page_title: Grahame Clark
section_title: Early career: 1935–39
hierarchical_section_title: Grahame Clark / Biography / Early career: 1935–39
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo from Dannevirke i 2008 Norsk bokmål: Foto av Danevirke i 2008
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 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, with the Clarks requiring hospitalisation for three weeks.
  In 1936, Cambridge University Press published Clark's The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe, in which he demonstrated his growing interest in ecological and environmental themes. The book established Clark as being at the forefront of Mesolithic archaeology, and was hailed as an important and trend-setting tome which would influence generations of Mesolithic archaeologists before eventually becoming outdated due to more detailed research. In 1939 Methuen and Co published Clark's Archaeology and Society. This was a textbook that outlined how to understand past societies through archaeology, and expressed the view that archaeology could be a force for peace in the world by promoting notions of human unity. In the book he condemned Soviet archaeology, believing that the Soviet government had forced archaeologists to support their pre-conceived Marxist ideas about societal and economic development. He also condemned the use of archaeology in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, claiming that they used archaeology to promote a "diseased nationalism". Published to good reviews, the book was read widely and revised editions were published in 1947 and 1952. According to the historian of archaeology Pamela Jane Smith, it became "one of Clark's most widely read and respected publications."
caption: In 1936, Clark was guided around the Danebirke by German archaeologists
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