J. D. Clark, 85; Archeologist Was Expert on Early Africa

J. Desmond Clark, a UC Berkeley archeologist and anthropologist who wrote the book and became a living textbook on the prehistory of Africa, has died. He was 85.

Clark died Feb. 14 of pneumonia at an Oakland care facility.

With his Berkeley colleague, paleontologist Tim White, Clark led expeditions to Ethiopia’s Middle Awash River Valley and other African excavation sites for more than 20 years.

In 1981, the team discovered skull and femur fragments of a 4-foot-tall, two-legged hominid 4 million years old. They determined that it proved that bipedalism and brain size evolved independently of each other--counter to the prevailing view at the time that big brains developed first and that walking on two legs followed.

Another of their major finds was the 1996 discovery of the world’s earliest large mammal butchery, again in Ethiopia.

Clark, credited as one of the first archeologists to involve Africans in studying their own territory by teaching them modern excavation and research methods, also helped reopen Chinese archeological digs to foreigners. In 1991, he obtained permission to dig for fossils in the Nihewan Basin near Beijing--the first permit granted to a foreigner in 40 years.

The best-known of Clark’s more than 18 books is “Prehistory of Africa,” published in 1970. A close second is his 1967 compilation, “Atlas of African Prehistory.”

But beyond his books and 300 scholarly papers, Clark became a walking resource on how our ancestors lived 4 million to 6 million years ago. While White and other colleagues concentrated on hominids, Clark dug for stone tools and other evidence of how life was maintained.

“His lifelong quest,” White said, “was to elucidate the very beginnings of human culture and technology and its development through time in Africa. He was not only an expert in the oldest stone tools, but he knew the Iron Age and the late Stone Age and which colleague was digging at what cave, and where it was and how old it was.

“The knowledge and understanding this one man had of African archeology,” he said, “will never be surpassed.”

John Desmond Clark was born in London on April 10, 1916, grew up in the English countryside and earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in archeology from Cambridge University. With few jobs available at home, he left England in 1938 with his new bride, Betty Cable Baume, to accept a position in Northern Rhodesia, which is now Zambia.

That job, as secretary of the newly formed Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and curator of the David Livingstone Memorial Museum, lasted until he moved to Berkeley in 1961.

When Clark served with an ambulance team in Somaliland and Ethiopia during World War II, his wife, who would later organize his camps and sketch his discoveries, ran the museum in his absence.

Clark, who taught at Berkeley from 1961 to 1986 and headed its department of anthropology for many years, continued his research and writing until his death.

Last year he published his third paper on the prehistoric site of Kalambo Falls in Zambia.

During his decades with the Livingstone Museum and at Berkeley, Clark explored sites throughout Africa, including on the Congo Basin, the Central African Rift Valley, the Sahara, the Nile Valley, Angola, Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.

He also led expeditions to India as well as to China, always in search of evidence of early humans’ lifestyle.

Clark, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1993, is survived by his wife of 63 years; a daughter, Elizabeth Winterbottom of Australia; a son, John Clark of England; a sister, Moira Coulson of England; and five grandchildren.