Grahame Clark: An Intellectual Biography Of An Archaeologist

Abstract

A biography based on the major publications of Sir Grahame Clark, one of the leading British archaeologists of the 20th century.. To chronicle the intellectual life of Grahame Clark (1907-1995) is to participate in the history of the discipline of archaeology, which Clark almost single-handedly at first transformed from an antiquarian pastime based largely on artifact classification into a sophisticated study of the human past based on collaborations among scientists from many disciplines. Noted archaeology writer Brian Fagan, himself a former student of Clarks at Cambridge University, assesses Clarks pioneering efforts in economic and environmental prehistory. Out of the stultifying atmosphere of dull museum display cases, Clark redefined prehistoric archaeology as the study of ancient communities ceaselessly adapting to ever-changing environments. His famous excavation of the Stone Age hunter-gatherer site of Star Carr was a tour de force of environmental archaeology. Clark also broke British prehistory out of its entrenched provincialism to consider Britain within the context of Mesolithic Europe and, eventually, global prehistory. During Clarks exceptionally long career, spanning well over half a century, the generations of students he trained colonized the world of archaeology and reshaped the discipline in Clarks image. }The British archaeologist Grahame Clark was a seminal figure in European and world archaeology for more than half of the twentieth century, but, at the same time, one whose reputation has been outshone by other, more visible luminaries. His works were never aimed at a wide general public, nor did he become a television or radio personality. Clark was, above all, a scholar, whose contributions to world archaeology were enormous. He was also convinced that the study of prehistory was important for all humanity and spent his career saying so. For this, he was awarded the prestigious Erasmus Prize in 1990, an award only rarely given to archaeologists. This intellectual biography describes Clark's remarkable career and assesses his seminal contributions to archaeology. Clark became interested in archaeology while at school, studied the subject at Cambridge University, and completed a groundbreaking doctorate on the Mesolithic cultures of Britain in 1931. He followed this study with a magisterial survey, The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe (1936), which established him as an international authority on the period. At the same time, he became interested in the interplay between changing ancient environment and ancient human societies. In a series of excavations and important papers, he developed environmental archaeology and the notion of ecological systems as a foundation of scientific, multidisciplinary archaeology, culminating in his world-famous excavations at Starr Carr, England, in 1949 and his Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis (1952). Clark became Disney Professor of Public Archaeology at Cambridge in 1952 and influenced an entire generation of undergraduates to become archaeologists in all parts of the world. He was also the author of the first book on a global human prehistory, World Prehistory (1961). }

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