation of the Mesolithic site at Farnham with the non-professional W. F. Rankine. The excavation only revealed some stone tools, producing no ecological data and very little evidence of any structures. Although Rankine argued that they should produce a lengthy report, Clark only wrote up the results for a 1939 article in the ''Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society''.

In February 1935, Clark had suggested that the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia rename itself as the Prehistoric Society, thus stretching its remit far beyond East Anglia. A vote on the issue produced an overwhelming majority in support of the change. Membership of the group then grew rapidly; in 1935 it had 353 members, and this had increased to 668 in 1938. Under Clark's lead, the new ''Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society'' published articles by prominent archaeologists like Childe, Piggott, Philips, and Glyn Daniel, and emphasised interdisciplinary examinations that took into account the work of the natural sciences. Clark also encouraged archaeologists working on non-British prehistory to submit to the journal, and met with the prominent French archaeologist Henri Breuil on the latter's visit to Cambridge.

In the summer of 1936, Clark married Mollie in St Peter's Church, Chichester. They then embarked on a honeymoon in Norway and Sweden, looking at the region's prehistoric rock art, on the subject of which Clark then produced an illustrated article for ''Antiquity''. Later that year, the couple and Philips embarked on a road trip across northern Europe, visiting archaeological sites like the Danevirke and the Nydam Boat. In Germany they spent time at the Schleswig Museum and met with Gustav Schwantes, who took them to visit Alfred Rust's excavation of a Mesolithic site at Meiendorf. Clark and Rust got on well and remained in contact for many years. Crossing to Denmark, the trio were involved in a car crash near to Randers

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