Skip to main content

Discourses on the History of Archaeology

Clark and Prehistory at Cambridge

Authors
  • Pamela Jane Smith

Abstract

If honours and titles give measure of a man, then Professor Sir Grahame Clark was indeed important. Faculty Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University from 1935-46, University Lecturer 1946-52, Disney Professor of Archaeology 1952-74, Head of the Department of Archaeol­ogy and Anthropology 1956-61 and 1968-71, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge 1950-73, Master of Peterhouse 1973-80, he was a visiting lecturer at diverse universities; appointed CBE in 1971, he received many awards includ­ing the prestigious Erasmus Prize for 1990, presented by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, for his "long and inspiring devotion to prehistory" (Scarre 1991:10); and in June 1992, he was knighted.

Yet well before fame and position were rewards, Clark made major contributions to the establishment of prehis­tory as an academic subject at Cambridge University. Cambridge was the first and, for many years, only British university granting an undergraduate degree which offered prehistory as a specialization. "The development of postgraduate research in prehistoric archaeology at Cambridge had to wait on the provision of undergraduate teaching;' Clark (1989b: 6) recently observed. The "faculty was the only one in Britain producing a flow of graduates in prehistoric archaeology" (Clark 1989a: 53).
Year: 1996
Volume: 6 Issue: 1
Page/Article: 9-14
DOI: 10.5334/bha.06103
Published on May 20, 1996
Peer Reviewed