page_title: Grahame Clark
section_title: Disney Chair: 1952–72
hierarchical_section_title: Grahame Clark / Biography / Disney Chair: 1952–72
caption_attribution_description: English: Çatalhöyük at the time of the first excavations.
context_page_description: Sir John Grahame Douglas Clark CBE FBA, 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.
context_section_description: In 1952, Garrod took an early retirement and Clark was selected as her replacement for the Disney Chair. To mark this status, Cambridge University awarded him an Sc.D degree on the basis of his published work. In this position he avoided formal meetings and made decisions by himself. He failed to obtain many resources for the department from the university administration, with the department therefore remaining small under his tenure. He did however acquire funds to hire a research assistant, the first being Eric Higgs. As chair, he encouraged the staff in his department to prioritise their research over teaching, and to prioritise the teaching of graduates over undergraduates. In this position he had little personal contact with the department's students, and encouraged them to go abroad after their education, believing that the best opportunities for archaeological research lay outside Britain. He got on with some of his staff, such as John Coles and McBurney,  although not with others, such as Glyn Daniel.
  Over the coming years he would also sit on a range of committees, including the Ancient Monuments Board, Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, the management committee of the Institute of Archaeology, as well as the Prehistoric Society, of whose journal he remained editor. In 1951 he had been elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 1953 he gave the Academy's Reckitt Archaeological Lecture, which he devoted to a discussion of prehistoric economies.
  With his project at Star Carr completed, Clark returned his attention to the excavation of the Iron Age settlement at Micklemoor Hill. He oversaw two further seasons of excavation in 1952 and 1953, which was mostly overseen by Clare Fell, the assistant curator at the Museum of Archaeology.
  In 1954, Clark was made aware of Neolithic pottery and worked flints that had been discovered through an excavation at Hurst Fen near Mildenhall in Suffolk. Believing this to be likely evidence of a Neolithic settlement, he oversaw a project of excavation at the site in 1957 and 1958, although left most of the running of the excavation to Higgs. Clark was disappointed that he excavation revealed a number of scatters post-holes and pits but no structures. The site had nevertheless yielded important typological information about Neolithic pottery and provided greater knowledge about the Neolithic period in eastern England. It would prove to be Clark's final major excavation.
  Prehistoric Europe brought Clark wider visibility and resulted in his first opportunity to visit the United States. In 1952 he was asked to attend the inaugural meeting of the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropology in New York City. At the event Clark met the American archaeologist Gordon Willey, who became his good friend. In 1957 he returned to the U.S. to teach for a semester as the Grant McCurdy Lecturer at Harvard University. In 1958, Clark published his last piece of original research on the Mesolithic, an article on trapez-shaped microliths for the Proceedings. That year he also spent time in France's Dordogne region, visiting Lascaux cave and Hallam L. Movius's excavation of Abri Pataud.
  In 1959, Clark was elected President of the Prehistoric Society. In his presidential address he called for a less Eurocentric and more global focus on research into prehistory. To this end he produced a one-volume history of global prehistory, resulting in World Prehistory: An Outline, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1961. Despite its title, over half of the book was devoted to the prehistory of Western and Central Europe, reflecting how little was known about much of the world's distant past at the time. The book proved an immediate success and brought Clark far greater visibility and opportunities.
  In 1960, Clark returned to Peacock Farm to oversee a small excavation designed to recover material that could be subjected to the newly developed process of  radiocarbon dating. He also grew increasingly interested in Greek prehistory, and gained a permit to excavate the Neolithic Ne
caption: During the 1960s, Clark spent increasing time visiting archaeological sites across the world, including Çatalhöyük in Turkey
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