Grahame Clark

Sir John Grahame Douglas Clark CBE FBA FSA (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.

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 Antiquity's 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.

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.