Professor Sir John Grahame Douglas Clark, C.B.E., M.A., Sc.D., Ph.D., F.B.A.

The Society's third most senior Fellow, Sir Grahame Clark, died on 12 September 1995, completing sixty-two years in the fellowship. Clark was born on 28 July 1907 into an army family and educated at Marlborough and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he spent the rest of his career. For sixty years he played a central part in co-ordinating research in prehistoric archaeology and anthropology to found a world archaeology with the object, in his own words, `of uncovering the community of men'. While still in his twenties, Clark published two notable books, The Mesolithic Age in Britain (1932) followed in 1936 by The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe, which established his reputation as the foremost authority on a period that, up to then, had claimed the attention of few scholars. A year previously, he had been instrumental in transforming the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia into a national society, and it was soon to become a major international vehicle for the advancement of studies in world prehistory. In 1935 Clark began his long teaching career at Cambridge as assistant lecturer in archaeolgy, a post he held until 1946, a year after he returned from war service in the R.A.F., interpreting photographs. From 1946-52 he was university lecturer and from 1952-74 Disney Professor of Archaeology. His association with Peterhouse culminated in the mastership of the college from 1973-80, during which time he was a keen supporter of the boat club, and his display of contemporary art and Chinese ceramics in the lodge surprised dons and students who could have been forgiven for thinking his interests lay entirely in the past, and in scholarship, to the exclusion of aesthetics. Clark was one of the prime movers in the short-lived, but seminal, Cambridge University Fenland Research Committee which was formed in 1932 to investigate the early Neolithic site at Plantation Farm, near Cambridge. The Committee's object was to study, through interdisciplinary research, successive phases of human settlement in relation to changing environment, its members being archaeologists, botanists, geographers and geologists. Its main task had been completed by 1936 and it faded out in 1940 with the onset of war. Between 1949 and 1951 Clark excavated in the alluvial deposits of the Mesolithic hunting camp at Star Carr near Scarborough, Yorkshire, where he and his students (among them a number of future eminent Fellows) recovered bone, antler, wood and other organic material employed by the settlers, traces of the animals on which they subsisted and new evidence of the ecological conditions prevailing at the time of occupation. The project remains a classic of its type and was published in Excavations at Star Carr (1954, revised edition 1971). Throughout his life, Clark was a leading figure in the Prehistoric Society; he was president from 1958-62 and editor of its Proceedings from 1935-70. He lectured throughout the world; one invitation which gave him especial pleasure was from the Indian government to give the first Mortimer Wheeler Memorial lecture in New Delhi in 1978. He was a member of the Ancient Monuments Board from 1954-77 and the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments 1957-69; a trustee of the British Museum 1975-80 and, a unique honour for an archaeologist, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize of the Netherlands Foundation in 1991. His publications are too numerous to quote but mention should be made of Archaeology and Society (1939), Prehistoric Europe: the Economic Basis (1952) and World Prehistory: an Outline, published in 1961, revised in 1969 and 1977, and translated into nine languages. He held office as a Vice-President of the Society from 1959-62 and was awarded the Gold Medal in 1978. He was knighted in 1992. As with everything he did, Clark took his fellowship of the Society seriously; courteous, grave and undemonstrative (one seldom saw him smile) he attended meetings whenever a Cambridge don was lecturing or one was put to the ballot. In his will Clark bequeathed £10,000 to Peterhouse to be used to support undergraduate travel.