John Desmond Clark was a paleoanthropologist who was born in London, England on April 10, 1916 to Thomas J.C. and Catherine (Wynne) Clark. Clark was educated at Monkton Combe School and Christ's College. In 1934 he enrolled in Cambridge to study history but soon switched his interest to archaeology and anthropology. He received his B. A. degree in 1937 and later that year accepted a job in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). He served a dual position as curator of the David Livingstone Memorial Museum and as secretary of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. He also served as secretary of the Victoria Falls Conservacy and was a founding member of the National Monuments Commission, as well as it's secretary. He was married to Betty Cable Baume in 1938.
From 1941-1946, his wife, Betty, served in his absence as curator in Livingstone. Clark spent WWII with the East Africa Command, serving in Ethiopia, the Somalilands, and Madagascar. After the war, he returned to Cambridge and earned his Ph. D. in 1950. Clark spent more than twenty years at Livingstone and accomplished a wide variety of projects and innovations. He saw to the construction of a new museum and and enlarged and diversified the staff. He was also involved in extensive fieldwork and many excavations. Clark also did major work involving the previously ignored rock art and Later Stone Age.
In 1953 Clark discovered Kalambo Falls, which was a single drop, 722 foot waterfall on the frontier between Zambia and Tanzania. A small basin lake behind the falls was the center of prehistoric occupation. It contained extensive archaeological deposits ranging in date from the late Acheulean into recent times. He believed that his work in the Kalambo Falls area of southwestern Tanganyika was his most important contribution. At the time he was one of only three prehistorians in sub-Saharan Africa.
In 1961 Clark accepted a full-time teaching position at the University of California - Berkeley . Besides his teaching responsibilities, Clark added a new program to the anthropology curriculum. While at Berkeley, Clark continued his field work in Africa throughout the 1960s, 1970s and into the mid 1980s. In 1982, the Korean government invited Clark to visit that country to examine what was being discovered on the Korean Paleolithic.
Clark earned emeritus status in 1986 after twenty-five years of teaching at University of California - Berkeley . The college held a five day gathering, called The Longest Career: The Human Career in Africa, to celebrate Clark's years of service to the college. Students and colleagues from over twenty countries attended to honor him. Clark did not slow down, even as an emeritus. He kept an office, continued his field work and in 1988, made his first of five trips to China. In the 1990's he made his greatest find. He found fossil hominids that date from 4 million years ago. These fossils, the earliest hominid ancestors, were placed into a new species of Australopithecus, Australopithecus ramidus, in 1994 and into a new genus Ardipithecus in 1995. Also in the 1990s, Clark worked for several seasons on the Bouri peninsula in the Middle Awash Valley where his interest was with the (Earlier) Paleolithic. This site revealed tools dating 2.6 million years old. An earlier team found a massive Middle Pleistocene skull from Bodo (late Homo erectus) that revealed cut marks made by stone tools when the bone was fresh. In 2000, one of his last publications, The Acheulean and the Plio-Pleistocene Deposits of the Middle Awash Valley, Ethiopia, a 235 page co-edited monograph was published.
Awards and Accomplishments of Desmond Clark:
1948: Founder,
Member and Secretary of Northern Rhodesia National Monuments Committee.
1965: Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1972: Huxley
Medalist,
Royal Anthropological Institute in London.
1985: Honorary Science Degree at
University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and University of Cape Town.
1982: Golden Mercury International Award.
1985: Gold Medal, Society of
Antiquaries.
1986: Berkeley Citation, University of California
1987:
Fellows Medal, California Academy of Science
1988: Honorary Fellow Royal
Society of South Africa
1988: Sr. Fellow Institute for the Study of Earth
and Man, Southern Methodist University Dallas, Texas.
Publications of John Desmond Clark:
Prehistoric Cultures of Northeast Angola and their Significance in
Tropical Africa (1963)
Atlas of African Prehistory
(1967)
Kalambo Falls Prehistoric Site- Volume I
(1969) Volume II (1974)
The Prehistory
of Africa (1970)
John Desmond Clark died in Oakland, California, on February 14, 2002. Though he had macular degeneration, it was the pneumonia he had come down with after a trip to England that was the cause of his death. Up until that time, Desmond Clark was still active and working at the age of 85.
Howell, F. Clark, Kent Lightfoot, and Tim D. White.
2002 IN MEMORIAM: John Desmond Clark, Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Berkeley 1916-2002. Electronic document, http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/inmemoriam/JohnDesmondClark.htm , accessed July 25,2009.
The Oxford Companion to Archaeology-The Oxford Press-1996.
The International Who's Who1996 to 1997, 60th edition.
Grolier Encyclopedia-1993.
American Anthropology Obituary IndexWritten by: Linda Robinson
Rewritten by: Lillian Dolentz, 2009