ABSTRACT
In retrospect, the World War II years with their enforced idleness were probably beneficial to a young archaeologist driven to pursue the past. Grahame Clark worked long shifts at RAF Medmenham, edited a much attenuated Proceedings, and had ample time to think about environmental archaeology. Clark's thinking about archaeology and humanity stemmed from many intellectual strands and a number of defining discoveries and experiences. Clark began his archaeological career in the cozy, largely amateur world of the 1930s, when flint artifact typology was all the rage. His seniors were preoccupied with chronology, simple culture history, and little else. Clark's travels to Scandinavia in 1932-1933 were a defining experience that brought him to appreciate the magnitude of the climatic changes after the Ice Age. Clark was a devoted member of many other learned societies, notably the British Academy, where he lobbied hard in his later years for a close marriage in research between archaeology and the natural sciences.
