Clark, J Desmond

▪ 2003

      British archaeologist and anthropologist (b. April 10, 1916, London, Eng.—d. Feb. 14, 2002, Oakland, Calif.), was a world-renowned authority on ancient Africa and the leader of archaeological expeditions that opened dramatic new windows on human prehistory. A year after graduating from the University of Cambridge in 1937, Clark became director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), a position he held until 1961. During this time, while developing the museum, he conducted archaeological research and published his findings in The Prehistoric Cultures of the Horn of Africa (1954); he also helped found the Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, the first organization to bring together archaeologists from across the continent. As professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1961 to 1986, Clark led a number of important expeditions in Africa. In Ethiopia with colleague Tim White in 1981, he unearthed a four-million-year-old skull and femur fragments; the fossils belonged to the oldest human ancestor known at that time and helped scientists establish that bipedalism had evolved independently of brain size. In 1991 a Clark-led team excavated in the Nihewan Basin near Beijing—the first team of foreign archaeologists to work inside China in 40 years. A prolific writer, Clark published some 20 books, including The Prehistory of Africa (1970)—perhaps his best-known work—and 300 journal articles. Among numerous honours, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965 and received the British Academy's Grahame Clark Medal for Prehistory in 1997.

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