up to Peterhouse College, Cambridge, in 1926 completed his Ph.D. in 1930. His dissertation was later published as The Mesolithic Age in Britain (1932). Miles Burkitt supervised Clark’s doctorate, but it was probably dorothy garrod, an active excavator, who had a greater influence on him. Clark lectured in Cambridge from 1935 to 1952 when he became Disney Professor of Archaeology. He retired from the chair in 1974 but actively wrote and researched until his death. The list of his publications is phenomenal.

While Disney Professor, he employed eric higgs and david clarke and created an exciting environment for students from Britain and other parts of the world at Cambridge University. These contacts and a significant program of overseas excavations were the result of Clark’s interest in world prehistory.

Clark’s long career covered more ground that that of almost any other archaeologist of the twentieth century. He is not identified with the analysis of one kind of archaeological material, nor indeed with an interest that is restricted to one aspect of prehistory. Clark has been universally linked with the Mesolithic site of Star Carr in Yorkshire in England. However, even that work should be viewed in the larger context of Clark’s overall career, for it was but one element on a broad canvas, prepared over the decade before excavation and retouched and developed many years later. Clark frequently switched his focus and interest; he would introduce ideas and study topics and then move on.

Although Clark was not regarded as a founder of “the new archaeology,” at least some of its concepts were present in his writings during the 1950s. He did not carry the radiocarbon revolution to its conclusion, although he had used early radiocarbon results to demonstrate that the northern and western European Neolithic was far older than previously supposed. Clark moved on to consider hunter-gatherer landscape use and suggested the hierarchical taxonomy of human groupings in the Paleolithic northern European plain. It was left to others to identify these as biologically based mating networks, and meanwhile, Clark was engaged in the investigation of cultural diversity. His last book, Space, Time and Man (1992), discussed the human ability to conceive of and organize time and space in ways that other species cannot.

Peter Rowley-Conwy

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists,Vol. 2, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 525–529.

Clark, J. Desmond

(1916–)

John Desmond Clark is preeminent among twentieth-century archaeologists working in Africa. More than any other individual he has shaped African prehistory, and his visions have established or structured almost all of the prehistoric research now under way on that continent. Desmond Clark was born in London and attended Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he studied archaeology and anthropology under Miles Burkitt and grahame clark, who taught him the importance of the paleoenvironment in archaeology and how changes in that environment might influence human behavior.

In 1937, Clark went to work in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) as secretary of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Lusaka and as curator of the Rhodes-Livingstone Memorial Museum in Livingstone. He reorganized the museum, created thematic exhibits of both archaeological and ethnological materials, and wrote an accompanying handbook. The museum proved to be popular with local people and schoolchildren and after World War II attracted foreign tourists visiting nearby Victoria Falls. Later the museum was to be the site of Clark’s annual Winter School in Archaeology. Clark also established the National Monuments Commission to protect archaeological sites in Northern Rhodesia.

During the 1930s, Clark was one of the few professional archaeologists in southern Africa. He began his fieldwork with the geologist Basil Cook from Johannesburg, and his study of the stone tools and fossils of the Old Terrace gravels of the Zambezi River in Northern Rhodesia resulted in his first publication in 1939. He obtained a research grant to do additional excavations at Mumbwa, and a 1942 report recorded a sequence of Stillbay, Rhodesian Wilton, and