His contributions to prehistory began with his doctoral thesis and post-doctoral research in the 1930s on the Mesolithic of Britain and north west Europe. It produced a flurry of books and papers which established frameworks for the period still used today.
Through the Fenland Research Committee and his excavations at Peacock's Farm, a Neolithic site near Mildenhall, he came to recognise the value of environmental studies in prehistory, particularly pollen analysis, and the need to select sites for examination which could easily provide environmental as well as the more usual artefactual and structural evidence.
In Archaeology and Society (1939), long to be a standard textbook for archaeology students, he stressed the need to interpret archaeological material in terms of the once-living societies that produced it. With Prehistoric Europe: the Economic Basis (1952) he demonstrated how that could be achieved in respect of economic life. By his classic excavations at Star Carr, near Seamer in North Yorkshire, he triumphantly brought all the themes together, producing cultural, social and economic interpretations of a (then) superbly well-preserved Mesolithic settlement, all set in the context of a meticulously reconstructed contemporary environment. Excavations at Star Carr (1954), a landmark in archaeological publication, stood the tests of his own re-evaluation in 1972 and the addition of far more data from new fieldwork in the 1990s.
Grahame Clark helped form the Prehistoric Society in 1935 and edited the Society's Proceedings for 35 years, establishing them as one of the world's premier journals. At Cambridge, where he became Professor of Arch<->aeology in 1952, his interests became increasingy wide, and the courses in the Faculty of Archaeology became ever more international in scope. Graduates in increasing numbers were dispatched to posts around the globe in a kind of post-colonial intellectual imperialism. His own seminal contribution to the internationalisation of archaeology was the disarmingly simple World Prehistory: an outline (1961), and he documented the progress of his world-pervasive Cambridge school of thought in Prehistory at Cambridge and Beyond (1989).
Working in Photographic Interpretation during the war, he was on hand to serve on the CBA's first executive committee. Ever an intellectual elitist and a trenchant commentator, he was often impatient with what he may have seen as CBA parochialism; but his reminders to the first committee of the need for independence in research, and that the social purpose in archaeology is education in the human sciences, are timely still today.
John Grahame Douglas Clark: born 28 July 1907; educated Marlborough and Peterhouse, Cambridge; at Peterhouse, Bye-Fellow 1933, Fellow 1950, Master 1973-80; Disney Chair at Cambridge, 1952-1974; FBA 1951; CBE 1971; Kt 1992; married Mollie White 1936 (two sons, one daughter); died 12 September 1995.
Peter Addyman, former President of the CBA, was a student of Grahame Clark
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