Sir Grahame Clark: A passionate connoisseur of flints (an internalist study of Clark's early publications)

摘要

An internalist approach to Clark's early publications from 1927 to 1939 is used to examine his goals, methods, assumptions, definitions of archaeology, immediate academic influences, and intellectual change.;Clark was a founding member of the interdisciplinary Fenland Research Committee, publishing with the Committee throughout the 1930s. During this association, his methods broadened when he stressed the importance of excavating and promoted the study of wetland sites. His demonstration of the relevance to British archaeology of natural scientific techniques, such as pollen and faunal analysis, was a major contribution.;Clark's greatest strength was his ability to synthesize several independent lines of evidence and to demonstrate how information from varied sources converged to support a conclusion. When classifying an artifact, he studied morphology, function, type of material, patination, techniques of manufacture, and associated finds. When excavating, he correlated archaeological, botanical, geological, and faunal evidence.;He strongly influenced the establishment of the Prehistoric Society in 1935 and as Honorary Editor of its Proceedings until 1970 facilitated the publication of innovative research. In The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe, he introduced the reconstruction of prehistoric subsistence patterns and social factors into the study of past cultural distributions and seemed to assume that economic activities were more basic to the survival of a society than social, ideological, or artistic endeavours.;During the late 1930s, Clark was influenced by D. F. Thomson's seasonality study, A. M. Tallgren's re-evaluation of prehistoric archaeology's methods, and by German and Scandinavian settlement excavations. In Archaeology and Society, Clark redefined archaeology as the study of how humans lived in the past, theorized many different aspects of society were interrelated but continued to argue that typological analysis must precede interpretation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).