CLARK, JOHN DESMOND

(b. London, United Kingdom, 10 April 1916;

d. Oakland, California, 14 February 2002), paleoanthropology, archaeology.

Clark conducted groundbreaking research into the prehistoric archaeology of Africa and through his discoveries he convinced archaeologists of the importance of Africa for understanding world prehistory. During his long career he made significant contributions to the knowledge of human origins through his excavations, his efforts to develop archaeological institutions in Africa, and the students he trained.

Education . Desmond Clark first became interested in archaeology as a child growing up in Buckinghamshire. His father, a chemist with an interest in history, often took Desmond to see the ruins of hill-forts, monasteries, and castles. These interests were later encouraged by Clark’s mathematics teacher at Monkton Combe School in Bath. In 1934, Clark entered Christ’s College, Cambridge University, where he studied history and then archaeology and anthropology with Miles Burkitt and Grahame Clark. Under their tutelage Clark learned the basics of Paleolithic archaeology, the importance of artifact typology, and the role of the environment in shaping material culture and human behavior. While at Cambridge, Clark also spent two seasons excavating an Iron Age hill camp at Maiden Castle under the guidance of archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, keeper of archaeology at the Museum of

London, who taught Clark rigorous excavation methods and the importance of keeping careful records. During his last year at Cambridge Clark became engaged to Betty Cable Baume, who was studying modern languages at Newnham College, and they married in 1938.

Clark received a BA in anthropology and archaeology with First Class Honors in 1937 but quickly found that there were few university or museum positions available in Britain. However, late that year he received an offer from the governor of Northern Rhodesia to become curator of the David Livingstone Memorial Museum and secretary of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute for Social Anthropology in Livingstone, near Victoria Falls in Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia). Clark accepted and arrived in Livingstone in January 1938. At the time the museum consisted of early maps of Africa, cultural artifacts, and documents belonging to David Livingstone. Clark quickly began to put the museum’s collection of archaeological and ethnological material in order and prepared a handbook for the collection.

The Africa Years . When Clark arrived in Livingstone there were only a few archaeologists who were investigating African prehistory. Astley John Hilary Goodwin, Clarence van Riet Lowe, and Neville Jones had begun to work out the sequence of archaeological artifacts and periods of southern Africa, while further north in Kenya Louis and Mary Leakey were searching for evidence of the earliest humans in Africa. Rhodesian Man had been discovered at a mining site called Broken Hill in 1921, attracting worldwide attention, and Paleolithic artifacts had been found in the Old Terrace Gravels of the Zambezi River. Clark conducted excavations of these Zambezi River deposits in collaboration with geologist Basil Cooke in 1938, and together they began to unravel the sequence of stone industries and fossils at the site. Clark also learned of excavations conducted at Mumbwa in the Kafue Valley by Italian scientists in 1930 and decided to reinvestigate the site in 1939. These careful excavations disclosed a remarkable archaeological sequence stretching from the Middle Stone Age to the Iron Age that Clark used to illustrate the impact of paleoenvironments on early human behavior. The results of these researches, published in 1942, were not only significant for their detail but also for the careful drawings of artifacts that Clark’s wife Betty prepared.

World War II interrupted Clark’s career, and in 1941, he joined the Field Ambulance Unit of the Northern Rhodesia Regiment. He was sent to Ethiopia and Somalia and saw action against the Italians, but conditions were such that Clark had frequent opportunities to search for prehistoric artifacts, and by the end of the war he had accumulated an extensive knowledge of the archaeology of the region, which led to the publication of The Prehistoric Cultures of the Horn of Africa in 1954. While in Nairobi, where the headquarters of the British East Africa Command was located, he visited Louis and Mary Leakey to discuss African prehistory and to conduct a small excavation. Clark was discharged from the army in 1946 and returned to Livingstone to resume his duties there. His wife Betty had run the museum during his years away and continued to serve as its secretary after his return. The decision had recently been made to separate the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, which was moved to the capital Lusaka, from the museum, which was renamed the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum and opened with a new building in 1951.

During his travels across Africa before and during the war, Clark became aware of the growing threat to archaeological sites by settlement, farming, treasure hunting, and other activities. In order to insure the preservation of archaeological sites, Clark established the Northern Rhodesia National Monuments Commission and served as its first secretary. With the end of the war, it was also easier for scientists across Africa to travel, attend meetings, and organize new institutions. Clark regularly attended meetings of the South African Archaeological Society, but it was the organizing of the first Pan-African Congress on Prehistory by Louis Leakey that brought the greatest number of researchers together and did the most to encourage archaeology in Africa. The meeting was held in Nairobi in 1947 and was attended by archaeologists, geologists, and paleontologists from all over Africa as well as Europe. Clark presented his research at the congress and served as its assistant secretary. The congress not only elevated the stature of archaeological research in Africa in the eyes of European and American researchers, but it also brought together researchers from Africa in fruitful ways that accelerated the progress of prehistoric research on the continent. Clark’s own stature was elevated through his participation in the First Pan-African Congress, and at the Second Pan-African Congress, held in Algiers in 1952, Clark was appointed president of the prehistory section.

Beginning in 1948, Clark had also initiated new excavations along the Zambezi River Valley around Victoria Falls, where he collected numerous stone artifacts and worked out a stratified sequence of successive stone tools types or industries. In 1950, Clark took a leave of absence from his duties at the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum and returned to England. Working with Miles Burkitt at Cambridge University, Clark drew upon the material he had collected in the Horn of Africa and his excavations of the Zambezi gravels to complete his PhD degree in 1951. After completing his dissertation, Clark returned to Livingstone and resumed his studies.

While exploring along the Kalambo River near Lake Tanganyika in 1953, Clark discovered a rich archaeological site at a location called Kalambo Falls. He conducted a cursory investigation in 1953 and then again in 1955, but his first serious season of digging was undertaken in 1956 when he was able to get financial support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Work continued intermittently at the site until 1966, and the wealth of material found at the site, combined with Clark’s extensive and careful records of his discoveries, made his work there a valuable contribution to African archaeology and made Clark a recognized expert in African prehistory. His excavations uncovered a long succession of deposits beginning with Acheulean hand-axes, followed by materials from the Middle Stone Age, and finally by Iron Age artifacts. However, no hominid or animal remains were ever found at the site.

A great deal was learned about the climate and environmental conditions existing at the various periods being uncovered because Clark had assembled colleagues from a variety of different disciplines to participate in the excavations. The newly invented method of carbon-14 dating was also used to obtain absolute dates for the different layers, which greatly improved the understanding of the chronology of African prehistory, although the dates obtained were later found to be somewhat incorrect. Studying the material found, interpreting what it indicated about cultural and technological developments in prehistoric Africa, and preparing his results for publication was a long and arduous task. The first volume of Kalambo Falls Prehistoric Site was published in 1969, with a second volume appearing in 1974. Clark continued working on the third and last volume through the later years of his life, and it was finally published in 2001.

Clark’s career took another significant advance forward in 1955 when he arranged for the Third Pan-African Congress on Prehistory to be held in Livingstone. Again the meeting was well attended by scientists from Africa and abroad, with Clark even leading participants on field trips to archaeological sites in the vicinity. It was during the Livingstone meeting that Clark first met Sherwood Washburn, who was conducting research on baboons at Victoria Falls and the Wankie (later Hwange) Game Reserve. The success of the meeting, combined with Clark’s extensive fieldwork in various parts of Africa as well as his accomplishments at the Rhodes-Livingstone museum, gave Clark an international reputation. In 1952, he had been elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and in 1955, he became president of the South African Archaeological Society. He was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 1956 and was later named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1960. He was also made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1961.

Clark published a series of articles in the years immediately after the Pan-African Congress in Livingstone, including a catalogue for the David Livingstone exhibition and several encyclopedia articles on African prehistory. He also expanded the collections of the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum and added two young British archaeologists, Ray Inskeep and Brian Fagan, to the museum staff. Then in 1959, the Portuguese diamond mining company Companhia de Diamantes de Angola invited Clark to excavate sites in northern Angola where mining operations had discovered large quantities of artifacts. Although the colonial government in Northern Rhodesia was not happy about Clark working in a region not under British colonial administration, his discoveries in Angola added important new data to his knowledge of African prehistory.

The Berkeley Years . Clark’s career took a dramatic turn in 1960 when the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley invited him to join their program to teach Old World Archaeology, and especially the archaeology of Africa. Sherwood Washburn, who had met Clark at the Pan-African Congress in Livingstone, had recently joined the department and had just started a program in paleoanthropology. Recognizing that he was at the mid-point of his career and that such an opportunity might not present itself again, Clark accepted the offer and joined the department in the fall of 1961. He joined such talented researchers as Washburn, Theodore McCown, and F. Clark Howell, and with the addition of Glynn Isaac to the department in 1966, Berkeley became a center for the study of African prehistory and paleoanthropology.

Clark now had access to funds that allowed him to conduct a much wider variety of research projects. In July 1961, just before going to Berkeley, Clark traveled to Burg Wartenstein in Austria to participate in a symposium sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation on the subject of African Ecology and Human Evolution. He joined nineteen other participants from a variety of disciplines to discuss the implications of new ecological, evolutionary, and primatological discoveries for the study of human origins and human prehistory. The symposium was so successful that Clark, Walter W. Bishop, and F. C. Howell organized another international colloquium in 1965 at the Wenner-Gren conference center at Burg Wartenstein. The papers presented at the colloquium and the volume that was subsequently published, Background to Evolution in Africa (1967), helped to shape the newly emerging discipline of paleoanthropology.

Through an invitation to conduct work in Syria by the Antiquities and Museums Directorate of Syria, Clark spent two seasons in 1964 and 1965 excavating a Lower Paleolithic site in the Orontes Valley. From 1965 to 1968, Clark supervised the investigation of lake bed deposits in the Karonga region of Malawi in northern Africa. These excavations brought together archaeologists, paleontologists, and geologists who worked together to reconstruct the cultural, environmental, and geologic conditions in the area during the Pleistocene. From 1970 to 1973, Clark excavated Neolithic sites in the central Sahara and the Sudanese Nile Valley, where he investigated the origins of agriculture and the development of sedentary ways of living, and the ways that changes in climate contributed to such changes in human behavior. He also continued to write during this period. After many years of collecting information about the relationship between early human material culture and ancient environmental conditions, Clark published an Atlas of African Prehistory in 1967. The atlas consisted of a series of maps that show the distribution of archaeological sites in different geological periods in relation to topography, vegetation, climate, and other factors.

At Berkeley, Clark and his colleagues were attracting students and prestige to their program in African prehistory and paleoanthropology because of the quality of the training and research offered there. They were able to hire Glynn Isaac as a faculty member in 1966, which further strengthened the department’s expertise in African paleoanthropology. The program was influential not only for its renowned teaching and research faculty, but also for its efforts to train African nationals who might return to Africa and encourage an indigenous tradition of research there. Throughout his career, Clark remained dedicated to the support of African researchers and the formation of research institutions in Africa.

Clark departed for Ethiopia in 1974 with a large team of international colleagues from a variety of disciplines to undertake an extensive excavation project. The team, coordinated by Clark, investigated Middle and Late Stone Age sites, but on the Gadeb Plain in central Ethiopia the team discovered Oldowan and Acheulean artifacts in deposits dated at 1.5 million years old. In addition to heading the research, Clark helped to find money for the construction of research facilities to be located in Ethiopia. Then in 1980, Clark conducted a cursory exploration of the deposits along the Middle Awash River. He found an abundance of Oldowan and Acheulean artifacts and plans were made to begin serious excavations the following year, but rebel fighting and difficulties with the Ethiopian authorities made that impossible.

While work in Ethiopia was suspended, Clark participated in excavations in India and Korea. He was also invited by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to join collaborative Chinese-American excavations of early Pleistocene hominid occupation sites in the Nihewan basin in the Chinese province of Hebei for four successive seasons between 1989 and 1992.

Clark formally retired from teaching at Berkeley in 1986, but he remained active in collaborating with researchers on new excavations. Circumstances in Ethiopia improved so that a team of researchers led by Clark and Tim White, also a Berkeley professor of paleoanthropology, was able to return in 1990 to work in the Middle Awash region. In 1994, the team found the fossil bones of a new hominid species that was estimated by radiometric dating methods to have lived 4.5 million years ago. The new hominid was so different from any species then known that a new genus was created and the creature was named Ardipithecus ramidus. This remarkable discovery was followed in 1996 by the excavation of some new hominid remains, and in 1997, Yohannes Haile-Selassie, who was then a Berkeley graduate student, found a skullcap of this hominid. This new hominid species was later named Australopithecus garhi and was determined to be 2.5 million years old. While Clark remained a part of the Middle Awash research team throughout the 1990s, his role in the actual excavations diminished over the years as a result of his failing eyesight and his age.

During the latter portion of his career, Clark received numerous awards. He received his DSc degree from Cambridge University in 1975 and honorary doctorates from both the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town in 1985. The Royal Anthropological Institute awarded Clark the Huxley Medal in 1974, and he was awarded the Grahame Clark Medal for Prehistory by the British Academy in 1997. It brought great satisfaction to Clark, who had been a long-time friend and colleague of Louis and Mary Leakey, when he received the L. S. B. Leakey Foundation Prize in 1996. Clark was also a member of many scientific societies. He became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965, four years after his arrival at Berkeley. He served as a member of the L. S. B. Leakey Foundation’s Scientific Executive Committee from 1980. In 1986, Clark became a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1993, he became a full member after obtaining American citizenship.

Clark achieved great prominence during his career and is considered to have made significant contributions to the knowledge of the archaeology of prehistoric Africa and to the development of the discipline of paleoanthropology during the last half of the twentieth century. Clark arrived in Africa at a time when African archaeology was in its infancy, and because he was one of only a handful of professionally trained archaeologists working on the continent, he was in a unique position to make important advances. By taking advantage of unexpected opportunities to travel and excavate in different parts of Africa, he achieved a remarkably comprehensive knowledge of the prehistoric cultures of the entire continent, from the early Paleolithic to the advent of agriculture. One of Clark’s primary contributions to archaeological methodology was his conviction that one needed to determine the environmental conditions prevailing at a particular time and place in prehistory in order to properly interpret the cultures of the past and the ways they actually used the artifacts that archaeologist found. He wanted to reconstruct the behavior of early peoples and how they used their tools. In this work, he reflects the influence of his old professor Grahame Clark.

Clark also promoted and facilitated the pursuit of archaeological research in Africa by expanding the role of existing institutions such as the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum or by helping to establish new institutions such as the Pan-African Congresses as mechanisms to foster research and to bring researchers together. As a leader of major expeditions, he offered colleagues and students opportunities to conduct groundbreaking research and during his tenure at Berkeley, he trained several generations of students who have gone on to make significant contributions of their own. While colleagues and historians held Clark and his achievements in high regard, there were aspects of his work that were criticized. Some scholars have noted that Clark was slow to accept the great age assigned to archaeological sites after the development of the radiocarbon (carbon-14) dating method, and he viewed the extremely early dates given for early hominid sites by the potassium/argon dating method with caution. However, through his many books, articles, and presentations at meetings, which he continued working on right until his death, Desmond Clark made archaeologists recognize the importance of Africa in world prehistory and the centrality of Africa for the study of human origins.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY CLARK

Stone Age Sites in Northern Rhodesia and Possibilities of Future Research. Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1939.

The Stone Age Cultures of Northern Rhodesia. Cape Town: South African Archaeological Society, 1950.

The Prehistoric Cultures of the Horn of Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954.

The Prehistory of Southern Africa. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1959.

Prehistoric Cultures of Northeast Angola and Their Significance in Tropical Africa. Lisbon: Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang), 1963.

The Distribution of Prehistoric Culture in Angola. Lisbon: Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang), 1966.

Atlas of African Prehistory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

With Walter W. Bishop, eds. Background to Evolution in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

Kalambo Falls Prehistoric Site, vol. 1, The Geology, Palaeoecology and Detailed Stratigraphy of the Excavations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

The Prehistory of Africa. London: Thames & Hudson, 1970.

Kalambo Falls Prehistoric Site, vol. 2, The Later Prehistoric Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

The Cambridge History of Africa: From the Earliest Times to c. 500 B.C. London: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Kalambo Falls Prehistoric Site, vol. 3, The Earlier Cultures: Middle and Earlier Stone Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

OTHER SOURCES

Cooke, H. P., J. W. Harris, and K. Harris. “J. Desmond Clark: His Career and Contribution to Prehistory.” Journal of Human Evolution 16 (1987): 549–581.

Daniel, Glyn, and Christopher Chippindale, eds. The Pastmasters: Eleven Modern Pioneers of Archaeology: V. Gordon Childe, Stuart Piggott, Charles Phillips, Christopher Hawkes, Seton Lloyd, Robert J. Braidwood, Gordon R. Willey, C. J Becker, Sigfried J. De Laet, J. Desmond Clark, D. J. Mulvaney. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1989.

Phillipson, David W. “John Desmond Clark 1916–2002.” Proceedings of the British Academy 120 (2003): 65–79.

Wendorf, Fred. “J. Desmond Clark.” In Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, edited by Tim Murray.Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999.

———. “J. Desmond Clark.” Biographical Memoirs, vol. 83. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2003.

Matthew Goodrum