University of California Berkeley
Regional Oral History Office University of California
The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
University History Series
J. Desmond Clark
AN ARCHAEOLOGIST AT WORK IN AFRICAN PREHISTORY AND EARLY HUMAN STUDIES:
TEAMWORK AND INSIGHT
With an Introduction by
Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth
Interviews Conducted by
Timothy Troy
in 2000-2001
Copyright 2002 by The Regents of the University of California
Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed
witnesses to major events in the development of northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral history
is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with
firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of
preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for
continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is indexed, bound with
photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California,
Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is
not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered
by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and
irreplaceable.
************************************
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents
of the University of California and J. Desmond Clark dated February 5, 2001. The
manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the
manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the
University ofCalifornia, Berkeley. No part ofthe manuscript may be quoted for publication
without the written permission of the Director ofThe Bancroft Library of the University of
California, Berkeley.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the
Regional Oral History Office, 486 Bancroft Library, Mail Code 6000, University of
California, Berkeley 94720-6000, and should include identification ofthe specific passages
to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with J. Desmond Clark requires that he be notified of the request and allowed
thirty days in which to respond.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
J. Desmond Clark, "An
Archaeologist at Work in African
Prehistory and Early Human Studies: Teamwork and
Insight," an oral history conducted in 2000-2001 by
Timothy Troy, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2002.
Copy no. I
J. Desmond Clark, 2000.
photo by Timothy Troy
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2002
OBITUARIES
J. DESMOND CLARK
1916 - 2002
i-
a
i-
k
He intended it to be temporary
but stayed for 24 years.
Professor Clark s early work in
Africa took him and his wife on
expeditions to the Congo Basin,
the great Rift Valley of central
Africa, the Sahara, the Nile Valley,
Angola and Ethiopia. His wife
provided drawings of the stone
implements with which he illus
trated his many scientific papers,
and during World War II she ran
the Livingstone museum for him.
Professor Clark came to Berke
ley in 1961, served as chairman of
the anthropology department for
many years, and for 20 years he
and White led expeditions to the
prehistoric sites of the Middle
Awash Valley that have produced
major hominid finds as old as 6
million years. Professor Clark
published more than 18 books
and 300 articles on paleoanthro-
pology and was the author of the
major 1970 work titled "The Pre
history of Africa,"
which is still a
standard textbook.
He is survived by his wife of 64
years, Betty Baume Clark; a
daughter, Elizabeth Winterbot-
tom of New South Wales, Austra
lia; a son, John Clark of Kent,
England; a sister, Moira Coulson
of England; and five grandchild
ren.
n
n
i-
)S
ie
.n
.a.
John Desmond Clark (April 10, 1 9 1 6 February 14, 2002), for whom
archaeology was a lifelong passion, emerged in the 1940s as a major figure
in African Prehistory. By the 1970s, he had dug in China, India and the
Middle East and throughout Africa and won international recognition as a
great palaeoarchaeologist.
His field excavations were models of their kind,
enhanced by his enlistment of specialists
from other disciplines.
The volumes reporting on Kalambo Falls (1969, 1973) set publication
standards. The final volume appeared shortly before his death to complete
this lifelong work. His skills at synthesis provided the framework that
continues to order much work in the field. The Prehistory ofAfrica (1970)
displays his strengths, interdisciplinary control over material, lucid think
ing, apt prose, and dedication to making the ancient past live.
Between 1938 and 1961, as curator and director of the Rhodes-
Livingstone Museum, now the National Museum of Zambia, he built a
museum of international standards. He also worked to create the National
Monument Commission and the PanAfrican Congress on Prehistory. After
moving to the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, he initiated major
collaborative studies in the Horn of Africa and made the Berkeley African
palaeoanthropology program preeminent.
His wife, Betty Cable Clark, was his permanent partner in his work,
famous for her drawings. She organized his archaeological camps and
helped make the Clark hospitality legendary.
Desmond Clark s
many honors include membership in the Royal
Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, the LSP Leakey Award, the
Huxley Lecture of the Royal Anthropological Institute, being named a
Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and the love of former
students and friends.
Please visit the web site created in honor of]. Desmond Clark, http://socrates.berkeley.edu/
-Ihesjdcl /index. html.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2002
OBITUARIES
Memorial Service
27 February 2002
Speakers:
E Clark Howell
John Clark
Elizabeth Colson
Margaret Conkey
Timothy White
4 *
Reception
THE GREAT HALL, THE FACULTY CLUB, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY
i
i-
a
i-
k
n
n
i-
)S
ie
ic
n
He intended it to be temporar
but stayed for 24 years.
Professor Clark s early work ii
Africa took him and his wife 01
expeditions to the Congo Basir
the great Rift Valley of centra
Africa, the Sahara, the Nile Vallej
Angola and Ethiopia. His wif
provided drawings of the ston
implements with which he illu:
trated his many scientific paper:
and during World War II she ra:
the Livingstone museum for hin
Professor Clark came to Berkc
ley in 1961, served as chairman c
the anthropology department fc
many years, and for 20 years h
and White led expeditions to th
prehistoric sites of the Middl
Awash Valley that have produce
major hominid finds as old as
million years. Professor Clai
published more than 18 bool
and 300 articles on paleoanthn
pology and was the author of th
major 1970 work titled "The Pn
history of Africa," which is still
standard textbook.
He is survived by his wife of i
years, Betty Baume Clark;
daughter, Elizabeth Winterbo
torn of New South Wales, Austr;
lia; a son, John Clark of Ken
England; a sister, Moira Coulsc
of England; and five grandchili
ren.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2002
OBITUARIES
J. Desmond Clark
famed scholar
of ancient man
By David Perlman
CHRONICLE SCIENCE EDITOR
J. Desmond Clark, a world-fa
mous anthropologist and African
fossil hunter, and a foremost ex
pert on human evolution, died
from pneumonia in an Oakland
convalescent home on Thursday
at the age of 85.
A professor emeritus of anthro
pology at the University of Cali
fornia at Berkeley, Professor
Clark had been in good health
and had just returned home from
a trip to England with his wife,
Betty, when he was hospitalized,
university officials said.
"Clark was legendary," Tim D.
White, one of his eminent col
leagues at Berkeley, said yester
day. "He towered above anybody
else in African archaeology with
his breadth and depth of knowl
edge about the rise and develop
ment of prehistoric culture. His
death leaves an enormous void."
"He s a monument to the field
of archaeology, said F. Clark
Howell, another leading Berkeley
anthropologist who had known
and worked with Professor Clark
for nearly 50 years. "He left be
hind a new set of scientific foot
steps."
As a specialist in the stone tools
that marked the origins of culture
among the earliest members of
mankind s ancestry, Professor
Clark s many expeditions took
him to India and China as well as
Africa, where he and Tim White
together focused for many years
on the fossil-rich region of Ethio
pia known as the Middle Awash
Valley.
There he and his colleagues
made spectacular discoveries of
creatures known as hominids,
which preceded the emergence of
modern Homo sapiens by mil
lions of years. While White and
J. Desmond
Clark was a
professor
emeritus of
anthropology
at UC Berkeley.
his Ethiopian colleagues found
the hominid fossils, it was Clark
who unearthed their stone imple
ments, opening fresh insights into
the development of early pre-hu
man cultures.
Professor Clark was also
known, along with White, for ad
vancing the careers of young Ethi
opian anthropologists who have
emerged in recent years as new
leaders in the field.
And typical of his views on the
inevitable links between science
and society, Professor Clark was a
fierce opponent of the racism that
permeated South Africa during
the apartheid era. In 1985, for
example, he organized two major
sessions for a world anthropology
conference in England, but then
led a group of colleagues in pull
ing out of the meeting when its
officers barred South African sci
entists from attending.
A year later, at a Berkeley party
marking Professor Clark s official
retirement, he was praised by a
group of black African scientists
who came as his guests.
Less than three years ago, Pro
fessor Clark was still actively ana
lyzing a trove of stone tools 2.5
million years old that were discov
ered by Tim White and Berhani
Asfaw, a leading Ethiopian an
thropologist
who had been a
Berkeley graduate student en
couraged by both Professor Clark
and White.
John Desmond Clark was born
in London and educated as an
archaeologist at Cambridge Uni
versity. With few professional jobs
available in England, he became
curator of the David Livingstone
Memorial Museum in 1938 in
Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.
He intended it to be temporary
but stayed for 24 years.
Professor Clark s early work in
Africa took him and his wife on
expeditions to the Congo Basin,
the great Rift Valley of central
Africa, the Sahara, the Nile Valley,
Angola and Ethiopia. His wife
provided drawings of the stone
implements with which he illus
trated his many scientific papers,
and during World War II she ran
the Livingstone museum for him.
Professor Clark came to Berke
ley in 1961, served as chairman of
the anthropology department for
many years, and for 20 years he
and White led expeditions to the
prehistoric sites of the Middle
Awash Valley that have produced
major hominid finds as old as 6
million years. Professor Clark
published more than 18 books
and 300 articles on paleoanthro-
pology and was the author of the
major 1970 work titled "The Pre
history of Africa," which is still a
standard textbook.
He is survived by his wife of 64
years, Betty Baume Clark; a
daughter, Elizabeth Winterbot-
tom of New South Wales, Austra
lia; a son, John Clark of Kent,
England; a sister, Moira Coulson
of England; and five grandchild
ren.
Cataloging information
J. Desmond Clark (1916-2002) Archaeologist
An Archaeologist s Work in African Prehistory and Early Human Studies:
Teamwork and Insight, 2002, xvii, 532 pages.
Education in England, Cambridge; pre-war work in Africa, Rhodes-Livingstone
Museum history, museum collections, infrastructure; conversation with BETTY
CLARK about family and the museum in wartime; WW II in Somaliland, Yavello,
Gondar campaign, anecdotes; 1947 Pan-African Congress and subsequent
congresses; work on patterns of movement, Nachikufu, Kalambo Falls, the
winter schools; research work of the sixties, iron and copper smelting,
Louis Leakey stories, friendship with Glynn Isaac; developing a "whole
picture" approach, tools, foods, hunting; work in Syria, Nyasaland, Malawi;
mounting and staffing expeditions, training African students; Ethiopia in
the seventies, Pore Epic Cave, Gadeb, the Sudan, political issues; India,
G.R. Sharma, Son River valley, research logistics; China s Nihewan Basin;
UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology faculty, professional association,
research facilities, students and colleagues. Includes dialogues and
monologues created in 2001-2002 with colleagues ANDREW SMITH, GARNISS CURTIS,
CHARLES KELLER, TIMOTHY WHITE, HIRO KURASHINA, MARTIN WILLIAMS, DONALD ADAMSON, STEVE
BRANDT, MERRICK POSNANSKY, ROBERT BLUMENSCHINE ,
and JACK HARRIS.
Introduction by Kathy Schick and Nick Toth, Professors of
Anthropology and Co-Directors, CRAFT (Center for Research into the
Anthropological Foundations of Technology), Indiana University.
Interviewed 2000-2001 by Timothy Troy for the Regional Oral History
Office, The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
The Leakey Foundation extends special thanks to Mr. and
Mrs. Robert Donner, Jr. for their generous leadership in
this project.
We also gratefully acknowledge:
Mr. and Mrs. A. Watson Armour IV
Dr. Frank Brown
Dr. Matthew Kaser
Robert W. Lasher
Camilla and George Smith
TABLE OF CONTENTS-- J. Desmond Clark
PREFACE i
REGIONAL ORAL HISTORY OFFICE INTERVIEWS IN ANTHROPOLOGY iii
INTRODUCTION by Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth iv
INTERVIEW HISTORY by Timothy Troy ix
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION xii
I EARLY YEARS AND EDUCATION IN ENGLAND 1
Chiltern Hills Boyhood, Family 1
Siblings 4
Preparatory Schools, Rowing 6
Cambridge Years, Introduction to Archaeology and Anthropology 8
II GOING OUT TO AFRICA 12
Job -Hunt ing 12
The Trip Out 13
The Others There 14
A Review of Earlier Excavating Experience 15
More on the Trip Out, and Life in Livingstone 17
Marriage to Betty Baume, and Housing Arrangements 19
First Encounters with Tribal People 21
David Livingstone 22
Zambezi Boat Club Lore 25
Staffing the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum 28
Thoughts on Living in Africa 30
Children and Crocodiles 33
Post-War Return to Livingstone 37
Battling Malaria, Other Ailments 43
III DIALOGUE WITH BETTY CLARK 47
Meeting Desmond, and First Encounters with Africa 47
Logistics of Children, and Schools 51
Running the Rhodes -Livingstone Museum in Wartime 53
The Story of the Cast of Livingstone s Arm 55
Drawing Artifacts, Running Camps, Recording Meetings 57
The Return to England 61
Bushy the Galago, and Other Friends 64
Sangwe and the Gorges, the People and the Geology 67
The Move to Berkeley 70
IV THE YEARS BEFORE THE WAR 73
Livingstone Museum Exhibitions, Collections, and Library 73
Field Work on Prehistory and the Movements of People in Africa 81
Mumbwa Cave and Joseph Siatumbu 83
Other Early Scientists in Africa 87
Memories of Colleagues and Residents of Livingstone 91
Stores and Suppliers 95
V THE WAR YEARS, SOMALILAND 98
Entering the War, 1939 98
Seventh East Africa Field Ambulance 101
Casualties of the Gondar Campaign 104
Yavello and Rock Art 107
Njoro, the Huxleys, and the Leakeys 110
Somaliland, the People and the Italian Forts 111
Showing the Flag, During the Rain 116
Dog Assemblies, Camel Raids, Poison Arrows, the Mad Mullah 117
Mijirtein, Punctures, and the Charms of Cheetahs 124
1947-1948 at Cambridge, and the Travels of the Burkitt Collection 126
VI POST-WAR ARCHAEOLOGY 129
First Pan-African Congress, 1947 129
Growth of the Museum in Livingstone 131
Nachikufu, Chifuba Stream 134
Patterns of Movement 136
Rhodesian Man Revisited 138
Second Pan-African Congress, 1952 142
Kalambo Falls, 1953 146
Twin Rivers, the Winter Schools, Leopards Hill 152
Angolan Work, Dianang 155
Gun Flint Maker
The Valley Tonga
David Livingstone s Colleagues 161
Fourth Pan-African Congress, Leopoldville, 1959, and Zinjanthropus 164
Njoro, Bodies and Beads ^66
Mary Leakey and Predecessors 167
VII RESEARCH WORK OF THE 1960S 169
Iron and Copper Smelting Research 169
An Aside on the Current Situation in Zimbabwe 173
Earlier Meetings with Americans, Sherwood Washburn 174
New Acquaintances, Trip to America, Chicago 176
The Story of Louis Leakey Skinning the Duiker 179
Wenner-Gren Conference in 1961 180
Friendship with Glynn Isaac 181
Driving Across Country to Berkeley 182
Early Years in Berkeley 184
Developing the "Whole Picture" via a Team Approach 186
Tools, Foods, Hunting, Eating 188
Going Back, the Independence Movement, Revisiting the Exhibits 192
VIII WORKING IN AFRICA AND BERKELEY 195
Work at Latamne, Syria, 1963-1965 195
Nyasaland Field Work, and Livingstonia 199
Chiwondo Beds, Malawi, 1963 203
Mounting the Expedition, Staffing the Expedition, and Time Off 205
Lake Rukwa and the Ufipa Highland 209
Thoughts on Training African Students 212
Museum Infrastructure and Wankie Bricks 213
Fallout of People s Park EventsProtecting the Collections 214
The Omo, and Clark Howell 215
IX RESEARCH AND EVENTS OF THE SEVENTIES 217
Meeting Haile Selassie 217
Sudan 220
Concentrating on Ethiopia 223
Lake Besaka 226
Serkama and Laga Oda 229
Pore Epic Cave 231
Gadeb and the Webi Shebele 236
X INDIA, AND FARTHER AFIELD 240
Poona Conference: Trips to the Vindhya Hills, Western Escarpment 240
Taking Students Out, Working with G. R. Sharma, the Son Valley 243
Getting Around by Elephant 245
Baghor, and the Shiva Shrine 247
Logistics and Health Issues 249
The National Parks and the Animals 251
Kunjhun II 253
Holi 255
Cambay, and Bead-Making 256
Introduction to Korea and China 260
Working with Wei Qi, and Professor Jia, 1989 261
XI COLLEAGUES AND STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 267
Anthropology Department Faculty, Social Life 267
Professional Associations 271
Lowie Museum, Research Facilities 272
The Careers and Whereabouts of Clark s Students 274
Field Trips and Lab Courses, Old World Prehistory Program 276
Success in Getting Funding 279
More on Careers and Whereabouts 281
African Students and Others, and Some Mixed Successes 287
APPENDICES
1. Andrew Smith, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, March 11, 2000 298
2. Garniss Curtis, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, April 25, 2000 319
3. Charles Keller, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, May 8, 2000 340
4. Timothy White, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, November 2, 2000 357
5. Hiro Kurashina, J. Desmond Clark, Timothy Troy, April 21, 2001 374
6. Martin Williams and Donald Adamson, April 21, 2001 393
7. Steve Brandt and J. Desmond Clark, April 30, 2001 407
8. Merrick Posnansky, September 10, 2001 432
9. Martin Williams, November 30, 2001 445
10. Jack Harris and Robert Blumenschine, January 23, 2002 458
11. Conversation on the Problems at the Livingstone Museum
(Excerpt from April 18, 2000 interview with J. Desmond Clark) 470
12. "African Archaeology at the Millennium: retrospect and reaction"
by J. Desmond Clark 475
13. "Archaeological retrospect 10"
by J. Desmond Clark in Antiquities 496
14. Bibliography 502
INDEX 526
PREFACE
When President Robert Gordon Sproul proposed that the Regents of the
University of California establish a Regional Oral History Office, he was
eager to have the office document both the University s history and its
impact on the state. The Regents established the office in 1954, "to
tape record the memoirs of persons who have contributed significantly to
the history of California and the West," thus embracing President
Sproul s vision and expanding its scope.
Administratively, the new program at Berkeley was placed within the
library, but the budget line was direct to the Office of the President.
An Academic Senate committee served as executive. In the four decades
that have followed, the program has grown in scope and personnel, and the
office has taken its place as a division of The Bancroft Library, the
University s manuscript and rare books library. The essential purpose of
the Regional Oral History Office, however, remains the same: to document
the movers and shakers of California and the West, and to give special
attention to those who have strong and continuing links to the University
of California.
The Regional Oral History Office at Berkeley is the oldest oral
history program within the University system, and the University History
Series is the Regional Oral History Office s longest established and most
diverse series of memoirs. This series documents the institutional
history of the University, through memoirs with leading professors and
administrators. At the same time, by tracing the contributions of
graduates, faculty members, officers, and staff to a broad array of
economic, social, and political institutions, it provides a record of the
impact of the University on the wider community of state and nation.
The oral history approach captures the flavor of incidents, events,
and personalities and provides details that formal records cannot reach.
For faculty, staff, and alumni, these memoirs serve as reminders of the
work of predecessors and foster a sense of responsibility toward those
who will join the University in years to come. Thus, they bind together
University participants from many eras and specialties, reminding them of
interests in common. For those who are interviewed, the memoirs present
a chance to express perceptions about the University, its role and
lasting influences, and to offer their own legacy of memories to the
University itself.
The University History Series over the years has enjoyed financial
support from a variety of sources . These include alumni groups and
individuals, campus departments, administrative units, and special groups
as well as grants and private gifts. For instance, the Women s Faculty
Club supported a series on the club and its members in order to preserve
insights into the role of women on campus. The Alumni Association
supported a number of interviews, including those with Ida Sproul, wife
of the President, and athletic coaches Clint Evans and Brutus Hamilton.
Their own academic units, often supplemented with contributions from
colleagues, have contributed for memoirs with Dean Ewald T. Grether,
ii
Business Administration; Professor Garff Wilson, Public Ceremonies; Deans
Morrough P. O Brien and John Whinnery, Engineering; and Dean Milton
Stern, UC Extension. The Office of the Berkeley Chancellor has supported
oral history memoirs with Chancellors Edward W. Strong and Albert H.
Bowker .
To illustrate the University /community connection, many memoirs of
important University figures have in turn inspired, enriched, or grown
out of broader series documenting a variety of significant California
issues. For example, the Water Resources Center-sponsored interviews of
Professors Percy H. McGaughey, Sidney T. Harding, and Wilfred Langelier
have led to an ongoing series of oral histories on California water
issues. The California Wine Industry Series originated with an interview
of University enologist William V. Cruess and now has grown to a fifty-
nine-interview series of California s premier winemakers. California
Democratic Committeewoman Elinor Heller was interviewed in a series on
California Women Political Leaders, with support from the National
Endowment for the Humanities ; her oral history was expanded to include an
extensive discussion of her years as a Regent of the University through
interviews funded by her family s gift to The Bancroft Library.
To further the documentation of the University s impact on state and
nation, Berkeley s Class of 1931, as their class gift on the occasion of
their fiftieth anniversary, endowed an oral history series titled "The
University of California, Source of Community Leaders." The series
reflects President Sproul s vision by recording the contributions of the
University s alumni, faculty members and administrators. The first oral
history focused on President Sproul himself. Interviews with thirty-four
key individuals dealt with his career from student years in the early
1900s through his term as the University s eleventh President, from 1930-
1958.
Gifts such as these allow the Regional Oral History Office to
continue to document the life of the University and its link with its
community. Through these oral history interviews, the University keeps
its own history alive, along with the flavor of irreplaceable personal
memories, experiences, and perceptions. A full list of completed memoirs
and those in process in the series is included following the index of
this volume.
September 1994
Harriet Nathan, Series Director
Regional Oral History Office University History Series
University of California
Berkeley, California Willa K. Baum, Division Head
Regional Oral History Office
iii
Regional Oral History Office Interviews in Anthropology
George M. Foster, An Anthropologist s Life in the 20th Century: Theory
and Practice at UC Berkeley, the Smithsonian, in Mexico, and with the
World Health Organization, 2000
Mary LeCron Foster, Finding the Themes: Family, Anthropology, Language
Origins, Peace and Conflict, 2001
J. Desmond Clark, An Archaeologist at Work in African Prehistory and
Early Human Studies: Teamwork and Insight, 2001
Elizabeth Colson, Anthropology and a Lifetime of Observation, 2002
Burton Benedict, To be completed in 2002
iv
INTRODUCTION by Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth
To many archaeologists, Desmond Clark is the prehistory of Africa. He
has worked on that continent for over sixty years, has excavated
archaeological sites spanning the Early Stone Age to the Iron Age, and
possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of the discipline. He has personally
known practically every major figure in African archaeology and human
evolutionary studies during his career. It has been our pleasure and
privilege to have worked with him for the past quarter of a century. He has
served as a role model for us and for hundreds of other archaeologists in
the field, inspiring us all over the years with his seemingly boundless
energy and enthusiasm, his meticulous scholarship, his contagious spirit of
camaraderie and collegiality, and his love of fieldwork in the bush.
His character and personality were uniquely shaped by his childhood
and public schooling in England between the World Wars, his archaeological
studies at Cambridge University, his 23 years in colonial Zambia heading
the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum and conducting research, his service in the
British Army in Africa during World War II, and his four decades in
California, including 25 years teaching at the University of California at
Berkeley.
He has conducted archaeological fieldwork in many countries on three
continents, has published over 300 articles and books, has attended every
Pan-African Congress since the first one in Nairobi in 1947, and nearly
every meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists (SafA). The
greater part of his fieldwork over many decades was, of course, in Africa,
beginning in 1938, but he has made major forays into field investigations
elsewhere as well, notably in Syria in the 1960 s, in India in the 1980 s,
and in China in the 1990 s.
Desmond s life and career has been inextricably woven with that of
his wife and college sweetheart, Betty. She has worked with him for over
six decades, in the Museum, field, office and laboratory, and at home. Her
contributions over the years in excavations, camp life, work at the
Museum, archaeological illustration, preparing publications, keeping up
with correspondence, and, overall, "holding the fort"--has been a vital,
integral part of his life and work. Dinners and receptions at their home in
Berkeley were always memorable, with Betty seemingly effortlessly bringing
together a fantastic array of foods and delicacies, sometimes for dozens of
people. Conversations often went well into the night, often over an
aromatic snifter of brandy.
Desmond was the Director of the Livingstone Museum of Northern
Rhodesia (now Zambia) from 1938 until 1961. During this time he built up an
impressive collection of materials and organized exhibits that included
archaeology, ethnography, and natural history. We had the pleasure of
inviting him back to Livingstone in 1988 when we were working there, his
first visit back in twenty years or so. News quickly spread of his
return. . . When he attended a museum function, he suddenly found himself in
a sea of hundreds and hundreds of Zambian schoolchildren who had read all
about him in textbooks. They were very excited when they had heard he would
be returning to visit Livingstone and were extremely eager to see him. One
memorable child came up to him and asked, "Excuse me, are you Professor
Desmond Clark?" He answered in the affirmative. When the child then
exclaimed, "And you are not dead?!," Desmond responded, "Not that I know
of..."
Desmond has been on a first-name basis with many of the other great
pioneers in African prehistory and Palaeolithic archaeology, among them
Henriette Alimen, Camille Arambourg, Edouard van Zinderen Bakker, Lionel
Balout, Pierre Biberson, Bill Bishop, the Abbe Breuil, Robert Broom, Miles
Burkitt, Gabriel Camps, Gertrude Caton Thompson, Sonia Cole, Basil Cooke,
Raymond Dart, Oliver Davies, Bernard Fagg, John Goodwin, Jean de Heinzelin,
Louis and Mary Leakey, Charles McBurney, Peter Van Riet Lowe, Kenneth
Oakley, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and E. J. Wayland. He has provided a
bridge between these other trailblazers and members of our generation of
scholars, often sharing reminiscences and anecdotes of times shared
together in the field and at Pan-African Congresses or other conferences,
and giving invaluable glimpses of these leading figures as people as well
as scholars.
As a special tribute to Desmond, a conference was organized in 1986
in Berkeley to celebrate his career. Entitled "The Longest Career," it
coincided with his 70th
birthday and his alleged retirement from the
University of California (his retirement has been anything but
retiring...). It is a testament to Desmond s professional and personal
stature and influence that hundreds of colleagues and former students came
from around the world to attend. We especially remember, at a celebratory
dinner one night, Phillip Tobias energetically singing a song about Desmond
and Betty set to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune.
As graduate students working with Desmond, we remember many classes
in African prehistory where we frantically took notes trying to keep up
with Desmond s fast-paced, fact-filled lecture tempo. Desmond would stand
at the podium with a long stick, pointing at the images projected on the
screen, and then pounding the stick on the floor of the stage to signal the
projectionist to advance to the next slide. Graduate seminars with Desmond
and Glynn Isaac were always a pleasure, and usually held in the living
rooms of their homes. Halfway through the evening s discussions of the
finer points of African prehistory, beer and wine were usually brought out
(possibly to help loosen the tongues of the more timid participants), and
at the end of the evening cigars (and occasionally snuff) were passed
around .
Walking with Desmond in Berkeley and in the field tended to be a good
aerobic workout. Desmond s boundless energy and impressive stride length
were notorious among his students and co-workers. After trying to walk with
Desmond from the Anthropology Department in Kroeber Hall up the hill to his
VI
office on Piedmont Avenue, one often arrived out of breath from the effort
to keep up.
Desmond s course entitled "Invention and Technology" was always a hit
among students, especially the demonstrations at the Lowie (now Phoebe
Hearst) Museum of Anthropology. Wearing cotton gloves, Desmond would bring
out examples of artifacts representing a wide range of technologies and
time periods, including stone tools, metallurgy, weapons and firearms,
fire-making paraphernalia, ceramics, baskets, and textiles. On one
occasion, Desmond was illustrating an Amazon blowgun, and borrowed a
student s thick notebook to serve as the target. He inhaled deeply and with
a robust puff shot the dart out of the tube across the room and into the
notebook. Closer examination showed that fully the first half of the
notebook pages had been neatly perforated by the dart.
Working with Desmond in the field in Zambia, Ethiopia, and China was
always a great experience. As soon as we would arrive in the study area,
Desmond could hardly contain his excitement about setting up a grid and
starting excavations. His exclamation "Let s get cracking!" became a
mantra to exhort everyone to get to work. At the end of each day, Desmond
would work attentively by his tent in the dimming light, sometimes aided by
a flashlight or lantern, working up his field notes, transcribing
information from his pocket notebook into a fuller log of the daily finds
and discoveries. These handwritten notes over the years have become
increasingly indecipherable to anyone except Desmond!
Fieldwork with Desmond always combined the discipline and hard work
of the daylight hours with a congenial camaraderie in the evening. Desmond
relished having colleagues gather before dinner for relaxed conversation,
jokes, and discussion of the day s work, usually over a glass of Johnnie
Walker Scotch. In China, Desmond also introduced us to "poker dice" in the
evening after dinner, playing with an antique set of dice Desmond had had
for years (with the images of the jacks, kings, and queens somewhat faded),
and we would play with M&M s as our poker chips. After parties and banquets
in the field in China, Desmond would always have everyone join hands and
sing "Auld Lang Syne," concluding with a chorus of "Hip-Hip-Hooray!"
Besides archaeological excavations, we also collaborated with Desmond
on two ethnoarchaeological projects. One was an expedition to study
traditional bamboo use among the Kucong, a minority group deep in the
mountains of Yunnan Province in southern China. It was an all-day, rigorous
hike up the mountain to get to the village. When the Chinese heard that
Desmond, then 75 years old, would be coming, they constructed a sedan chair
with poles to carry him up the mountainside. Desmond gratefully declined
the offer and did quite well on the hike on his own two feet, although he
did finally let them carry him a short distance since they had gone to all
the trouble of preparing the chair.
The second ethnoarchaeological project was to the central mountains
of Irian Jaya, New Guinea, to study one of the very last traditional stone
vii
technologies, producing flaked and polished stone adzes. When we were in
the town of Wamena, attending a local feast, one of the local Dani
tribesman asked Desmond, through an interpreter, if he would like to buy a
pig tusk nose ornament like the one he was wearing. Desmond said yes, the
transaction was made, and the man then removed the tusk from his own nose
and handed it over to Desmond, who gingerly accepted it.
Those that know Desmond will know of his many and varied passions and
interests over the years, for instance in antique firearms and weapons, old
silver, ancient maps, gardening, old ceramics, wine, books on Africana,
furniture -making, rowing on the Cam and the Zambezi- and retreating on
weekends with his wife, Betty, to their rustic cabin at Inverness,
California.
We have a number of especially fond memories with Desmond, many
completely outside of archaeology. We remember shooting black-powder
flintlock rifles (with gunflints that we had made ourselves) at a rifle
range in California; Desmond hit the dead center of a one-inch bull s-eye
at fifty yards using only the iron sights of the flintlock. He proudly wore
the bull s-eye on his field hat for some time afterwards until it fell off
in Ethiopia.
On one glorious June morning in Indiana not too long ago, we went up
in a hot air balloon with Desmond, floating over forest, lake, and
farmland. We landed an hour later in a field behind a farmhouse, and an
alarmed couple came running out in their pajamas thinking we had made an
emergency landing.
We once went to a Medieval Christmas banquet in Berkeley with
Desmond, his wife Betty, and his daughter Elizabeth. We were all dressed in
Medieval costumes that we had fashioned, but Desmond was the hit of the
banquet wearing his scarlet Cambridge University gown and black bonnet,
complete with dagger tucked into his belt. We arrived a few minutes late,
after the festivities had started. When people saw Desmond enter the
banquet room in his grand garb, people started applauding as we walked to
our seats, apparently thinking we were part of some planned procession.
For many years, Desmond and Glynn Isaac hosted an oyster-bake picnic
at Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco with dozens of
participants and hundreds of oysters. Desmond and Glynn would take giant
kelp horns from the seashore and blow them in unison in a raucous primeval
fanfare, their faces getting redder and redder as they trumpeted. Later,
the oyster fest was transformed into a pig roast at Desmond and Betty s
cabin in Inverness, an all-day affair of building a fire and spit-roasting
a large leg of pork as the main course. (Charles Lamb s "A Dissertation
upon Roast Pig" would always come to mind at these events).
Desmond s legacy and his lasting effect on the field will stem not
:rom what he has done, but how he has done it, not just what he has
accomplished, which has been considerable, but the energy, enthusiasm, and
viii
optimism with which he has approached life, work, and new challenges. (One
of our colleagues once described Desmond as "The World s Oldest Boy Scout,
and he meant it as a compliment). Desmond s scholarship and encyclopedic
knowledge of African prehistory will likely never be surpassed,
particularly with his depth of knowledge for all time periods, and he has
been a driving force behind building the multi-disciplinary thrust of
archaeological investigations. It has been a privilege and pleasure for us
and so many others to know him and to have worked with him.
Kathy Schick and Nick Toth,
Professors of Anthropology and Co-Directors,
CRAFT (Center for Research into the
Anthropological Foundations of Technology) ,
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana
August 1, 2001
IX
INTERVIEW HISTORY-- J. Desmond Clark
Without question one of the most accomplished anthropologists and
paleoarchaeologists ever, J. Desmond Clark published twenty books and over
300 scholarly articles in innumerable scientific journals. The third volume
of his celebrated work on Kalambo Falls was issued recently, and he was
hard at work on an article concerning Adrar Bous, a site in the desert of
northern Niger, at the time of his death. Though most of his nearly
seventy years of field archaeology were concentrated in Africa, Clark also
did extensive work in Syria, India, and China. With Mary and Louis Leakey,
he helped to establish the Pan-African Congress on Prehistory as the
preeminent organization of its kind for that continent. Professor Clark
attended every session of that body from its first gathering in Nairobi
1947 until several years ago.
Clark received too many awards and honors to be listed here, but some
of them were: the Huxley Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute;
honorary doctorates from Cambridge, the University of Witwatersrand, and
the University of Cape Town; the Gold Medal of the Society of Antiquaries
of London, the Berkeley Citation by the University of California, and the
Fellows Medal of the California Academy of Sciences. He was an elected
fellow of the British Academy; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences;
the Royal Society of South Africa; the Society of Antiquaries of London;
the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the South African
Association for the Advancement of Science; and the National Academy of
Science, Washington.
Coordinating times to work with a man well into his eighties seemed
like it would be a relatively easy part of the process of doing an oral
history. He would be a captive audience; I would go to his house up in the
hills; we d record for awhile, and he would then need to rest and I would
depart. Prof. J. Desmond Clark wasn t such a man. His date book was
always packed with appointments, and at the end of our sessions, rather
than retreat for a nap, he would be at the door very nearly before I could
pack up, briefcase in hand, broad-brimmed African hat on his head ready for
a lift up to the archaeology lab on campus to meet with a graduate student
or two, with distinguished visitors in town, or with old colleagues for
lunch at the Faculty Club. During our sessions the phone would ring
perhaps several times per hour, and Desmond would be profusely apologetic
to me and as brief as possible with the caller. But the calls were
important: from scholars, students, relatives all over the place. One
morning, at the height of the crisis in Zimbabwe, I helped the concerned
Desmond dial Africa and then his son in England who d likewise been
attempting to make contacts in Zimbabwe. Another sad morning, Sherwood
Washburn being very near death, we received a call from Sherry s brother,
Bradford Washburn, the distinguished mountaineer, photographer, and founder
of the Boston Museum of Science. Desmond was asked by Washburn to write
something for the newspapers about his brother s extraordinary pioneering
career in the field of primatology and the evolution of man. "We ll get
back to you, Brad," Desmond said. "Take care." Desmond sat back and after
only a few brief, contemplative moments of silence - tears welling up -
dictated an extraordinarily eloquent piece on his beloved friend Sherry
without any hesitation at all. It was like watching John Gielgud perform
some solemn, moving soliloquy. I wrote as fast as I could -
my own tears
streaming - made a few minor corrections, and we called Bradford back on
the East Coast. (Desmond s resemblance to Gielgud, incidentally, came out
beautifully in morning light as he leaned back, hands folded at his chest,
and remembered) .
Desmond s memory was phenomenaldates, names, places, citations to
scholarly articles and books. He d remember the names of the most remote
cites and places. After one hour of recording his experiences during the
war in Somaliland and Ethiopia, I had to spend three hours trying to locate
oases and inselbergs and dry rivers on detailed maps I d dig out in Earth
Sciences or in the anthropology library up at Kroeber Hall. They would be
there, and Desmond would have the names correct! I spent perhaps two
hundred hours in this project finding correct spellings in African
languages, French, Italian, Portuguese, Swahili and Chinese. For awhile
I d stop Desmond and ask for a spellingparticularly for names of places
and people I would never be able to locate. But after a time I stopped
asking. The interruptions would be too disruptive and there were so many.
I resigned myself to much follow-up work, much of it joyous, as I d finally
focus a magnifying glass down on some remote oasis in the Sudanese desert,
for example, where it was said crocodiles could still be found, living
relics of earlier eras when the Sahara was a savannah of waving grass
crossed with small rivers and spotted with lakes and little ponds.
The man s knowledge of languages was matchless. He told me a story,
for example, of meeting two Italian priests on a small island in the remote
Lake Tana of Ethiopia at the end of the Gondar Campaign of World War II.
After a few moments of attempting this and that language, Desmond and the
priests settled on Latin as the language for their conversation. The
priests most wanted to know whether the war was over or not. They were
overjoyed to hear that it had ended sometime earlier.
A gentleman of incredible tact, Desmond could sketch a character with
fine lines and color and capture the most difficult of people - the Abbe
Breuil, for example - with uncanny ease. There were no mean words from
this man, however; no bitterness. His great fondness for Louis Leakey, as
another example, precluded his saying anything untoward about the famous
man who had, certainly, a large number of detractors as well as worshipers.
At the most, Desmond might make a dry comment about somebody, but he would
never be harsh in his description.
We would work in the same sunny alcove of Desmond s living room each
session or, later, on the garden patio of his Oakland apartment. I d bring
coffee and donuts. I would set up among orderly piles of books and
xi
articles Desmond would be systematically working through. Desmond would
sit back and sometimes talk with his eyes closed thoughtfully or with them
wide open and expressive in the morning light.
Finally we talked of all the work yet to be done. Conferences to be
attended, sites to be revisited, data to be analyzed in the light of new
evidence, and so on. Desmond has always been known as an extraordinary
synthesizer of the work going on in prehistory. His comprehension of the
latest techniques was uncanny. In one conversation with the great
geochronologist, Garniss Curtis, I was left far in the dust as these two
senior scientists traded thoughts and gossip on the latest goings-on in the
field. All of Desmond s many former graduate students reported in
regularly with him from all over the globe. It was remarkable.
Ever a great oarsman, rowing was one of Desmond s passions. Relative
to the behavior of hippos in the Zambezi River (he d just told me of how a
crafty, silent crocodile had eyed his infant son, John, once at a riverside
picnic in Livingstone), Desmond said, "Generally not a problem. There was
one old hippo who used to like to watch us row. We d be out in a lightship
four. If the hippo came too closefor a better viewI d say, "Give it
ten, chaps!" and we d pull well away."
Desmond s stories are celebrated far and wide. His description of
trying to ride camels to Adrar Bous, for example, in a distant corner of
Niger captures all the pain and humor of the expedition. He had hundreds of
such stories and observations and remembrances, and, fortunately, many of
those have now been recorded for posterity.
Desmond was the recipient of an QBE for his work in the creation of
the museum and library in Livingstone and for his work in the founding of
the Victoria Falls Trust, and many other projects. Later he received the
CBE. Having moved to the United States in 1961 after twenty-four years in
Africa, he disqualified himself from receiving a knighthood. Clearly this
was a man whose devotion to his work with and for the people of Africa most
especially deserved that honor from his beloved England. Desmond s sense
of the post-colonial world - with all of its storm and stress - was
thoughtful and patient but never patronizing. His concern for the people
of Africa was intense. To the end, he pondered the future of mankind as he
continued, of course, to intently study the origins of our species, its
prehistory, its evolution, and its migrations.
This was a remarkable experience for me, and I m deeply thankful to
Desmond and his patient wife, Betty, and to ROHO and to the Leakey
Foundation for making it possible.
Tim Troy, Interviewer
February 2002
Xll
Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 The Bancroft Library
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
(Please write clearly. Use black ink.)
Your full name ^"oV^ ~&e.,v^Qf\*L C.W"k.
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SIGNATUE DATE:
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John Desmond Clark
Born: April 10, 1916 in London
Occupation: anthropology educator
Source: The Complete Marquis Who s Who .
Marquis Who s
Who, 1999.
Immigration: came to U.S., 1961, naturalized 1993; Family: s. Thomas
John Chown and Catherine (Wynne) C.; m. Betty C.-ble Baume, Apr. 30,
1938; children: Elizabeth Ann (Mrs. David Miall Winterbottom), John
Wynne Desmond. Education: B.A. Hons, Cambridge U., 1937; M.A.,
Cambridge U., 1942; Ph.D., Cambridge U., 1950; Sc.D., Cambridge U.,
1974; Sc.D. (hon.), U. Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1985; Sc.D. (hon.),
U. Cape Town, 1985 .
Civil/Military Service: Served with Brit. Army,
1941-46. Memberships: Fellow AAAS, Brit. Acad. (Grahame Clark medal
for prehistory 1997), Royal Soc. South Africa, Soc. Antiquaries London
(Gold medal 1985); mem. NAS, Am. Anthropol. Assn. (disting. lectr. 1992,
emeritus prof, of yr. 1996, L.S.B. Leakey Found, prize, 1996), Pan-African
Congress Prehistory, Geog. Soc. Lisbon, Institute Italiano di Preistoria e
Protostoria, Body Corporate Livingstone Mus., Deuschen Archaologischen
Instituts (corr. mem.). Addresses: Office, U Calif, Dept Anthropology,
Berkeley, CA, 94720-0001 .
Decorated comdr. Order Brit. Empire; comdr. Nat. Order Senegal; recipient
Huxley medal Royal Anthrop. Inst., London, 1974, Ad personam internat.
Gold Mercury award Addis Ababa, 1982, Berkeley citation U, Calif. r 1986,
Fellows medal Calif. Acad. Scis., 1987, Gold medal of Am. Archaeol. Inst.,
1989.
Positions Held: prof, emeritus, U. Calif., 1986-; prof, anthropology, U.
Calif., Berkeley, 1961-86; Dir., Rhodes-Livingstone Mus., No. Rhodesia,
1938-61 . Career-Related: faculty rsch. lectr. U. Calif., 1979; Raymond
Dart lectr. Inst. for Study of Man, Africa, 1979; Sir Mortimer Wheeler lectr.
Brit. Acad., 1981; J.D. Mulvaney lectr. Australian Nat. U., 1990.
Author: The Stone Age Cultures of Northern Rhodesia, 1950, The
Prehistoric Cultures of the Horn of Africa, 1954, The Prehistory of Southern
Africa, 1959, Prehistoric Cultures of Northeast Angola, 1963, Distribution of
Prehistoric Culture in Angola, 1966, The Atlas of African Prehistory, 1967,
Kalambo Falls Prehistoric Site, Vol. I, 1969, Vol. II, 1974, The Prehistory of
Africa, 1970; editor: Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. I, 1982, (with G.R.
Sharma) Palaeo environment and Prehistory in the Middle Son Valley
Madhya Pradesh, North Central India, 1983, (with S.A. Brandt) The Causes
and Consequences of Food Production in Africa, 1984, Cultural Beginnings:
Approaches to Understanding Early Hominid Life-ways in the African
Savanna, 1991; contbr. articles to profl. jours.
Biographic Information J. Desmond Clark
Bornt London, England, 10th April, 1916.
Educated t Monkton Comoe School and Christ s College, Cambridge.
Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos i
1937 B.A. Honours with Bachelor Scholarship and College Prize.
1942 M.A.
1950 Ph.D.
1975 Sc.D.
Positions held;
1937-1961 - Director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, Northern
Rhodesia (now Zambia).
1950-19 ,1 - Founder Member and Secretary of the Northern Rhodesia
National Monuments Commission; after 1961 Honorary
Member of the Commission.
Secretary of the Victoria Falls Conservancy.
1961 - - Professor of Anthropology, University of California,
Berkeley.
Curator of Palaeolithic archaeology, Lowie Museum of
Anthropology, Berkeley.
1974-1975 - Chairman, Advisory Committee, Lowie Museum of Anthropology
War service - 1941-1946 in Ethiopia, Madagascar and the Somalilands.
Honours <
- Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 1960
Commandeur de 1 Ordre national de Senegal, 1967.
Huxley Medal, Royal Anthropological Institute, London, 197
Hon. Sc.D. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,!
Kon.Sc.D. University of Cape Town, South Africa, 1985.
Gold medal of the Society of Antiquaries, London, 1985,
Berkeley Citation, University of California, 1986.
-WS lp
Foreign Associate, National Academy of Sciences, 1986.
Fellow of the British Academy, 1961.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Royal Society of South Africa.
Society of Antiquaries, London.
California Academy of Sciences.
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
South African Association for the Advancement of Science.
Membre d honneur de 1* Association Senegalaise pour 1* etude du
Quaternaire ouest africain (Asequa).
Honorary Corresponding Member of the Geographical Society of Lisbon. -.
::
Fellow or Member of more than twenty other learned societies and
subscriber to fourteen additional journals dealing with prehistory and
related subjects in the .United States, Africa and Europe* . .
International Congresses t .
, ..
Pan-African Congress on Prehistory and Quaternary Studies -.
Member of the Council, 1955 to present.
Organising Secretary of the Illrd Congress, 1955 and co-editor of
its Proceedings, 1957.
XV J.Desmond Clark
International Congresses, continued.
Vice-President of the Pan-African Congress, 1959.
:hairman, Section 3, Prehistoric Archaeology, 1963, 67, 71, 77.
Chairman of Committee on the Atlas of African Prehistorv, 1963 to
present.
Member of the Commission on Nomenclature and joint editor of the
bulletin issued from the Berkeley Office of the Commission with
the aid of a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
IXth
QTc
ternational Con9 ress of Pre- and Protohistoric Sciences, Nice
1976 and co-opted Member of the Permanent Council (UISPP).
Premier Congres international de Paleontologie humaine, Nice, 1982-
Member of the Permanent Council.
Other societies r
1950
1955
1967-8
1971
Awardst
1963-4
1969
1971-2
1974
1975-6
1975
1979
1979
1981
1982
1982
President of the South African Archaeological Society.
ssident of the South African Museums Association.
Chairman, African Studies Committee, Berkeley.
institute
FranCiSC ChaPter f th6 ",lo B ic.l
oH f California, Berkeley.
Hovard Shaw Lecturer, Bryn Mawr.
Guggenheim Research Fellow.
FLI
L
Cpntp
6r
; ^R1 Anthrpological Institute, London.
S?anforo*
r Advanced Study i the Behavioural Sciences,
Leakey Memorial Lecturer, Philadelphia.
Lcturer Academy
Grants-in-aidi
Near Eastern Center, on*, grant (or research in Syria. 19M .
* Se Ch Jndia. 1980.
"
Wenner-Gren Foundation grants to aid!
o a
Archaeological research in Africa
Pub rca.
Publication of the Atlas of African p^.ki
rcan p^.ki
and Donald Crabtree.
n stone-vorking vith Francois Bordes
.
Running the Berkeley Office of the n, ~t
Pan-African Congress on Prehistorv
S1On n Nomen<=lature of the
Computer analysis of data for Voi TTT * m.
Site. Vol. Ill of The Kalambp Falls
1
xv i
J.Desmond Clark
Grants-in-aid - continued:
UISP? grant to prepare a new edition of the Atlas of African Prehistory
and to establish a central registry of African sites.
Editorships, Editorial Boards and Scientific Institutions i
Editor: 1938-1961 The Occasional Papers of the Rhodes-Livingstone
Museum.
1960-1961 The Robins series of works on Central Africa.
1972-1982 Volume I, The Cambridge History of Africa.
1980-1983 With Steven A.Brandt: From Hunters to Farmers t The
causes and consequences of domestication in Africa.
California University Press, Berkeley.
Editorial Boards: Quaternaria. Rome, until its demise in 1984.
West African Journal of Archaeology, 1972-77;
advisory board, 1978 to present. ;
Paleorient, Paris, Scientific board, 1973- present. .
African Studies Journal, UCLA.
Palaeoecology of Africa, Bloemfontein, O.F.S. 1981 - .
present.
Journal of African History, London, 1963-1975.
Advances in World Archaeology, advisory board, 1980 -
present.
Membre du Comite de Patronage, Nouvelle ecole. Paris
Foreign member of the Comite de Perfectionnement de 1 Institut de
Paleontologie humaine, Paris, 1983 - present.
"
Member of the Reading Committee, 1 Anthropologie, Paris, 1982 - present.
Member of the Steering Committee for the Exhibition of fossil hominids .
Ancestors, New York Natural History Museum, 1982-84. ;,..
Member of the Science and Grants Committee, L. S.B.Leakey Foundation for -..
research related to human origins, behavior and survival* 1980 -
present. ..
Member of the Grants and Fellowships Committee, Foundation for Research
into the Origins of Man, 1983-84.
Member of advisory International Scientific Committee for Archeo, Rome, !
1985.
Scientific Associate of the Institute of Human Origins, Berkeley.
Consultant for the exhibit Life through time for the California Academy
of sciences.
Fieldworki
From 1938 to the present, archaeological fieldwork with publication has
been carried out ini -
Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Nyasaland (now Malawi) 1938-67, 1968, 1972. ...
V
The Somalilands, 1943, 1944-46.
Ethiopia, 1944-46, 1974, 75, 77, 78, 1981, 1982.
Angola, 1959, 1960, 1963, 1968.
South Africa, 1938-1961, 1962, 1966, 1979, 1985.
xvii J.Desmond Clark
Fieldvork, continued.
Syria, 1964, 1965.
Sudan, 1972-73.
Tanzania, 1966.
Air, TeViere, Republique du Niger, 1970.
Mauretanian Adrar, December 1967 (Vlth Pan-African Congress).
Madhya Pradesh, Central India, 1980, 81, 82, 83.
1968, UNESCO consultant on the organisation of an Antiquities Departmen
for Malawi.
1972 Led UNESCO Mission to train archaeological students in Malawi.
1982 Invited by the Department of Archaeology, Seoul National Universi
and the Government Department of Cultural Properties to visit
Korea and advise on Lower Palaeolithic sites there, in
particular Chongokni.
Adviser on Archaeology fort
Dundo Museum, Angola, 1951-1970.
The film In the Beginning made by the Northern Rhodesia Information
Department, 1960.
The film Nuclear fingerprinting of ancient pottery, made by the Lawreno
Berkeley Laboratory.
The films by University Extension Media Film Unit, Berkeley -
"A tale of two rivers"
(Dordogne), 1972.
"Early stone tools" and "Blades and blade tools", 1965.
The unabridged edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English
Language, 1984*
Publications i
Author or co-author of eighteen books on African and Indian
Prehistory and of more than 260 papers in learned journals in the
United States, Europe, Africa and elsewhere.
.
INTERVIEW WITH J. DESMOND CLARK
I EARLY YEARS AND EDUCATION IN ENGLAND
Chiltern Hills Boyhood. Family
Troy: It s March 3, and we re recording with Dr. Desmond Clark here at
his home in Berkeley. Today I thought what we could do is talk
about your boyhood in England, in the Chiltern Hills.
Was your town on the Thames?
Clark: We weren t actually in a town at all. We were up in the hills
about eight and a half miles from Henley-on-Thames, which was the
nearest sort of largish town, where a regatta, of course, is held
at the beginning of July every year, to which we used to go, of
course, for a number of years. And a little town called
Watlington on the other side, on the bottom of the escarpment.
Where we were was just below the crest of the Chiltern Hills.
It was a fairly large parish, the parish of Turville, which
had North End, South End, Turville Heath, Summers Heath, I think.
We lived at North End. The family, which consisted of my father,
my mother, and myself, came out in 1919, I think it was, or 1920.
Troy: You were born in 16.
Clark: I was born in 16. They lived in London for a time. Whether they
actually lived in my grandfather s house, I m not certain. My
father s father. But they must have for a time at any rate, I
think. And then they moved around northern London, Finchley and
places like that. My birth certificate I think says Colder s
Green, which is a suburb of north London.
My grandfather had quite a biggish house in Finchley, which is
where my father, of course, grew up. My grandfather was a chemist
who started a pharmaceutical business called Clark s Glycola,
which went on for years, and indeed finally, after my father died,
was bought by someone, I think his name was Smith, and it is still
sold in Boots, the chemists in England.
Troy: And it s a cosmetic cream?
Clark: A cosmetic cream, yes. We used it for years, in the family.
My father was trained as an electrical engineer at Faraday
House, but then, of course, the war came along, and he was called
up. He went to Queens College, Cambridge, to be instructed in how
to fight and so on, and then went out as a second lieutenant, I
suppose, I think, to the Somme. He wasn t there very long before
he got wounded and was fortunate enough to manage to get back home
to England. For a time he was convalescing in a big house,
Farmborough House in Hampshire, I think, which was owned by the
Empress Eugenie, the widow of Napoleon III. Then I think the war
came to an end. Otherwise, he would have to have gone back again,
of course.
Troy: Do you remember seeing him in uniform?
Clark: Not really. I must have somewhere a photograph of him in uniform,
I think, yes. For quite a long time, we had various things
including his sword in the house.
And then- -is this sort of thing relevant to you?
Troy: This is all relevant, Desmond, because eventually, we re going to
be talking about your Second World War experiences , and I think
that any son whose father had been in the service, there s
connections there. So this is good.
Clark: Yes. I suppose my earliest memory of my father s father, my
grandfather, is sitting on his knee down in the house in Finchley
in what was called the billiard room, in which he had built at one
end an organ. He had a longish beard. He d had a strokecan t
have been all that old, somewhere nearer on the seventy side of
sixty or something like that.
After the war, my father was persuaded by the family to take
on the Glycola business, which he did until he died. But
gradually he decided not to sort of advertise, which was a great
mistake, I think, because other people came along, and then there
it was. And I think he probably ended up by putting more money
into it than he got out of it. But at any rate, that was that.
We lived in the Chiltern Hills, surrounded by beechwoods,
first of all in a housemost of these houses were sort of
converted cottages of one kind or anothercalled The Hut, which
Troy:
Clark:
had some beautiful 18th-century iron railing around the front of
it, which had come from someplace in London. That was rented.
And then we moved to two cottages, sort of thrown into one, very
nice. Probably early 18th-century, I think they were.
I remember playing there and somebody bringing me bird s eggs
--which is not a good thing, searching for birds nests. Being
generally sort of introduced to the animals, vegetation, and so
on. Outside the gardenwhich was surrounded by a beautiful thorn
fence made of what do you call it? Mayflower?--it was common land,
which at that time was covered with gorse, and the grass was
regularly chewed up by sheepkept it nice and short. It was
great. I generally enjoyed learning about what life was like, and
this was Buckinghamshire, at the beginning of the century.
My father had one or two curious sorts of cars around about
that time. He used to go up to London probably four days of the
week. The rest of the time, he developed the house. They moved
later to a larger house with more space. I suppose he must have
had about, I don t know, two and a half acres, or maybe three
acres, something like that, called Northend House,
where we grew up. It was great fun.
You re the oldest.
That s really
I was the oldest, yes. By that time, I had both a brother and a
sister, and the three of us played regularly among ourselves.
Walks down the woods and all that kind of thing. And one would go
from time to time to people in other houses around for tea, or at
Christmas, that kind of thing, which was great fun. But for the
rest of the time, we essentially looked after ourselves. Various
nephews and nieces and so on would come and stay together after
with their parents as well, which was good. To begin with, I had
nursemaids .
Troy: As you grew up you were becoming really a naturalist in a way, it
sounds like.
Clark: Yes. We were well up with all the local animals and so on. You
used to go and see the local people going out on Sunday with their
ferrets rabbiting on the common, which of course is a right that
went back for a very long time.
Siblings
Troy: I wanted to ask you a bit more about your siblings. Who were
they, and their names?
Clark: There was my brother, whose name was Michael- -far and away, I
think, the more intelligent of us. Michael and my sister Moira,
who is about six years younger than I am. Moira married an
elderly army man, Colonel Colson.
Troy: And Michael s older than you, or younger?
Clark: Younger, I should think perhaps four years younger than I was. He
did well at school, went on to Cambridge to Christ s College,
where I had been. I think he got his degree in two years. Then
the war was on, you see, and he joined the Royal Ulster Fusiliers
and was in North Africa, and over to Sicily, where he got an MC, a
military cross.
Troy: What had he studied at Cambridge, Desmond, do you remember?
Clark: Yes, he studied law. He was going to be a lawyer, and 1 think he
would have been a very good one as well. [becoming emotional]
He was killed at Monte Cassino. I could never quite
understand why, with the advance on Rome, they tried to take this
almost untakeable monastery stuck up on a mountaintop. I don t
see why they couldn t easily have gone around the thing.
Troy: He had landed in Sicily?
Clark: He went through the Sicily campaign, yes.
Troy: Was he an officer?
Clark: Yes, a first lieutenant, I think, yes.
Troy: When did you find out about it, Desmond?
Clark: Let s see, when would it have been? I think he must have been
killed in late 42 or early 43.
Troy: And you were in Somaliland?
Clark: Yes, I would have been in Somaliland. I heard about it through, I
think, my father writing to me.
Troy: Had your brother gone to Monkton?
Clark: Yes, he was at the junior school at Monkton when I was at the
senior school. I would go and see him. Sunday afternoon, we were
free, and I would climb the hill and meet him. We d walk around
and so on up on Combe Down.
Troy: He probably looked up to you.
Clark: I don t know. I suppose perhaps, yes. He was good. He wrote a
diary, and I haven t really had a chance to look at it properly.
It came to my mother, and then my sister had it. I think she gave
it to the Royal Ulster Fusiliers archives.
Troy: And this was a diary he had kept during the military campaign?
Clark: I think he kept it actually right from the days when he was still
a schoolboy up in the Chilterns . That was my recollection. I
really want to try to dig that out, find out where that is.
Yes, Michael was a great guydefinitely the best of us.
Troy: Why do you say that?
Clark: I don t quite know. That s my opinion, and I think it was
probably the opinion of my father as well.
Troy: What about your sister Moira? Is she still with us?
Clark: Oh, she is indeed, yes, and she phones up fairly regularly, and I
always stay with her when I go to England. I ll be seeing her
again in the end of June. She lives in a little village about
thirty-five miles east of Cambridge on the Cambridge-Colchester
Road- -very convenient. She never went to the university. What
she did to start off with--and then the war came alongshe went
to read agriculture or dairying or something like that at Reading
University. Then in due course she married this man, more
elderly, nice chap, but fairly spineless, I would have said. They
proceeded over the years to have six children, I think. [counting
names] Six children, no, seven. They ve all done reasonably
well.
She had a very difficult time, apparently. She had been a
primary school teacher, but she was left with virtually nothing to
live on. What really kept her going, I suppose, was the fact that
my aunt had left her two-thirds of her estateand she left me
one- third, because I was better off. With the bank as trustees of
that, she had funding coming in.
Troy: Her husband passed away and she had all these kids.
Clark: Yes, exactly. And he was ill for two or three years at least. So
she had, I think, a very difficult time of it.
Troy: She s doing well now?
Clark: Yes. She has a very happy disposition. She sees her children
regularly. [emotional again] She really holds the family
together, you see what I mean? In much the same way that my
mother used to hold the family together, tell us what the nieces
and nephews and the rest of it, aunts and uncles, were doing.
She s superb on that. She has remained religious. She did a lot
for the church there.
Troy: Did any of her children become archaeologists or anthropologists?
Clark: No. One granddaughter was going to become an archaeologist, I
think, or is still very interested in it, but then she got
married, do you see what I mean? Had a couple of children. That
fixed that. But some of them come over here from time to time.
Yes, it s a very nice family.
Preparatory Schools . Rowing
Clark: I was told that I was somewhat uncontrollable. I must have been
one of these kind of people that today you would give some, I
forget what that pill is that s around which is recently not
recommended at all [Ritalin]. [laughs] I seem to remember I used
to do things like throwing fresh linen out of the window, or that
kind of thing. I had somebody to look after me who was the
daughter of a parson up in Yorkshire, a delightful person. My
brother was just born, I think.
At any rate, after once having been held over the water butt
by the gardenerto whom I must have done something dreadful, I
was not put into the water butt, fortunately- -the family decided
that perhaps I should go to school. So when I was six and a half,
which I think is far too young, I went to boarding school, halfway
across England, a place called Portishead, which was on the Severn
estuary, not all that far from Bristol. Small private school,
preparatory school, which I quite enjoyed,
reputation.
It had a good
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
I was there for maybe four years or something. The headmaster
died, I think about a year and a half after I got there. Somebody
else and his wife took it over who weren t frightfully good.
Eventually the family decided I wasn t learning anything. So I
then went to a preparatory school at Swanborne, which was close to
Bletchley in Buckinghamshire. Swanborne was a preparatory school
for- -damn it, can t remember. At any rate, there one started to
learn, and one started to prepare for Common Entrance Exam, I
think it was called.
Then the family looked around and decided to send me to a
small public school, called Monkton Combe. This was an
evangelical school, because my mother and her family--my mother s
family well, first of all they came from Wales with Cromwell.
The man who started the Irish branch of the family- -his name was
Wynnewas one of Cromwell s major generals, probably a very
disliked person by the Irish, I have no doubt at all. They were
fairlyvery tolerant people, but they were also, of course,
Orange men.
The religious side of my family was essentially Low Church, to
counteract, of course, the Catholicism that there was all over
Ireland. And Monkton Combe was also interdenominational and so
on. Not that they had too many Roman Catholics there. It was a
religious school. It was started for the sons of missionaries.
Anglican.
Anglican, essentially. But they didn t have to be Anglicans to go
there. Yes, I think that you would say the family were really
deeply religious.
Both your dad and your mother, would you say?
Well, yes. My mother certainly believed in the afterlife and so
on, that she would see my father. My father, I don t know to what
extent he was a fundamentalist and believed in, you know, Genesis
and that, but that s the way I was brought up. And I suppose you
could have called me a fundamentalist at that time.
At any rate, I enjoyed Monkton Combe. It was a good school.
I learned to row there, and we actually got into the semifinals of
the Lady s Plate the second year that I rowed at Henley, which was
quite an achievement in those days, because you were racing
against university college crews.
Troy: Was Monkton Combe on the Thames?
Clark: No, Monkton Combe was on the Avon. We had about a mile and a
half, I think it was, of somewhat sluggish water. We used to look
after our boats, of course.
Then we stayed for about two weeks or so in Henley, or around
outside, and the family would always come down, and on occasion,
we would have some of the crew to stay, or meals, and so on, which
was great fun.
Troy: Now, you were nearly a teenager by that time?
Clark: Yes, that s right. I enjoyed rowing, I enjoyed rugger, I enjoyed
to a certain extent walking. I hated cross country runs, which we
had. I was in the OTC, which is called the Officers Training
Corps, and learned how to use the Lee Enfield 303 rifle.
In those days, and probably still, to some extent, you had to,
as it were, decide whether you were going to go into the classical
side of academia or the modern side, as it was called, which
includes mathematics and physics and chemistry and that thing. If
you go into the classic side, which is the one that I did, you
don t do any of that at all, which was a great mistake, I think.
But I greatly enjoyed history. I also took Latin and Greek as
well, and what else? Oh, there were various things to do with
Scripture and such. At any rate, I did well in history, poorly in
classics.
Cambridge Years , Introduction to Archaeology and Anthropology
Clark: And then I went to Christ s College, Cambridge. I thoroughly
enjoyed Cambridge. That s where one began to realize that one had
a mind of one s own, rather than accept what one was told by
people. And of course, to some extent, I would, as it were,
question my father on some statement of his, which would annoy him
intensely. Understandably.
Troy: These would be evangelical statements or church statements, or
historical things that he d make that you d comment on?
Clark: Probably, I can t remember. But he was a great man. He was a
great useful man. He produced a superb garden, he ran hens, kept
horses. He bred Irish wolfhounds for a time, which was great. We
thoroughly enjoyed our time there.
Troy: And you had some interest in history even then, didn t you, when
you were a boy?
Clark: Oh, yes. And this, of course, was nurtured by my father taking me
to castles and cathedrals and so on. I remember going to some
castle in Anglesey [Beaumoris s Castle]. I can t think of what
its name was now, but they had just discovered the old loos, which
was great fun. Cathedrals and so on, particularly where kings
would have been buried, like Gloucester and so on.
I used to take photographs. In some school race, I won one of
those box camera things, and we would take photographs with that.
Inside you just had a time thing. You d lift it up. They would
mostly come out extremely well, which kept me very interested.
I was particularly interested in, I suppose, political
history, political-social history and so on, rather than economic
history or constitutional history. When I went to Cambridge, of
course, I went to read history, and one had a lot of
constitutional history. You had political thought, you had also
European political history, which was a major sort of thing when
you think of all of it, including Byzantium and so on. And a few
extra ones as well. I didn t do all that well in that. I think I
got 2/2.
I discovered that to be a good historian, you ve got to be
able to write sufficiently dramatic English, which I was not good
at--when it came to factual data and so on, I was okay--as well as
reading the sort of dog Latin or the medieval French which we had
for all the parliamentary things until you actually finally got to
English. So I switched to archaeology and anthropology, which I
really enjoyed. I ve always been interested, of course, in
medieval archaeology and Roman-Britain in particular. And when I
got to Arch and Anth I met Miles Burkitt, who was the very first
teacher in Britain of Paleolithic archaeology in Cambridge in
1919. I enjoyed him very much.
Troy: You d seen some Roman ruins and walls and that kind of thing as a
boy, is that right?
Clark: Yes indeed, and I used to go and look at Silchester. Silchester
was a great Roman town which- -
Troy: How do you spell that?
Clark: [spells] Anything that is called "something-chester," 99 times
out of 100, you can reckon that it was a Roman town of some sort.
Silchester was north, getting on from northern Buckinghamshire,
but it had never been built over, surprisingly enough. There were
10
walls all the way round it, and the amphitheater, et cetera. It
had been excavated, but not very well, in the early years of the
century.
Troy: Before Burkitt, before that generation?
Clark: Oh, yes, yes. There were a lot of interesting things found inside
Silchester. There was Roman pottery and pieces of glass lying all
over the place inside, and we used to go along and collect some of
this. I had a mounting little collection of odds and ends from
here, there, and everywhere, in a cupboard in my room back at
home, which I greatly enjoyed.
Where do we go from there? Oh, yes, that s right, through
Arch and Anth: that s really where I got interested in
archaeology. There had come, I think the year before, Grahame
Clark, or Sir Grahame Clark as he later was, who was a great
teacher. Miles Burkitt was also a good teacher, but he was not a
good field man. But he visited so many of these sites, he knew a
large number of the people who were responsible in discovering
them or opening them up and so on, Count Begouen and those famous
sites of Trois Freres and Le Tuc d Audoubert in the Pyrenees and
so on.
Burkitt knew the man who had discovered Altamira, he knew a
whole lot of them. He d got all these stories which made his
tutorials, and his lectures, so extremely interesting. Louis
Leakey was one of his students. And that s where I first met
Louis in 1937.
Troy: Leakey came and lectured on his early work at Olduvai?
Clark: On his early work in Olduvai Gorge. And he brought casts of his
artifacts as well, I remember this. That s the first time I met
him.
Troy: Well, 37, you were almost finishing up at Cambridge at that
point.
Clark: I was, yes, exactly. And I did better than I, I suppose, had
hoped: I got a first in that. I was given what was called a
Bachelor s Scholarship by my college, a very small amount of
money, I think, and variousthe college prize, which consisted of
various books which had the college arms stamped on it, of which I
have most of them, I think, still with me.
Troy: And these would be books on history and anthro and archaeology?
11
Clark: Books that I chose. One was the shorter Oxford, which now is out
in a little cabin that we have. It is valuable getting a bit
battered now.
Troy: The cabin, or the shorter Oxford?
Clark: The shorter Oxford. [laughs] Cabin to some extent, I suppose, as
well.
Troy: Where is your cabin?
Clark: It s out at Inverness Park.
The Bible, to be read as literature, was one. And the other
may have been H. G. Wells History of the World, isn t it? I
think so, yes. Remarkable book, 1927, I think it was.
12
II GOING OUT TO AFRICA
Job -Hunting
Clark: At any rate, then one had to sit down and think about what one
was --where could one go. Because I had to have a job. My father
had supported me in Cambridge, and it was now my time to. So I
looked around. There were variousyou wrote to someplace which
had a curious name, rather like it always reminded me of Fagin.
You know Fagin, the Jewish chap in Oliver Twist? That s what the
name sounded like.
What you did is you wrote to them and said, "I want a job in
this and that," and they would send you information about where
jobs were. One of them was the Salisbury and Wilts [Wiltshire]
Museum in Salisbury. Nice museum, Salisbury s a nice place--my
daughter went to school there laterand I liked the man as well.
The salary they were offering was 135 a year, and you were
expected to find the rest of it yourself. I didn t get that job;
a local man got it. I suppose I was pleased that I didn t.
The other one that I applied for was Norwich, and there there
was another man, a local lad made good, also an archaeologist from
Cambridge, Rainbird Clark. He got that job, and quite rightly so.
The next one was the British Museum, and I thought I might get
that. That would have been a good job, and that would have paid
you a salary that you could have lived on. But I didn t get it.
Almost the only question that I was asked was, "What do you know
about Byzantine ceramics and archaeology?" My reply to that one
was, "Not a great deal," and I didn t get that job. I think it
was also lined up for somebody, probably from Oxford. So I was
never more grateful I never got that job, because I would be dead
by now if I had. [laughter]
And then out of the blue there came this offer straight from
the governor of Northern Rhodesia offering a job of secretary for
13
a new anthropological institute, the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute,
which he had founded, and curator of the David Livingstone
Memorial Museum, which he d started about one year or two years
before, with odd collections. He had a good basic collection of
ethnographic material, and he was interested in maps.
Troy: And what was this fellow s name? Do you remember?
Clark: This was Sir Hubert Young. He was the governor of Northern
Rhodesia. A good scholar. And he was obviously very interested
in this. The reason, I think, the institute and the museum were
founded was that they were housed in old government buildings in
Livingstone, which had been the capital up until 1935, and the
capital was then moved to a more central position at Lusaka. They
had all these government buildings and houses in Livingstone, and
they didn t quite know what to do with them.
So that s where we came into it. They wanted me to go out
there as soon as possible, and I said yes. This was a contract,
400 a year, plus a house and basic furniture. That seemed very
good.
The Trip Out
Clark: I went out on the 17th of December from Tilbury by Intermediate
Union Castle Steamship Company boat, the Llanstephan Castle.
Troy: What was the first part of that name?
Clark: Llanstephan. It s a fine castle in Wales, actually--! saw it
later on. The boat was getting a bit old. Had Christmas on
board. I was frightfully seasick going through the Bay of Biscay,
but I recovered.
Troy: And a little homesick? I mean, this was your first time away from
England.
Clark: Possibly, I think, yes.
Before I left I really had to find out where Northern Rhodesia
was on a map. And I always remember my mother saying, "Ah, dear,
but it s only for three years. And think of the experience."
[ laughs ]
So I got out there. We called in at Las Palmas in the Grand
Canary. We called in at St. Helena, you know, where Napoleon was
14
incarcerated and he died. And we landed in Cape Town. In Cape
Town, you got on a train, South African Railways, Rhodesian
Railways , which took three and a half days to get from Cape Town
up to Livingstone. But it stopped in Bulawayo, which was the
second largest town in what s now Zimbabwe. That was Southern
Rhodesia. And the governor, who was also traveling on that train
with his own coach, asked to see me. So I went along there, and
we chatted and got on quite well. He played chess, not very well,
but fortunately, he played chess better than I did. He won most
of the games, I think.
So I was there just about until we got to Livingstone. We got
to Livingstone, it was nighttime, probably round about six-
something or so. And what I remember in particular, all the
lights of the little station, was the magnificent scent of the
flowers. Do you know a jungle flower called frangipani?
Troy: I ve read that name.
Clark: Yes. Frangipanis, and some red ones, and of course, the bauhinia
as wellall indigenous, magnificent, superb.
Troy: Was it a hot night when you got off the train?
Clark: It was a hot night. Indeed it was a hot night. Livingstone was a
hot place. Except in June and July, when we actually had fires,
or a fire in the living room, which was great fun. And some of
the finest climate in the world in those two months. And I
enjoyed it very much. [becomes emotional]
The Others There
Troy: When you were in Cape Town, did you meet anyone there who was in
archaeology when you first got there?
Clark: No, I don t think I did the very first time. The only person
there was John Goodwin, and he was away at that time. He may have
been excavating somewhere, I think. But he wasn t there, so I
came straight up. I saw quite a lot of him, of course, in later
years.
The nearest person who was in archaeology, an amateur
archaeologist, I suppose you could say, turned professional
eventually, was a man called Neville Jones, who had been a
missionary in Southern Rhodesia around Bulawayo, a place called
Hope Fountain Mission. He was a Baptist, I think it was. He got
15
interested in archaeology. But he was further down in South
Africa.
He collected artifacts from the Victoria Falls, which of
course is only six miles away from Livingstone. I met him, oh,
after I had been there for a few months. It was a great joy
seeing him. Curious. He looked somehow like a missionary, I
think rather. But he was very keen on his archaeology, and at
that time he had just been appointed as archaeologist-ethnographer
at the Bulawayo Museum, which was the major museum in the country.
So I saw quite a bit of him; we would invite him up, so he d come
and stay with us, and we d walk around the Victoria Falls.
The interesting thing about that was, of course, that the
falls, which are a mile and a quarter wide at the present line,
had worked their way back through old fault lines and shatter
belts for about sixty miles. There was sixty miles of gorges.
The most recent of these, which went down to the fifth gorge, had
old terraced gravels and river bed gravels exposed on the spurs
that were left after the river had cut its way back to the present
line. So it was possible to estimate by looking to see what
artifacts were there, that had been abraded and rolled in the
stream, how long it had taken to cut back. It took quite a long
time.
Most of my work to begin with, of course, was done around the
Victoria Falls, and I was fortunate that at that time they had cut
a big trench through to make a canal to lead water from the upper
river, so that it could be taken all the way down to the bottom of
the third gorge, I think it was, where they had a hydroelectric
scheme. In the top levels, where they were cutting, there was
archaeology. It was fauna, and these were found in the old river
bed and terraced gravels. I did a lot there.
And then I met Frank Dixey, who was a geologist in Nyasaland
who later came over to start the geology department in Northern
Rhodesia. Later became Sir Frank Dixey, great chap. He was the
geologist who worked with me on the Zambezi gravels and other
deposits, which resulted in the first volume that I did.
A Review of Earlier Excavating Experience
Troy: Now, going back a little bit, you d had, during the Cambridge
years, some actual archaeological excavating experience with Sir
Mortimer Wheeler. Is that right?
16
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Oh, yes. Yes.
Maiden Castle.
I did my field work with Mortimer Wheeler at
Troy:
Clark;
Troy:
Clark:
And what was he like?
Wheeler was just like a brigadier. You know? Had a mustache- -
whether he d been a brigadier in the first war I m not certain,
but he was a brigadier actually in the second, believe it or not.
He was a remarkable man. Great sort of personality. Came from
lowly beginnings, I think, in Yorkshire, but he really developed
archaeology in Britain. Certainly so far as its fine field
techniques are concerned. Of course, they had been started
earlier on by Pitt-Rivers, who was really remarkable. Pitt-Rivers
did superb work.
Pitt-Rivers had been an engineer in the Crimean War and owned
this large estate called Cranborne Chase in Wiltshire where there
was masses of archaeology. And of course, what they were
interested in besides the circles and so on, things like
Stonehenge, et cetera, were all the various different kinds of
barrows and hill forts and all those kinds of things. He did
fantastic work there in the--it would have been the latter part of
the- -I always think now it was the last century, but by god, it s
not! [laughter] You see what I mean? You have to say 19th
century, isn t it?
And Wheeler had studied with Pitt-Rivers?
I don t know whether he had or not. Wheeler s first class of work
was done at a big Roman military camp in Monmouthshire, I think,
called Caerleon. Remarkable work. Then he d worked at St.
Albans, another Roman city. Did terrific work there. Mary
Leakey, I think, worked with him there for one season and didn t
like him. I got on fairly well with him. He was always pretty
critical. He ran the London Museum, and at that time, it was in
Kensington Palace. I worked there for a time when I was waiting
to find a job and so on, which was quite interesting.
The London Museum- -was that a precursor to the British Museum?
Oh, no. The London Museum was entirely separate from the British
Museum. The British Museum had two main parts, you see. The
British Museum in Bloomsbury, which dealt with all the artifacts
and all that kind of thing, and the Natural History Museum in
South Kensington. The London Museum dealt with London
antiquities. Used to have a lot of dresses there of former queens
and so on. A remarkable collection of things, actually. An old
shoe, medieval shoes, and things that had been dug up from here,
there, and everywhere.
17
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
A magnificent collection of chamber pots, which are extremely
interesting. They really started in Elizabethan times, I think:
an eye would be painted on the glazed earthenware at the bottom of
the pot.
An eye looking at you as you went, is that the idea?
That s right, yes, exactly.
Was that to make you feel--?
I don t know about that. [laughter]
But then with the Jacobite rebellion and that kind of thing,
you d have some which would have James II painted on the bottom.
Others would have William III painted on the bottom. I do
remember that. So it went on. That was great.
But that s where I learnt all my field work, the way to
record, survey, and so on, which was invaluable. This was a place
called Maiden Castle, just outside Dorchester. Maiden Castle was
probably one of the largest, most impressive of the late Iron Age
hill forts--a number of banks and ditches and so on, and the
entrance gate where there were a whole lot of the defenders found
buried. Very fine excavation work with all of that. It was taken
by Vespatian at the Roman invasion of Britain from the--I can t
remember what they were called, but the late Celtic people there.
But there was a little Roman temple inside, and there was a
Neolithic bank-and-ditch sort of fort thing inside this huge great
earthwork. Very impressive. Yes, that was good.
And you did several seasons there with Wheeler?
I did about one and a half, yes, that s right. The second season
it rained most of the time; it wasn t so good. Not particularly
satisfactory excavating in the rain, which to certain degrees we
found out again later on in Africa.
More on the Trip Out, and Life in Livingstone
Troy: You had crossed the Equator coming down in the ship. When you
crossed the Equator was there an initiation of some sort?
Clark: Oh, yes, indeed. Father Neptune and his consort and so on, you
know, sat there, and you got ducked in the swimming pool. The
swimming pool was one that was sort of on the deck, if you see
18
what I mean; wasn t let into the deck, it was on the deck. Then
you were given an inscription that saidpossibly I ve even got
that somewhere, I don t know.
And one played deck tennis, with those rope quoits, and
shuffleboard and that kind of thing. I greatly enjoyed it. We
dressed for dinner every evening. The baths--there was fresh
water for washing the face and that kind of thing, but the baths
were always sea water. It was very good. Bunks were reasonable,
and the living rooms were comfortable. Every so often there would
be a fancy dress dance, that kind of thing. It was good. And
Christmas, as I say, was on board.
I enjoyed seeing the Canary Islands, and St. Helena in
particular, and Ascension Island. Good memories of lots of those
things .
Troy: Now, you said that when you got off the train in Livingstone it
was night.
Clark: It was night, and it was during the rains, which come in the
summer. From the end of October, beginning of November, through
to perhaps middle of April, something like that, end of April, we
would get close on six months of rains, with a certain amount of
let-up as well. It tended to rain at night and in the morning,
and then the afternoon would become sunny. I never did play golf,
I never really had time for it, but you could get out and have a
round of golf.
I rowed. We had the little Zambezi Boat Club there which must
have been founded shortly after 1906, 1906 or 1908, when Arnst and
Barry rowed the sculling championship of the world. That was
organized by America, I think- -Arnst came from America. And Barry
was English. I can t even remember who won. Single sculls. I
don t know what they did, mile and a half, something like that, on
the Zambezi, along the Northern Rhodesian side, which is a fine
stretch of reach.
Troy: The Zambezi at that point is the boundary, isn t it?
Clark: The Zambezi is the boundary between Northern and Southern
Rhodesia, or what is now Zambia in the north and Zimbabwe in the
south, yes, that s right.
Troy: Well, the rowing and the ambiance of the place provided a nice
transition for you.
Clark: Oh, it was terrific.
19
Troy: It wasn t as if you were thrown into a completely different world.
Clark: No, exactly. It was totally invaluable. The archaeology was
there, the rowing was there, there were some very interesting
people there. We made excellent friends. In point of fact, one
of the first people we met was Douglas Hall, who was the district
officer at the time. He and his wife were witnesses at Betty s
and my wedding, in 1938. He is still alive, back in England. He
ended up as Sir Douglas Hall and he s ninety-something. He and
his wife took us camping, to introduce us to what there is called
ulendo--in East Africa it is called safariwith tents and walking
and carriers and so on. ^reat fun. We keep in touch. Heard from
him again at Christmas.
Three or four months after I got there, there came the first
of the Rhodes -Livingstone Institute people. I was living, after
the time that they did arrive, in what had been old Government
House, so I was living in sort of luxury, if you see what I mean.
But there it was. It had, of course, only one kitchen in it. I
think the original idea was that three families should live there,
but wives of other people said, "No, not with one kitchen." So we
were all given separate houses.
The director of the institute was Godfrey Wilson, and his wife
was Monica Wilson. They were both social anthropologists. Monica
had been trained at Cambridge. I m not certain about Godfrey. I
think it was Edinburgh. They had been working among the Nakyusa
people in southern Tanzania. They were very dear friends.
Marriage to Betty Baume. and Housing Arrangements
Troy: Betty came out quite quickly after you d arrived.
Clark: Yes. Well, we met in Cambridge. She was reading modern
languages, French and German. We met over one of the numerous
sherry parties the undergraduates used to have in those days in
the rooms of a former school friend of mine who was in Queens
[College]. He was about one of the first six pilots of Spitfires
to be killed in the Second World War. But that s where Betty and
I met, and I succeeded in dropping a glass of sherry down the
dress that she was wearing, which probably wasn t a good thing,
but nevertheless it didn tit wasn t a very good dress either, I
didn t think.
At the end of Cambridge, she did well- -she got a 2/1. She
should have got a first.
20
Troy: A 2/1? And you had gotten a 2/2?
Clark: No, that was in my history. I got a first in the archaeology.
The second sort of class, whatever you like to call it, division,
was a 2/1 and a 2/2, and then a third. That was the tripos, as it
was called, the honors thing.
We were engaged. In fact, she gave me this ring which has
17 / 12/37 on the inside. That was the date when I sailed for
Africa. She came out about three or four months later, and we
were married out there. Married in the district commissioner s
office, registry, office as it were--he was the registrar, amongst
other things. We had an Episcopalian minister, but he was away on
leave, I think it was, at the time. We were married again in the
church after we got back.
Troy: Was it problematic for her when she realized you were going out
and that she would follow? Was there some trepidation?
Clark: Oh, I think she was quite excited about it. No, I don t think she
was hesitant at all. We were very much in love, and there it was.
Troy: Where is her family from in England?
Clark: Her family is from Yorkshire. They came initially, I think, from
Lincolnshire or somewhere like that. Her family name was Baume,
and they were probably Flanders weavers or something of that kind
when they came over. They moved to Yorkshire. Is that right?
Yes, that s right. Mother s family owned a chemical mill, I think
it was. She was born and brought up in west Yorkshire, which was
the sort of the height of the black country, and everything got
black in those days. Dewsbury, Bradford. It s now all been
cleaned upamazing! --back to the original beautiful cream-colored
limestone.
At Cambridge I had a car, which was I think one of the first
square-nosed Morris Oxfords. I bought it for twelve pounds ten, I
think. It was painted green; it was called the Green Dragon. We
used to drive around the Cambridge countryside and so on, looking
at archaeological sites, and sometimes occasionally picking
something up. And I would drive up to Yorkshire to spend
Christmas or whatever it was with her and her family. Memories of
driving up the Al, which was the Great North Road, in the
wintertime. You ve got fog and so on, and you d get about half a
dozen lorries going very slowly on this winding road, wondering
whether you could manage to risk getting by before something comes
in the other direction!
21
Troy: In Livingstone you settled with the other people about who was
going to live where?
Clark: Oh, that s right. Yes. Well, first there was Godfrey and Monica
Wilson. They had another house. And then shortly after, Max
Gluckman came. Max and his wife, who was Italian. What on earth
was her name? Mary, Mary Gluckman. Yes, that s right. We d see
a lot of them. Picnics, you know, usually on weekends, that kind
of thing. We normally did not work on weekends. We would go out
into the countryside. And one learnt a great deal about all sorts
of things, the vegetation and the animals, et cetera. And the
people, I enjoyed.
First Encounters with Tribal People
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
That was your first experience with indigenous people, wasn t it?
Yes. One would not--my family was an extremely tolerant sort of
family, if you see what I mean, no prejudices really. Other than
that we tended to think that Roman Catholics were not good people,
but you can see where that came from. That was that. We had no
experience of black people or anyone else, Jewish people if it
comes to that, until we got to Livingstone. There were a lot of
Jewish people in Livingstone, actually, some extremely nice
people.
Well, Max Gluckman, I m sure, was Jewish.
He was Jewish, yes. He was from South Africa. Yes, of course.
He was a very good social anthropologist. He went to study the
Barotse in what s called Barotseland, that is, the upper Zambezi.
How do you spell that?
It is the land of the Lozi, who used to be called Rozi,
R s and L s are sort of interchangeable. They had a big
[spells]
I think.
paramount chief there. The earlier one, Lewanika, had invited the
British South Africa Company to come in and form an
administration .
Northern Rhodesia consists of two parts, really: northwestern
and northeastern. Most of the northwestern portion is a
protectorate, or was a protectorate, based on Lewanika s influence
in that part of the world. Northeastern Rhodesia was actually,
you might say, taken over. Much of it had slave traders over it,
and there were little skirmishes in various places in Nyasaland
22
and further over into Northern Rhodesia. So that that was a
colony, as it were, rather than a protectorate, and it went right
through to the end.
Troy: You d take these weekend trips, and you were beginning to see
these people for the first time.
Clark: Yes. And we greatly enjoyed seeing the ways in which they did
things. Simple things like cracking nuts, for example. Grinding
maize, or millet. Actually, the grindstones were more essentially
used for millet, whereas the maize was pounded in wooden mortars,
with big long pestles. I would take photographs of all of this,
Troy: What were the people?
Clark: The local people were the Ba Toka. They were a branch of the
Tonga- speaking peoples, who were spread much more widely.
David Livingstone
Clark: And, of course, when we were there, one learned a great deal about
David Livingstone and his discoveryor whatever you like to call
it--of the Victoria Falls. Nobody had been--no Europeanhad of
course been there before he got there in 1855. A good
relationship had been established with David Livingstone s family
by Hubert Young, I think it was. We had followed that one up.
Troy: Were some of David Livingstone s family still in Livingstone?
Clark: No, they were back in Scotland. His eldest son was killed in the
Civil War [American Civil War], I think it was. Yes. Robert was
his name. But we had Livingstone s sketchbook, which was given to
us by his grandson, Dr. Hubert Wilson. Rather, it was loaned to
us in the museum. That and a number of sort of relics of David
Livingstone. Later, we acquired all sorts of rough notebooks and
so on. In 1955, which was the centenary of his discovery of the
falls, we mounted a David Livingstone Memorial Exhibition. We had
a large corrugated iron exhibition hall built for that, which was
very good. We exhibited lots of Livingstone objects and
historical materials.
Troy: If you could meet Livingstone right now, what would you ask him?
What was your sense of this man?
Clark: What would I ask him? Let me think about that for a moment.
23
Troy: Did you have a chance before you went out to Livingstone to do
some research on Livingstone?
Clark: No, not really. No. I knew about him, of course. And the
meeting with Stanley and the rest of it. I went to a number of
places afterwards, Ujiji [in Africa] and Blantyre [in Scotland],
of course, where he came from, and learnt really quite a lot from
that.
What would I ask him? Goodness me. I suppose one of the
things that interested me was how well he acclimatized to the
food. I think that was probably due to the fact that, of course,
what he ate basically in Scotland was porridge, and what Africans
eat in Africa today is a porridge of some kind or another. I
suspect that that was the thing that really--and food would not
have worried him at all. But there are lots of other things one
would like to have asked him.
And of course, initially, he was a fervent missionary, and
latterly, it was the explorer that took over. There was the
famous address he made--I think it was at Oxford, and I think that
it must have been to the British Association for the Advancement
of Science, or it could conceivably have been to the Royal
Geographical Society, he at least talked to both. But at one of
these, the Oxford one, I think, he made the plea for missionaries
to come out and, as it were, civilize the people and open up
Africa. Ar that time he thought the Zambezi was navigable,
because he d skipped the Kebrabasa Rapids, unfortunately.
Troy: And so he thought that people would come up the Zambezi right into
the heartland.
Clark: Right, that s the idea, yes. And Cambridge developed- -well, maybe
it was Oxford and Cambridgethe Universities Mission to Central
Africa. Must have been Oxford and Cambridge. That was
Episcopalian, and that group went out to this Cape Maclear down at
the south end of Lake Tanganyika. Lake Tanganyika, of course, had
Arab slave traders all over it, and the Scottish Missionary
Society later established itself at Livingstonia up in the north
in an isolated plateau that there was overlooking the lake. Must
have been about 8,000 feet, I think.
Troy: Overlooking Lake Tanganyika.
Clark: Overlooking Lake Malawi- -Lake Nyasa, sorry, Lake Nyasa. Did I say
Tanganyika earlier? Cape Maclear is the south end of Lake Nyasa,
or Lake Malawi as it s now called. And they were there, I don t
know, for about three years or so, and then of course the rains
came along, they got malaria, they died. I think they moved to
24
another mission further away from the lake. They died there as
well. The Universities Mission then took itself off to an
isolated island nearer but still within Nyasaland, nearer the
Portuguese, as it then was, Mozambique coast. And that s where
their headquarters is. Built a huge great cathedral there.
Troy: It s still there?
Clark: Well, the headquarters are there. It was, up to the time that I
left. It was mostly rock, I think, really. Dreadful. They must
have moved somewhere else now, must have moved back to Blantyre or
Zomba I would think by now. At any rate, yes, that was that.
Then that flintlock there [points to a flintlock rifle hanging
on the wall] was one of 400 that was brought by the trading arm of
the Scottish Missionary Society to protect themselves against the
Arab slave traders who were all over there.
Troy: All around Lake Nyasa?
Clark: Yes. Then they gradually became peaceful once more. Only to
become unpeaceful more recently.
Troy: David Livingstone going to Livingstone today would be amazed,
wouldn t he?
Clark: I think he would. His grandson came out, Hubert Wilson, and I
knew him quite well, actually. Great man. He d been a missionary
out in the Luangwa Valley for, I don t know, fifteen years or
something. He must have been in his nineties when he died. I
visited him where he lived in Scotland, and together, we visited
Blantyre, Dr. Livingstone s birthplace, saw the mill and so on.
One of David Livingstone s daughters, I think his eldest
daughter [Diana] , married a man called Bruce who was some kind of
a landowner up there [Blantyre] , I think. The daughter
discovered--! think there were three trunks. You know those metal
uniform trunks, as they used to be called, up in the attic. There
was an enormous amount of material there. The red shirt with the
ink marks on it that he was wearing when Stanley met him.
She lent us a lot of this material for the exhibition. One of
the things --you know the photographs of Livingstone wearing a kind
of hat with a peak? Navy blue with a peak? On the inside it had
the maker s name, somewhere in Grafton Street I think it was, and
I remember writing to the firm saying, "Do
you have any
information about this?" "Oh, yes, of course," they said. "We
can make you one if you d like one." So I said, "Yes, do." So
they did. We roughed it up a bit and so on. We made another red
25
shirt when the originals had to go back. And said "copies of,"
which was fun.
Troy: Now, you arrived in 37.
Clark: I got there in 37. I was met by the man, a truly delightful man,
who was a district commissioner, who had been seconded to look
after the museum for a year and to write a museum handbook for the
collections that were there, which was basically ethnographic, and
the maps. Some few bits of historical stuff and so on. His name
was Vernon Brelsford. A delightful man. He had been living in
Government House. We kept in touch for years until he died. He
wrote an excellent handbook, a very valuable handbook.
We kept regularly in touch, particularly through the Northern
Rhodesia Journal, which Vernon edited, and we did all the rest of
it at the museum. Basically my wife did much of the work. We
produced six volumes of that, which I have here. Full of
absolutely fascinating information, much of it accounts from early
people who had been in Northern Rhodesia, travelers and the rest
of it. Stories about bomas, as they were calledthose were the
district officers--! think it s a Portuguese word. And of course,
the women in Northern Rhodesia were always called Donna, not
Memsab. Memsab is essentially east African. Donna, of course, is
Portuguese, because on the one side, there s Angola, and on the
other side, there s Mozambique.
Zambezi Boat Club Lore
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Before we get much further on I want to fill in a bit more about
the rowing on the Zambezi.
I have a tankard from the Zambezi Boat Club, which has a story
attached to it, actually. [gets the tankard] It was after the
war that we got these. We decided that we would write to Garrards
in London to get a decent style of tankard. We had them inscribed
with the arms of the Zambezi Boat Club, which we got the Lord
Lyon, King at Arms, to do for us, and I could tell you what it all
was, but never mind. And then with our name here, and the date
that we joined the club. And that I think is "J. D. Clark, 1938."
That s right, that s what it says.
Yes. These tankards--there were probably, I don t know, seven or
eight of them- -they d hang behind the bar, and when we came in
from rowing, we d be able to have our beer out of them.
26
Well, in due course I left, came over here, and thought no
more about that tankard until, must have been about four years
ago, maybe more, I got a letter from a geologistwe d had some
correspondenceand he said, "You know, I was in Maun in Northern
Botswana, and I was in the hotel there having a drink, and I was
given my drink in a tankard which said, J. D. Clark, Zambezi Boat
Club. "
"Oh," he said, "I know J. D. Clark." And he said to this man,
who was a very nice chap--I ve got his name somewherewho ran the
hotel, he said, "You should send this back to J. D. Clark." "Oh,"
he said, "I won t do that, but if he d like to come out and get
it, I d be very glad to give it to him."
Well, I wrote to this chap in Maun and I said, "I m sending
you another mug," and it crossed with a letter from him saying, "I
don t need another tankard. But," he said, "I would like a copy
of a book of yours "--Human Origins I think it was "and some
reprints, because I m interested in archaeology." So I dug one of
these out- -got it from Zaragoza, actually, found it in a bookshop
there and sent it out to him. It was a product of a symposium
that I had organized at the Mainz UISPP [International Union of
Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences] Congress in oh, I suppose
1987 or something like that.
I got a very interesting letter back from him, corresponded
for a while. He said, "You d be interested to know how I got this
tankard. I was down in Gaberones," which is the capital of
Botswana, of course, "getting in supplies and so on. I went into
the bar there and had a drink and some lunch before setting off up
the road to get back to Maun, and when I came back" he had one of
those vanette things, you know, with an open back "here was this
tankard, and I looked around, absolutely nobody around. So I took
it home. I m sending it over to you."
Troy: So it just appeared in his van? No way of knowing who put it
there.
Clark: All I can think of is that when there was UDI [Unilateral
Declaration of Independence] in Southern Rhodesia, and the war was
going between guerrilas and the government, the Zambezi Boat Club
must have had by that time a few people who were sort of Bolshei
and so on. There may have been movement back and forth across the
Zambezi. It s the only thing that I can think of.
I was delighted to get it back. It s a bit battered, of
course, in places.
Troy: No bullet holes.
27
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Fortunately. But it s a beautiful piece of work.
Pewter.
Yes. It s pewter, yes.
"Regent Street, Garrards."
Yes. Those are the crown jewelers.
Crossed oars here on the seal.
Oh, yes. And the shield has a little flower, a gillie flower,
which is said to be on the arms of the Livingstone family. Then
underneath that is there a V shape?
Yes, there s a V, and crossed oars, and a flowing kind of chevron.
That s on the arms of Zambia. That represents the Zambezi, the
waters of the Zambezi.
And there are three little sailboats.
Yes. Now, those are caravels. A caravel was the first kind of
PortuguesePortuguese and Spanishboat that used lateen sails,
which they, of course, got from the Arabs. And it was caravels
that were used to discover the new world.
Is the boat club still there?
The boat club, as far as I know, is still there. When I was there
last in 1988, and went into the bar, there were at that time it
had certainly become interracial. There were one or two Indians,
one or two whites, one or two black people there. I introduced
myself--! was there with Nick [Toth] and Kathy [Schick] --and said,
"Can we have a drink?" "Yes, you can have a drink."
We took our drinks out onto the veranda to watch the sun go
down, which is a magnificent sight over the river. I went inside
for something, I forget what it was, and I heard one of these
people sitting on the barstool say, "Who is that old guy there?"
[laughs] Which was nice. But that s my main memory.
When we were there, we built a new club house, but by 1988
when we visited it had degenerated into put-put boats and things.
They had sold all the rowingboats . We had two international
regattas, actually, that we organized, in 1954 and 1955. One was
Rhodes Centenary Regatta and the other was David Livingstone
Centenary Regatta. We had eights up from South Africa, we had two
28
was great,
that time.
They had crews up from Southern Rhodesia as well at
That was great.
Staffing the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum
Clark: They were great days. They were some of our happiest days, I
think. Days that we spent in Livingstone. And I think we were
very fortunate, actually, that we left when we did. Because I
doubt that I would have lasted there very long, you know. I might
have, I don t know. But the museum has sort of had difficult
times. First of all after I left, a former provincial
commissioner took over for two years. He d been a great friend of
mine, we did a whole lot of things about Livingstone together and
so on.
He s married to a
Troy: What was his name?
Clark: That was Gervas Clay. He s still alive,
daughter of Lord Baden-Powell.
Troy: Scouting.
Clark: Scouting.
Troy: Is Gervas Clay in Livingstone, or is he back in England?
Clark: Oh, Gervas is in England, in Somerset. All those provincial
people, if they d come from England, they went back to England, 1
think. If they d come from South Africa, they went there, or some
of them went to Southern Rhodesia, as it then was. Yes. We
visited them in Somerset. They ve moved now.
But then Barrie Reynolds took over. He was an ethnographer,
very good ethnographer.
Troy: And you brought him to the museum, didn t you?
Clark: Yes, we brought him to the museum, and a prehistorian. Also a
technician man, who was good on natural history as well. Yes, we
had three excellent people there. And we had about eight Africans
who helped doing one thing or another. One head one, who I still
keep up with, who I hope is still alive. I always send him
something every Christmas.
And we tended to select ones who were able to play a musical
instrument, because we had a small band, with xylophones and drums
29
And we tended to select ones who were able to play a musical
instrument, because we had a small band, with xylophones and drums
of one kind or another, and rattles, et cetera, pipes, which they
would play once or twice a day, I think, for about ten minutes in
the courtyard. There was an inner courtyard to the museumthe
new museum, we built a new museum of course. Oh, that was a whole
other thing. Yes.
Troy: So this was kind of a break, a musical break, in the day?
Clark: That s right, yes. And visitors always enjoyed it very much. I
enjoyed it also.
Troy: Did you play anything during those sessions? Or these were just
the Africans playing?
Clark: These were the Africans. Who were good, particularly the chaps
who were playing the xylophones. Those were very good.
Xylophones, drums, there were friction drums where you d have a
reed up in the inside of the drum and you whetted your hand and
moved it up, they d go mooooooonraunmmooooommmmmoooommm sort of
noises. And then, of course, various other kinds of drums. And
side-blown whistles, et cetera.
Troy: When you said that you wouldn t have lasted if you had been back
there, you meant that times were changing and new people were
coming in, new administrators and so forth? Independence.
Clark: Well, to give you an example, one man I met, he was a man who was
really looking after, I suppose, security, as it were, Harry
Oppenheimer in Johannesburg. He had been a game warden in the
Kafue National Park. After independence, it didn t take too long
before the minister of tourism and sport or whatever it is said,
"I m coming out with some of my friends, we want to shoot."
Oppenheimer said, "No, I m afraid you re not going to shoot. Not
in the national park." So either he was sacked or he resigned, I
can t remember what it was. First-rate chap.
That s the kind of thing that I ve been talking about. I
wouldn t have lasted with that sort of thing going on. It s very
difficult for them, really, you know. They never seem to- -there s
so much corruption in these governments that very little manages
to filter through to where it ought to go, even if it s specially
designated. I don t know.
30
Thoughts on Living in Africa
Troy: You were there for twenty-three years. Did you feel that in some
ways you became an African, you became a Rhodesian?
Clark: No, I think I never did. If I had been there continuously, then I
might well have. But every three years, and latterly every two
and a half years, we were given six months leave with full pay in
some country that we wished to go to that was temperate--we
couldn t do it in another tropical country, had to go somewhere
else. Plus the traveling time. So we always went back to
England.
Normally, what we would do is we would rent a cottage
somewhere- -the first time we went back after the war was that
terrible winter of 1946-47, and we rented a cottage called the
White Cottage in Grantchester, very close to where Miles Burkitt
lived. Miles was probably mainly responsible for putting me in
touch with--it was one of the Huxleys, Michael Huxley, I think,
who owned it, or had recently inherited it. That was great.
And then on other leaves we d go somewhere else. Always
within distance of Cambridge, so we continually were going in and
out . And we would get caught up with what had been going on while
we d been away. So we essentially remained very English. And
still to a great extent we ve remained very English. [laughter]
Troy: But to the extent that those white Rhodesians were there from
birth and went through the whole process of independence, and
suffered all of the angst and misgivings, et cetera, you didn t
feel that yourself particularly?
Clark: It varied very much. On the whole, I think many of them had a raw
deal, apart from the administration and odd people like ourselves
--and we were always considered to be the kind of people that, if
an African or something was going to come and visit, and it was
not considered that the provincial or district commissioner should
put him up, we were always asked to do so, which we did. I
remember the last one was Seretse Khama and his wife. 1
We were
asked to do this and we said yes, but fortunately, the district
commissioner or someone put them up, which was all right. But you
can see the problems that we had with that kind of thing.
Seretse Khama was President of Botswana from 1966-1980. He married a
white woman, Ruth Williams, which was very controversial at the time. TT
31
The population of Rhodesia, besides the provincial
administration and the rest of it, consisted of farmers up the
railway line for the most part, miners and people associated with
the mines on the Copper Belt, traders in the towns, and in
Livingstone. There were quite a lot of Jewish traders of one kind
or another. There were some amazingly fine ones. They were very
good friends of ours. Somebody, a man called Hugh MacMillan, has
written a book called The Jews of Zambia, I think [Zion in Africa:
The Jews of Zambia, 1999] which I haven t seen, I ve been meaning
to get it.
They had come, many of them, from Lithuania, Estonia, and so
on. They must have come out I suppose just before they certainly
were there before we got there. Whether some of them were very
early after the First World War, I don t know, but certainly,
others came out after the Second World War. And, of course, a lot
of Poles came out as well.
That was one of the remarkable things. We had what were
called the aristocratic Poles who came out quite shortly after
Poland had been invaded, or maybe just before Poland was invaded,
I don t know. They were nice people on the whole. Curious
people. We had a man and his wife were very good friends of ours.
But then we had a lot of what are called peasant Poles, who
had walked [becomes emotional] all the way from Poland, I think,
down through the Middle East, got a boat, and were brought- -some
went to Kenya, maybe some went to Tanzania, some went to Zambia.
They must have been dropped off, the Zambian ones, I think, at
Durban, in the town, and come up by train. And I always remember
this story because when trains with troops on them came through,
that would probably be about twice a week or something like that,
in the forties, the local Women s Institute would have tea and
buns, something like that. The president of the Women s Institute
phoned up the president of the Polish group in Livingstone and
said, "There s a whole lot of Poles coming through on such and
such a date, and what are you going to do?" [voice breaking]
"Oh, we re not going to do anything," the president replied,
"they re peasant Poles."
Troy: There was this really stratified sense of humanity, wasn t there?
Clark: Extraordinary. It really was. Surprisingly enough, they went, I
can t remember where, but at any rate there was one big camp for
them, up at a place called Abercorn, quite close to Kalambo Falls,
twenty-two miles I think it was. I used to know Abercorn quite
well, and the camp was there. One of my grandsons, one of my
daughter s sons in Australia married a Pole, and her mother had
been born in Abercorn. [emotional again at this statement]
32
Troy: This is bringing back some fascinating and some tragic memories.
Clark: Some of them, yes.
It was a very delightful place in those days, I suppose for
us. Probably not so delightful for the African population. But
they did at least have peace. They had hospitals, they had
primary school education.
One had, of course, somebody in the house, a cook as well,
somebody to look after the garden. They all had their quarters
with you, most of them did. But I suppose you d say they re
better off now than they were, but it s very difficult to know.
So far as hospitalization is concerned, I should think it
certainly is not the case. No.
It would be very interesting to know what it is like back in--
sort of in the countryside, as it were. People in Livingstone who
are living in some of these old government houses, they used to
have beautiful gardens. They had to be kept up, because it was
all sand and so on. They had to be watered. Now the whole thing
has gone back to sand, and you see patches of mealies being grown
in order to feed themselves. Not only that but other vegetables
and so on.
Troy: When was the very last time you were back in Livingstone?
Clark: Last time I was there was 1988--was that right? No, I was there
more recently than that. After the Harare Pan-African Congress,
and that was in, I think it was 96. [10th Congress of the Pan-
African Association for Prehistory and Related Studies, Harare,
Zimbabwe, July 1995.] The meetings were in Harare, but there was
an excursion up to Livingstone. I was asked to go back and talk
about some of my old sites and so on in the Zambezi Valley. I had
been secretary of Victoria Falls Trust, and the game park came
under that as well.
And when I was there [1996] I visited the museum. It looked
very well kept. The man, Vincent Katanekwa, who was looking after
it, subsequently had a bad car accident, I think, and I haven t
heard what s happened. But the museum looked good- -he is an
excellent man. And there was also a member of the staff of the
antiquities service there in Livingstone, Nicholas Katanekwa,
Vincent s uncle. Both excellent men. Nicholas I think is about
to retire, unfortunately, but he was one of the shining stars when
it comes to historical, archaeological, ethnographic preservation
of cultural heritage, if you know what I mean.
33
Children and Crocodiles
Clark: Let me say that when we were in Livingstone and so on, we used to
have weekends for ourselves, and we would go out with friends, and
picnic for the whole day up the river. We got to- -it was not easy
to get there, because there are very swift currentswe got to
what we believe was Kalai Island, which was the island from which
David Livingstone went with the old boatman down to visit the
Victoria Falls. 2
Troy: How far is Kalai Island from Livingstone?
Clark: Oh, probably eight miles, something like that, up the river, up
the Zambezi. It was the headquarters of Chief Sekuti, who was the
chief that Livingstone was staying with. Sekuti 1
s father was
buried on one side, and we found the burial place, actually.
Livingstone described large elephant tusks being put there. I
collected some pottery from the site, I think. But that was fun,
we used to go there. Every so often, elephants would come over
from the south side.
We also went to Kandahar Island, which must have been named
after Lord Roberts of Kandahar, Afghanistan, I suppose, at some
time. Elephants would come over to that, and you had to be very
careful when you went ashore that there weren t elephants there
already, in which case you went to one of the other islands.
Troy: Was there a danger when you were going out to these islands that
you could be swept over the falls?
Clark: No, but you could easily turn over, though, in the current.
Troy: Hippos and crocodiles?
Clark: There were hippos and crocodiles. We only bathed where the water
was running over rocks so much below. And you had to watch out.
We never did see any crocodiles when we were bathing like that,
but they were tricky. On one occasion, a picnic that we had south
of the falls, down to the fifth gorge, Sangwe Gorgeand I did an
2
Desmond Clark later refers to Sekuti s Island. "This is about three
to four miles upstream on the Zambezi from the Victoria Falls. It is
surrounded by some deep water and rapids. David Livingstone spent the
night with Sekuti on this island and was canoed down the river by his
boatman to land on the island in the middle of the falls known as
Livingstone Island. His first view was walking through the little patch of
woodland onto damp grass and peering over the edge of the chasm."
interesting experiment in that area for several years round about
that time. But in any case, there was a beautiful blue pool, the
water had sort of scooped out a pool which I suppose is sort of
like this and a bit more round [motioning], deepish.
And it was hot, and we were a little tired, and I said to my
friends, with Betty, "I think I m going to have a swim before
lunch." It was around about that time. They said, "Don t do
that, let s have lunch first of all." So I said, "All right."
There was one area where there was a tree that overhung part of
it, nice little bit of grass around. We sat on that and we had
our lunch.
In the course of it, we realized that there was a rather
unpleasant smell, smell of something dead. We just went on having
lunch. Then looked up, and there was a crocodile looking at me
from about five feet away, I suppose. It was, I think, a youngish
crocodile. And here I was, on the picnic blanket, sitting
immediately over the crocodile s larder, you see. [laughter]
Because they never eat anything fresh. They always stow whatever
it is that they have in a sort of hole underneath a bank until it
gets putrid, and then they eat it.
But even a young crocodile is powerful, and if I d been on my
own, it could easily, I think, have held me down sufficiently that
I wouldn t have been able to break free. But that was a lucky
escape, there.
Troy: And so you got up very quietly and walked away?
Clark: We left it to its meal. I don t know what it would have had,
duikers, something like that. Duikers, klipspringers, that would
have come down to drink. But that was an unpleasant little
occasion.
And then another lovely pool where the Sangwe went into the
Zambezi, another beautiful blue one there, and that s one where I
think we had bathed once or twice and looking over on one time,
there were half a dozen crocodiles on the sand bank, looking at
us. So that was another place where we didn t swim again.
Troy: What was dangerous about the elephants?
Clark: Well, the elephants had been shot at by poachers, so the elephants
did not like human beings. You didn t want to have an elephant
tearing at you. It would not have been very pleasant.
Troy: Hippos dangerous?
35
Clark: Only if you were in a boat. There was one old hippo that would
come out regularly when we were out in our four rowing, would come
up and surface. Never, fortunately, surfaced underneath the boat,
but would surface close by, and when you saw it, you always said,
"Okay, chaps, give a ten," you see, and you could get away from
it.
There was one occasion that Betty told me about--! hadn t got
back from the war at that time. There was an old tea room in
Livingstone where there was a deepish sort of pool, and a nice lot
of grass, beautiful grass, which was kept all the way around the
place. She had had a picnic lunch there with the two children.
John, who was quite young, maybe three or something like that, was
playing in the grass. Betty was feeling sort of dozy, and John
was playing around her, and the water was down there. She looked
up, and there was a crocodile. So she snapped him up pretty
quickly. Otherwise, he might not be here today.
Troy: When was your- -you said the two children- -when was your daughter
born?
Clark: Elizabeth was born early in 1939. John was born in 1941, just a
couple of years after we went out to Africa.
Troy: Are there still crocodiles and hippos and things in Livingstone?
Clark: Oh, very much so. One interesting thing, on the south side, the
little Victoria Falls village has now really become a biggish sort
of town. There are all sorts of unfortunate casinos and things
like that, but there is a crocodile park, I suppose you d call it,
where they cultivate the crocodiles. There are middle-sized ones
and so on. They kill them both for food and also for the skins,
make all sorts of things, handbags, shoes, et cetera. But it was
extremely interesting. The young crocodiles, which they will
allow you to hold, are amazingly strong.
But they have about half a dozen old crocodiles there, and
these they got because people up the Zambezi and elsewhere would
say, "We have a man-eater here who s collected half a dozen
people. Please come and get rid of it."
They would trap this
thing and take it along, and they had it within a sort of ranged
area with a pool in the bottom. Huge, great things. You wouldn t
stand a chance on earth with a thing that size. They must weigh,
I don t know, maybe 400 pounds or more, I should think. Really
frightful things. Dreadful.
Troy: When you went on these excursions before and after the war, did
you row up the river for these picnics?
36
Troy: When you went on these excursions before and after the war, did
you row up the river for these picnics?
Clark: Oh, yes, we would row and we would also havesome of the little
boats, tin sort of boats, would have sails. Sometimes you could
use a sail. Sometimes it got a bit rough, and the family got sort
of anxious, so I d land and drop them on the bank, I d row back
myself. But afterwards, we had putt-putts, and we d putt-putt-
putt up, which was great.
I remember we also had Dalmatians which we bred for a time.
Both the male and female we got from Louis and Mary Leakey, when
they were puppies. Well, the hippos came out, you see, if the
ground was sort of muddy and so on, a hippo print would go in
about so much, and these little puppies would fall into the hippo
print. [laughter] Amazing.
Troy: You went out on these picnics with the various people you ve
mentioned, Doug Hall and others?
Clark: Yes. Various people. One particular friend of ours was Phillip
Court. He was a doctor, a surgeon. He was teaching in Hong Kong
University, and of course was there during the war, and was
interned by the Japanese. He said one was on the verge of
starvation. But he said if you could get one egg a week, it just
kept you going. He was an awfully nice man. He had two children,
and his wife. He was a South African, and he came back and was
appointed as surgeon in Northern Rhodesia, and he was stationed in
Livingstone for quite a long time.
Troy: His children were approximately your children s age, so that was
perfect.
Clark: Yes, they were much the same, I think.
Our children, at that time, had gone away to school. First of
all, for primary they went down to Southern Rhodesia- -Zimbabwe.
My son went to Bulawayo, to Whitestone School, and my daughter
went to Salisbury, to a very good school. They enjoyed it--the
climate, you see, was so much better. And, of course, at that
time in Livingstone there wasn t anything other than primary
school.
Troy: What was better about the climate further south?
Clark: More temperate. Much more temperate. And less malaria.
Then there came the question of, for secondary education,
where would we send them? South Africa, or back to England? And
37
plane. More or less nonstop to Livingstone. There was a big
airport that was built in Livingstone, yes.
Troy: What year was that, that the Comet was being used?
Clark: Oh, some time in the fifties. Several years.
Troy: When you first got to Livingstone, were there airplanes?
Clark: No. The oldwhat was it called?--! don t know what the service
was called, but it was British [BOAC] . And it took about six days
to get down from London, stopping overnight in various places
before arriving in Johannesburg, I remember.
One of the places they stopped at was Mpika, which was only
about maybe thirty miles, or less than that, from Nachikufu. At
Nachikufu, of course, I used to have some supplies sent up from
Broken Hill with the mailman. Again, it would take two-plus days
or so, and if it was hot, you would get a few maggots in the meat.
However, if you cooked the meat well, you could always just flip
the maggot out. It didn t enjoy being cooked. And you ate the
meat, no problem about that.
Post-War Return to Livingstone
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
When you returned to Livingstone after the war did you go to the
same house?
Yes, we did, to begin with. Later, after we built the new museum,
and we had persuaded the government that indeed, it was worth
supporting museums, monuments commissions, and research, we were
able to get some more funding. So we either built or bought
museum houses. We had about three museum houses, I think. I
think that was it. So the one that I lived in, we built--the
museum built, ratherand it was a joy planting the garden and the
rest of it.
Tell me a little bit more about life. Was it hard to get food?
During the war, it must have been a little bit tight, but
generally, life was quite good in Livingstone?
The national government had moved to Lusaka, but there was still a
flourishing little center. Livingstone was a small community. It
had a rather nice park, which Lewanika had given to the government
or to Livingstone, which had a lot of very nice trees in it.
There were the Rhodesian teak tree, and various others. Shady, so
38
Troy:
that you could walk in it. And Lewanika said that the white
people needed this, that his people had always had shade and
woodland to walk around in, but the white people had nothing, so
this was a nice place for them where they could sit down. It was
very pleasant.
A small commercial community. Many of them were Jewish who
had come out from places like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany
I think as well, and Poland, of course, later, and established
small businesses. Some had come out and had set up small trading
stores out in the countryside in various places, in Barotseland,
for example, which is where the Sussmans, two brothers, Eli and
Harry Sussman, lived and traded. And they did remarkably well,
sort of buying and selling cattle and so on. And the Sussmans own
Woolworth s in Cape Town, and various other things. Very nice
people, extremely nice. 3
After the war the tourist trade probably picked up some, didn t
it?
Clark: Very much so, and of course, the museum was a leading place for
that. It was very flourishing, and it remained like that up to
the time that the countries became independent. Of course, it
wasn t too long after independence that the rebellion in Southern
Rhodesia took place, the veterans, so-called veterans, who today
occupy the European farms. And so it became very difficult to
move from north to south. Barbed wire and railings and things
were everywhere, an immigration and customs post was put just on
the boundary, so it destroyed the tourist trade.
Troy: In what year did that all begin?
Clark: It became independent, I think, in 1964--Zambia, that is.
Northern Rhodesia then became Zambia.
Troy: I remember seeing pictures of the revolutionaries smashing a
statue of Rhodes in Southern Rhodesia.
3
The Sussmans also had stores in Barotseland, interests in the Zambezi
sawmills, and owned the very large Lochinvar Ranch in the Kafue River flood
plain between Livingstone and Lusaka. They held masses of native game on
the ranch. There were three hot springs on the property as well. Two were
excavated yielding Late Stone Age burials, organic materials, and stone
tools of an early Bushman type people. This work was written up by
Creighton Gable in one monograph. Another was by Brian Fagan and Francis
van Noten. The Lochinvar Ranch is now the Lochinvar National Park of
Zambia. DC
39
Clark: Oh, really? That was probably in Harare. I don t think we had
one.
Troy: Yes, bashing it. It looked like the end of Stalin or--you know.
Clark: And yet, I think it was at this Philadelphia meeting I was talking
to some people who said they d been up to Bulawayo recently, been
to the Matopos, and I said, "What s happened to Rhodes s grave?"
Because it s in a fantastic place, on top of what were called
kopjes there, hills, with huge great granite boulders around it.
Very, very impressive place, enormous view from it as well. And
they said it s perfectly intact.
Troy: Really? Isn t that wonderful. Did you know any of the
descendants of the Rhodes people?
Clark: I knew the daughters of Rhodes s brother, Colonel Rhodes, and that
was Georgia and Violet. They lived not all that far from
Cambridge. They lived in a manor houseoh, what s the name of
the place? Can t remember it now [Hildersham] . We visited them
on several occasions.
Troy: Were they unmarried?
Clark: Yes, both unmarried.
Troy: So their last name would be Rhodes!
Clark: Rhodes, indeed, yes. Georgia came out to Livingstone, oh, two or
three times, I think. One of those was on the occasion of an
international ornithological congress. She may have been sixty by
then. One of our local people who had collected different birds
had them in cages and he brought all these along and put them in
some hall for people to go and look at, over lunch or something.
When he came back, he found somebody had opened all the doors.
And that was Georgia who had opened the doors! [laughter]
Troy: Isn t that incredible? Sounds like they were quite interesting
characters .
Clark: Oh, very interesting characters. They really were, yes.
Troy: Did Rhodes himself have children?
Clark: No. He never married.
Troy: Somebody mentioned that when you went down to South Africa to take
the ship back to England there was something, an inn perhaps,
called "Rhodesia by the Sea," in Cape Town, where you folks--
Rhodesians and others living in Rhodesiawould congregate? I
forget who told me this .
Clark: No. I don t think we ever did. We used to stay at the Settlers
Club in Cape Town, Queen Victoria Street, about halfway down it,
and oh, about quarter of a mile from the South African Museum. I
suppose it s named after the 1830 settlers who settled the eastern
part of the Cape province. And that was very comfortable. But
usually one managed to get onto the boat quickly, as far as I
remember.
When we came back, we normally used to bring out a car from
England. That was after we could afford to buy a new car. And
we d stay for two or three days in Cape Town, visiting people like
John Goodwin, looking at sites down there with him and so on, and
then move more slowly through South Africa, visiting other people
and other sites and so on, back to Livingstone, driving our own
car.
Troy: Which would give you the leisure that you didn t have when you
first got there, when you had to take the train, which was an
awesomely long trip. I think you said it was three days.
Clark: Three and a half days, I think it was, yes.
Troy: And the auto roads probably began to improve.
Clark: The roads in South Africa were good. The roads in Southern
Rhodesia were what were called strip roads. There were two tar
strips where the tires went, you see, and that was great until you
met somebody else. Then you had to move off to one side, almost
certainly. And there were as well low-level bridges across the
rivers.
The rivers, apart from the rainy season, flood time, had
really very little water in them, so the bridges would be, I don t
know, maybe so much above the stream. But at flood time, of
course, it would flood right over, and you would have to--I
remember spending at least two and a half days on the south side
after we came back, must have been early 1955, I think, with a
whole lot of relics of David Livingstone, actually, waiting to get
across.
Troy: And this would be south of Livingstone, in the various little
river valleys.
Clark: Yes, exactly.
41
Troy: These would be rivers that would feed down to the north into the
Zambezi, probably, from that point.
Clark: That s right, and when you got down onto the watershed, Bulawayo
was the chief western city. Then you crossed to the other side of
the watershed and all of those streams flowed south into the
Limpopo.
Troy: In the middle of these strip roads, you d have tall grass which
would tickle the bottom of the car?
Clark: Oh, no, they usually graded the roads quite well, because you had
to ensure that the gravel on either side of the strips really came
up to the strips, and there wasn t a great drop, if you see what I
mean, between the strip and the side of the road. No, they were
well maintained. Those were good. And the countryside was
basically woodland in the northern half, with the mukusi, which is
the Rhodesian teak tree, I think for making hardwood furniture
andwhat do you call?
Troy: Inlay?
Clark: That s right, all that kind of stuff. And then the mukwa, which
was a superb furniture tree. The mungongo, which is Ricinodendron
rautenenii, a tree of very light wood, extremely light wood.
Troy: Kind of like a balsa?
Clark: Not unlike balsa. But it had a very hard nut which could be
cracked open, and it had both fat and protein in it, very
valuable, and that was a staple of the northern San Bushmen
peoples.
Troy: And this tree was a tall tree?
Clark: It was not all that tall. I suppose it went to about thirty feet,
something like that, maybe a bit more. One of the extraordinary
things was, you could make fences from the young branches of the
tree. One of the amazing things I remember seeing, must have been
during the rains, I supposeif you put two upright and one across
like that, and they will, of course, sproutbut the interesting
thing is that even the one across sprouted.
Troy: Did any of your new staff, after you got the new museum going,
were any of those fellows rowers , oarsmen?
Clark: Brian Fagan rowed, yes. He rowed at Cambridge through his
college.
Troy: You rowed at Cambridge, didn t you?
Clark: Yes. I rowed for Christ s the whole of the time I was there, yes.
Troy: On the Zambezi in the hippo story, you mentioned that you were out
there with a four, and I thought, Gee, well, who were these four?
So Brian rowed, and then others in the administration and so on?
Clark: That s right, yes. One leading light in this was a man called
Norman Ramsey, who was the administrator general of Northern
Rhodesia. The high court was still in Livingstone, I think.
Ramsey was good. He came from Scotland. I think he rowed for
Edinburgh or St. Andrews or something like that. But we regularly
got fours out. We looked after the fours ourselves.
When everything started again after the war, we still had the
old clinker fours.
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
What is a clinker four?
The hull is made of a series of planks, boards, whatever you like,
which overlap, as opposed to what we always call a lightship. I
think over here it is called a shell. These are made from single
strips of, usually molded mahogany.
It sounds like a lightship might be a little faster.
Oh, they were, much faster. And of course, we had improved
outriggers and oarlocks. I think initially those fours had fixed
seats, we had sliding seats put in and so on. We later were able
to buy two lightship fours. We had those, regularly took them
out, and we trained.
What was the longest reach on the Zambezi above the falls?
had some really good long stretches, didn t you?
You
I suppose we had. About a mile and a half, I think, was probably
what it was. Of course, you could also go round Long Island, as
it was, and that would be somewhere like two or three miles.
Big enough so you could gradually come around it.
Yes, you could get around the top end of it, and the bottom end.
Yes, that s right, I d forgotten we used to do that.
Troy: And Ramsey was spearhead at the boat club?
Clark: Yes, he was very good indeed. It was he who organized with the
Lord Lyon, King at Arms, for the boat club to receive its own coat
of arms. It s on the tankard, actually.
Battling Malaria, Other Ailments
Troy: It must have been hard to have the children 30 off to school, but
you didn t have any recourse, did you? I mean, there was not that
good education beyond a certain point.
Clark: It was impossible. And, of course, they didn t do well in
Livingstone. There was malaria. We all mostly had malaria at one
time or another.
Troy: Quinine and that kind of thing?
Clark: Well, that s what we had to begin with. Later we had Mepacrine
and then Atabrine. Chloroquin came later, much later. I think
you took Atabrine if you got malaria. And then afterwards, you
took Mepacrine, which made the eyes turn yellow and so on, but it
did get the malaria out of the system.
Troy: What was having malaria like? How did it manifest? I ve never
met anyone who had malaria.
Clark: Well, high temperatures, sweating, feeling bloody awful,
headaches.
Troy: And you wouldn t necessarily know that you had contracted it until
it manifested quite suddenly?
Clark: That s right, exactly, yes. And shivering. You had to keep warm.
Troy: How long did it go on for, Desmond?
Clark: Oh, it would be a few days, you felt sort ofand latterly, of
course, if you had a relapse, you could cope with that. It
wouldn t last more than about a day and a half or something like
that. But as I say, with Mepacrine, they managed to cure the
relapse, provided you didn t get a reinfection. And the sort of
public health organization by the time we left was really quite
good. Cutting grass and so on, you see, keeping the mosquitoes
down, putting oil or something on any standing water. Seeing
there weren t tins or gutters and things that held water that they
could breed in. And it was pretty good. Once that s relaxed, of
course, they all come back again.
44
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
What other kinds of things might you contract?
issue?
Was leprosy an
Leprosy, you could get. Not all that often did people contract
leprosy, but certainly we knew one person in particular who got
it. From time to time, one used to wonder, especially if you got
white spots and so on on your hands. So you took a little needle
to see if you could feel them. If you could feel them, okay, then
it wasn t leprosy.
But if these little spots had no feeling, then that was of
concern?
It could be, yes, exactly. It could be something else. There was
hookworm that you could get, and that s mostly from damp places
and so on, walking around outside. You get it mostly through the
feet, or drinking as well. That was very debilitating. Many
Africans, of course, had that as well.
And probably have it through their entire life.
You could get rid of it, of course. Tapeworm was another thing.
You could get rid of that, of course, as well. Bilharzia,
schistosomiasis, that was common as well, so you had to be very
careful.
Troy: How does that manifest, Desmond?
Clark: The hosts for this are a snail, freshwater snail, and the human
body. It worms its way up into the bladder, and if it s not
treated, it goes right up into the kidneys, which is not so good
at all. By that time, it s pretty difficult to cure. Tartrate
emetic was the treatment. It killed the schistosome shortly
before it killed you, if you see what I mean. That was it.
Of course, there was Tropical Diseases Institute back in
Englandone in Birmingham and one in London. In the earlier
days, I never went to either of them, but you could go there and
they would cure you of these various things, most of them.
Troy: So the idea was to get the children out of there. I mean, that
was one of the issues, apart from the fact that there weren t
enough children within the white community to really get a good
school going there.
Clark: It was impossible. I mean, there was no secondary education.
Then a secondary school did start in Lusaka. Is that right? Yes,
that s right. And you could send children to it. There was a
school in Mazabuka.
45
enough children within the white community to really get a good
school going there.
Clark: It was impossible. I mean, there was no secondary education.
Then a secondary school did start in Lusaka. Is that right? Yes,
that s right. And you could send children to it. There was a
school in Mazabuka.
Troy: Where is Mazabuka?
Clark: Mazabuka is halfway between Lusaka and Livingstone. Actually
nearer Lusaka. And it just wasn t worth it. You had to send them
somewhere sort of temperate and where they would get a good
education. So it was either sending them down to Cape Townwell,
somewhere in South Africaor sending them home to England. That
indeed is what we did. So one of them went to my old school,
Monkton Combe, and our daughter went to the Godolphin School in
Salisbury. Both excellent schools, actually. Hers was better.
Troy: I remember visiting Winchester School and thinking, Gosh, what a
wonderful place.
Clark: Yes, it is. That s a terrific school, that.
Troy: Cold baths in the morning, open windows at night. [laughs]
Clark: That s what we had, cold baths. I suppose the windows were open,
I don t know. But we always had cold baths.
And the great thing was, of course, you leapt out of bed.
What you endeavored to do was to see if you could manage to get
dressed in about three minutes. You suddenly leapt out of bed,
dashed down, and the cold bath in the tubs. Other people had been
in, had their bath, and usually they sort of flopped in, flopped
out, you see, and much of the water would then have somehow
disappeared. So when you got in, there was certainly less water,
and it wasn t quite so, I suppose, quite so cold, I don t know.
You leapt in, leapt out, dashed upstairs, put on your clothes,
made the bedof course, we had to make the beds and dashed down
in time to get onto the terrace, which wasn t all that far
outside.
Troy: This was at Monkton Combe.
Clark: This was Monkton Combe, yes. This was later, when I was in the
schoolhouse. And you could answer the roll call for breakfast,
you see.
Troy: And have hot tea and porridge.
run by the school. That was fun. We had to walk back and forth
up a narrow little track. Sometimes there were steps over it, but
mostly it was sort of steep, really quite steep, with stone walls
on either side. These were the places where the pack mules had
moved, carrying the wool in medieval times, you see.
Troy: Certainly you didn t have mosquito netting at Monkton Combe.
Clark: No, not necessary.
Troy: So when you were in Livingstone, was that a reality at night?
Clark: That was essential. The whole house had mosquito proofing. The
fine metal gauze over the verandas and the windows, of course.
Then you slept under a net.
Troy: Were the windows always open? Were there times of the year when
it was probably pretty chilly?
Clark: I think more often than not, they were open. Except for the two
months of June and July, when it did at night become sometimes
quite cool, quite cold. We used to have fires then. We probably
didn t really need them, but it just made things cozy. So there
were fireplaces in the houses, and very enjoyable it was.
Betty Clark, 2000.
photo by Timothy Troy
INTERVIEW WITH J. DESMOND CLARK AND BETTY CLARK
III DIALOGUE WITH BETTY CLARK1
Meeting Desmond, and First Encounters with Africa
Troy: Betty, one of the anecdotal stories Desmond told me was about how
he spilled sherry on you at Cambridge. Was that the first time
you met him?
Betty: Yes, I think it was. I do remember that.
Clark: I remember it was a green dress, which was partly velvet and
partly--! don t know what you call that. Not a frightfully
interesting dress. [laughter]
Troy: Just what you said earlier, Desmond!
Where were you from, Betty?
Betty: I was born in a little town in Yorkshire called Dewsbury, and our
family very soon went to live in the woolen district town of
Bradford. My father used to work in woolen mills, but went to the
wool sales in London. He bought the raw wool which came back and
was then resold. I stayed there, I suppose until I went to
Cambridge in, what was it, 1934?
Clark: Yes, that s right.
Troy: And when did you decide to go to Cambridge?
Betty: As soon as I got a scholarship! We were sort of pushed at school
to try and go to Oxford or Cambridge. In my case it worked.
Troy: Did you go to a public school in Bradford?
Betty: No. I went to the Bradford Girls Grammar School. It wasn t a
public school but it was a very good school.
Elizabeth Anne Winterbottom reviewed with her mother the dialogue
with Betty and Desmond Clark, and some of her memories of childhood are
included in footnotes in this section.
48
Clark:
Betty:
Troy:
Clark:
Betty:
Clark:
Troy :
Clark:
Troy:
Betty:
We met someone here [who had been at Bradford] who was back on a
visit--Thelma Rowell. She was a primatologist. She was good.
Wasn t in anthropology.
Not in anthropology, no. I m not certain what it would have been
in. It could have been in zoology. It could have been in
environmental science or something like that.
Desmond, you mentioned that after you finished at Cambridge there
was a kind of a headhunter kind of process by which you got a
position.
This was one of these, I suppose, places that would send you
notification of job openings, and I followed up one or two of
those that they sent. I don t think they sent too many, actually.
Well, how did you get your job?
I got it because the governor wrote to me and offered it to me.
Miles Burkitt may have been going to bat for you, do you think?
I ve never really followed that one up, as to how Hubert Young
learned about me. It could have been from Godfrey and Monica
Wilson. Monica went to Cambridge, of course, and did her
anthropology theresocial anthropology.
Betty, what was your reaction when Desmond said, "We re going to
Africa."
Well, he didn t say, "We re going to Africa.
to Africa." [Desmond is chuckling]
He said, "I m going
Troy: And how did you react to that.
Betty: There wasn t anything I could do about it. I went on in my rather
boring teaching job, which was all I could get, until I suddenly
got a letter from him saying, "Can you come out? Because the
governor says we can get married." You see there was a regulation
there that any young civil servant didn t get married in the
first three years of his service.
Desmond went up on the train from the Cape to Zambia, and the
governor was on the same train, and the governor discovered
Desmond was on it and sent for him. Desmond played chess with the
governor and had the wisdom to lose! [laughter] Well, he might
have lost anyway, I don t know. And then he said to the governor,
"Is it all right if I get married?" And he said, "Yes." So I
went without having to wait for three years.
49
Troy: Wonderful.
Clark: Yes, it was.
Betty: It was, actually, because the war came and interfered.
Troy: So you got out there quite early in 38, Desmond.
Clark: I left Tilbury Docks on the Union-Castle intermediate boat, the
Llanstephan Castle, which sailed on the 17th of December. They
said they wanted me out there as soon as possible, and so being
bright in those days, that s what I did. I missed having
Christmas with the family and everybody, instead of which I had
Christmas on the Llanstephan Castle.
On the way out, of course, we stopped in Las Palmas . We
stopped at Ascension Island. We stopped at St. Helena and then to
the Cape. Then it was three days, I think, from the Cape by South
African Railways, changed to Rhodesian Railways before I arrived
in Livingstone. I arrived in Livingstone station about 6:00 in
the evening during the rains, of course, January, 1938.
When I left, Betty gave me that ring. [Desmond shows the
ring.] It has 17/12/37 engraved on the inside of it.
Troy: Which was the date that you departed.
Clark: That s right. It s got a bit thin.
Troy: Betty, Desmond and I were talking about how there were no planes
until after the war. In any case, you went out by ship?
Betty: I don t know whether there were planes, but no ordinary person
went on them. No, I went out on a ship. And I got off in Cape
Town and came up on the railway.
I remember when we got married. That was the weekend that the
local parson of the Church of England was away, so we got married in th
registry office, and we got remarried by the parson when he came back.
Troy: What were your first impressions?
Betty: I remember the magnificent vegetation.
Clark: And of course, the orange Kalahari sands. There was a brilliant
sort of difference between the glorious greens of the trees. Some
in flower- -the Baikiaea, for example, which is the Mukushi, had a
beautiful purple flower and curious pods. The way in which it
propagated was the pods burst open and tossed the seeds around.
50
Troy: Desmond also told me about your son John s almost being eaten by a
crocodile at one picnic.
Betty: Oh, yes. That s right. It was near the Zambezi Boat Club, where
Desmond used to row. And I d gone down, because I usually went
down and minded the children. Then we all had a drink in the bar
when he came back from rowing, and the man who looked after the
boats there came up. I don t remember whether Desmond was there
or not, but he said, "There s a crocodile down there, and if
you re not careful it will be "Goodbye to yorr Godbless."
Troy: [laughing] Both of your children, both Liz and John--
Betty: --were both born in Livingstone.
Troy: Were the facilities pretty good in the clinic?
Betty: Well, they had a reasonable hospital, and it was staffed by
properly trained nurses who came out from England, mostly.
Troy: I think Desmond mentioned one or several of the physicians.
Clark: Yes, there were two that we were very friendly with. One was a
man who had been teaching and practicing medicine in Hong Kong.
Betty: That s right, Phil Court. He was a prisoner of war at some point.
Clark: Yes. He was a South African from Natal, I think. Great chap.
Really was. We used to go on picnics and so on with him, with his
familyhad two daughters. And the other was Bob Dunn and his
wife.
There was another one we were friendly with as well, Clarke
was his last name, I think, also a surgeon.
2
He and Phil were
sitting on their veranda one evening, and the verandas have
mosquito gauze, and outside they saw a cobra appear. Clarke came
over to look at it closely, and one of the habits of cobras,
spitting cobras, is that they spit and they spit extremely
accurately, and they can spit in your eye.
2
"Just for the record it was Jack Clarke, the other doctor in
Livingstone, and his wife was called Judy. He was about six foot something
and she was about five foot something." [EW]
51
Sure enough this chap got some of the poison in his eye. So
he rushed out. And what you do is you put milk in it. Or if you
don t have milk, you put water in it, and sort of wash it out. It
is said to be extremely painful, Stupid thing to go so close to
look at it. [laughs] What on earth was his other name.
Troy: Was that an issue--cobras and other things crawling around?
Clark: There were always things like that.
Betty: Oh, yes, there were snakes.
Clark: So, mosquito boots and long slacks at night. And women would wear
longish dresses, with mosquito boots as well.
Betty: Yes, because they crawled out of the ground and bit your ankles
and legs .
Clark: Also, of course, when you were sitting outside--well, you could do
it inside as wellyou had one of those coils slowly burning, and
mosquitoes don t like this thing, and you put them down close to
where your feet are.
Betty: They still have those in Australia. The mosquitoes there don t
carry malaria, but they bite. 3
Logistics of Children, and Schools
Troy: When your children got older they went off to school?
Betty: Well, the climate made it difficult for two very blonde, blue-eyed
children to stay in it, so they went off to school when they were
about eight years old. They went to Southern Rhodesia, both of
them, and then when they grew to high school age, we sent them to
English schools. And they only came back once a year for the long
holidays.
3
"You didn t have a telephone, and the nearest telephone was the
Heathleys across the road. I remember one of the Heathley girls came
hurtling across saying that there was a long distance call for you, and
you, I ve never seen you rush so fast! It turned out that it was Father,
ringing to say that he was coming home from the war tomorrow on the six
o clock train! 1
I ll never forget, we were all dressed in our best at six
o clock in the morning, and the train was three hours late!" [EW]
"Well, that s life in Africa." [BC]
52
Clark: Actually they would come out on the Comet.
Betty: Yes, the Comet ran in those days.
Clark: Flew directly to Livingstone, of course.
Troy: After the war, yes. Made it much more easier to get to and from
England.
Clark: Yes. And we got mail, probably two days after it was posted.
Betty: Very cheaply, too. We didn t have to pay extra for the air mail.
And the children got out for frantically little.
Troy: Desmond mentioned going off to school at a young age. Being an
incorrigible child. But I know that down inside he felt that he
may have been a little bit too young.
Clark: That s right.
Troy: I suppose it builds strong characters and independence, but it
must have been hard to have them go off that way. When they were
in Southern Rhodesia you d see them more than once a year?
Betty: Yes. Three holidays. But we used to write endless letters. I
wrote every day and mailed it once a week. But it doesn t make
you less attached. Unfortunately it makes you more attached.
We ve never lived in the same continent, have we really? As
the children.
Clark: Well, I suppose their home was in Zambia when--
Betty: --but we didn t live there together. They visited once a year.
Then we came from Zambia here. And by that time they were
both in jobs in England, and shortly after that time, Elizabeth
went to Australia. And there we all are now.
53
Running the Rhodes -Livingstone Museum in Wartime
Troy: During the war when Desmond went up to Somaliland and so on how
did you handle that? There you were left to run a museum
yourself.
3
Clark: Yes, she was indeed and did it very well.
Betty: Well, I ran it because it was Desmond s job, and I was trying to
do his job for him. And I had two babies underneath the mango
tree outside with an African nanny, so that I could see what was
happening to them. And that s that. 4
Troy: Relatively small staff in those days?
Clark: Very small staff, wasn t it.
Betty: Oh, yes. There were only about three or four people working in
the building.
Clark: There was Joseph [Siatumbu] , of course.
Betty: Yes, one of the staff we still know, and the last time we went to
Zambia--how many years ago was that now--four? In 96 he was
there to meet us just the same as ever.
Clark: Yes, he was.
3
"Apropos of running the museum in wartime, before John was born
somebody came to the museum and wanted to be shown round, and he was the
King of Greece and his wife, and I showed them around to the best of my
ability. At the end of the afternoon he thanked me and kissed my hand- -and
I remember I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant! A lot of my work at the
museum was showing visitors round, and during the war we didn t have too
many, but they still had to be shown round and had the museum explained to
them as far as possible." [BC]
A
"I can remember as a child being absolutely fascinated when a man
from the Congo came down with a pangolin which I think he was trying to
sell to you--you being the museumand he didn t speak English, but you
spoke French. And I sat there absolutely fascinated while you and he spoke
in this French. You didn t buy the pangolin.
"What did you do in your spare time?" [EW]
"Well, I didn t have too much, that s for sure. Played a little
tennis, although I was never very good at it, I m afraid. And I always had
to find a babysitter before I could leave the house." [BC]
54
Troy: After you came back from the war, Joseph was with you in Malawi.
Did he go to Angola with you?
Clark: No. He never came to Angola. No. Basically it was Malawi, and
Zambia, of course. And he was with us with all the seasons at
Kalambo Falls .
Troy: He was there when you first got there.
Clark: No, I think we hired him. I seem to remember- -
Betty: --he was about our age--
Clark: --him appearing, and I think it was because we had taken over,
after three days getting there, from a very fine district
commissioner, Vernon Brelsford, who had been seconded to the
museum to write a handbook of the collections that there were.
It was a good collection of ethnographic material. Nothing
very much else, except for probably about twenty-odd early maps of
Africa, and I think a couple of volumes, geographies, the Senuto
and the Ogilby- -which is an English basic translation of Hondius
and people like that and that was the basis of the library. Oh,
and there was a quite a good mineral collection as well that had
been made, but I never knew very much about that--a lot of the
minerals, crystals, and so on, in connection with zinc, and lead,
and vanadium, et cetera, from Broken Hill. And I think we must
have had a cast of the Broken Hill skull.
Betty: Well, we had one, but we certainly didn t get it while we were
there.
Didn t you have any Livingstone letters when we got there?
Clark: Oh, yes. There were Livingstone letters, that s right.
Betty: Original letters. Don t you remember you housed them in proper
boxes so that they wouldn t fade.
Clark: It was the man who ran the sawmills, actually, Charlie Knight, who
designed the case for that. A letter would be put between two
sheets of glass within a wooden frame and the little handle thing,
and about half a dozen of those or so would slide into a sort of
box standing on legs, about the height that you want to read, you
see. And if you wanted to read one of these then you simply just
pulled it out, read it, and then put it back. It was a fine way
of keeping those letters.
55
Some of the maps did not survive quite so well. We had them
mounted in much the same way, except that they didn t go into--
they were on biggish framed glass round a big central plinth and
you d simply look at them like that. Then they did away with all
that and they put the maps onto a long mounted frameit had glass
over the top of it and the likebut the trouble is, they stuck
the maps up with sticky tape. And of course this all
disintegrated in due course and the maps became sticky and nasty.
Reduced very considerably the value of a number of them
fortunately, they weren t all put up like that.
But I had built up a very fine collection of maps and volumes
connected with African exploration, and we have of course from
David Livingstone s grandson, Dr. Hubert Wilson, who d been a
missionary in the Luangwa Valley for twenty-odd years, I think, we
had a number of letters and notebooks. We had various things like
David Livingstone s dental kit for extracting teeth. It was one
of these parrot beak sort of things you put over the tooth and
pullrather like taking a cork out of a bottleneck.
The Story of the Cast of Livingstone s Arm
Clark: One of the things that we also got, I remember, when I was there
we got a cast of David Livingstone s armthe one that the lion
had chewed up when he was in Botswana at one of the missions
there.
I think he d probably gone out to shoot this lion and the lion
charged him and broke the arm around about it was the humerus .
Yes. Up there. And it mended rather badly, it was askew, and
that was one of the main reasons, or the main pieces of evidence
for identifying [becomes emotional] the body. When he died, of
course, it must have been from complications of malaria, and
hookworm, and God knows what all, dysentery as well. And how old
was he? Seventy I think.
Betty: Well, he was reasonably old.
Clark: It was in 1873, that s right.
The place where the monument is now, way out on some sort of
track that was always kept open out towards the Bangweulu
Swamps--. It was very swampy, and of course Livingstone was
walking through water the last two or three days that he was
there, and he arrived at Chief Chitambo s village, quite a long
way from the coast.
56
When he died, they dried his body--sundried it and wrapped it
up in bark cloth. This was an area where bark cloth was made.
Troy: Extraordinary that they could preserve it that well.
Clark: Yes. I think they had to make quite certain that it was dry, and
then they wrapped it. I suppose it was slung from a pole and two
of them carried it and the two main chaps--oh, yes that s right,
the name of the mission was the Nassick Mission. It must have
been at Bagamoyo, where the main slave trading market was. And
these two main chaps were Susi and Chuma.
How far do you think it would have been from the coast?
They d probably went through southern Tanzania, I think. Must
have. I should think they probably had to go quite 800 miles.
Through territory of various other chiefs and so on. It was
amazing that they managed to get it back to the coast.
Troy: And the evidence that this was Livingstone?
Clark: They examined the body, of course, and found the broken arm.
We ve got it from the College of Surgeons, I think, in London.
And he s buried in Westminster Abbey.
Troy: But the monument s still there at the village.
Clark: Oh, yes. Not a very impressive monument. I suppose it was the
best that they could do at the time- -probably done by the British
South Africa Companymust have been.
Betty: Does it get a lot of visitors now?
Clark: I don t know, because I haven t been there to see it for a very
long time.
Betty: Doesn t sound likely.
Clark: It was a completely isolated area. I don t think anybody was
livingwell there was a caretaker there who had to clean the bush
from around it and a little path up to it and so on. I think
there were some white stonesthe usual sort of thing.
Troy: Now somewhere here I must ask you about the Leakeys, Betty.
Betty: Oh, yes, I enjoyed the Leakeys very much. Particularly Lewis, the
father.
Troy: I ve heard that they raised Dalmatians,
them?
And then didn t you raise
57
Betty: That s right. We started off with two of their Dalmatians.
[to Desmond] You came back on leave, I think it was the first
timeyou came with this Dalmatian puppy.
Clark: Yes, and we raised two, three litters. We had two Dalmatians up
to a very short time before we left. One died and the one left we
gave to a very good friend of ours who brought it home to England
when they were going back to Englandhad to go for six months
into the quarantine, poor thing.
her.
Betty saw it when it was really quite old, and it still knew
Betty: Yes. It was amazing. And now our daughter has Dalmatians. Only
hers are both bitches, so there aren t any young involved.
Drawing Artifacts. Running Camps. Recording Meetings
Troy: Betty, what was your reaction when Desmond first presented you
with a pile of rock and said, "Can
you draw these?"
Betty: Well, I do remember my first attempt. I knew that they had to be
single lines. You couldn t have shading. And I was given
ordinary drawing paper, white drawing paper and ink. And I
produced not bad drawings, were they?
Clark: Oh, they were very good.
Betty: And we sent them to the printer with the paper and he said, "Oh,
no, you can t do them on that. I can t reproduce them from that."
So I had to go back, and we went to the Ordnance Survey department
and said, "What can we do." And they gave me some sort of linen
transparent linen. And I transferred them to the linen and then
it worked.
Clark: Many of your drawings were done on linen, yes.
Betty: It was what the Ordnance Survey did their maps on.
Troy: The first big lot of material, this famous twenty-two boxes. Did
you draw some of that?
Clark: Betty drew all those, yes. Yes, I ve still got all the drawings,
of course, all the original drawings still there.
58
Betty: And I couldn t do them now, so don t ask me. [laughter]
Clark: No, of course.
Troy: But you didn t have any formal training. You just knew that you
couldn t shade them they had to be single lines.
Betty: Well, I just knew that they had to have the grain of the stone
going in the correct direction as it did on the stone. And you
had to have the shape. We drew the shape frcm shadows.
Clark: You had to know from where the flakes had been removed if you were
looking at a core or a biface or something like that. And there
is a convention for indicating the direction.
Betty: Of the blow.
Clark: If it was struck on the outside, you see, the peripheral edge, you
get a big flake out like that and then the lines indicating the
concentric circles around the place where it was struck. Because
initially what you have is only the negative of part of a cone.
You can get a very nice cone if you use a BB gun and fire it at a
piece of glassthen you get a perfect cone out of that, you see.
Well, very rarely do you find complete cones in connection with
flaking of stone. You only get partial ones, or basically just
the negatives in the core tools, if you see what I mean. They
would be positives of course with the flakes that came off.
Betty: Except you seldom had those.
Clark: And there are conventions to show precisely what it is that you
are looking at--a striking platform and how many flakes, little
pieces knocked off in order to form the striking platform, and
what the upper face looks like. And there may be some retouch on
it around the edges. All of that has to be shown, of course.
Betty got very skillful at doing that.
Betty: Well, it has to be done--I used to do it to actual size. But
almost all of it had to be reduced before it was printed. So
that s also a problem. You have to make the kind of lines which
will look thin but won t disappear when they reduce them. The
most difficult ones, really, were what are called the microliths.
They were half an inch big and you had to draw those natural size
too. And that wasn t too easy. But you got into the habit of
doing it.
Troy: You said shadows, so you d have light which would allow you to do
an outline that could be from a lamp or a natural source?
PLATK 26
Tshilnlian Tnnhfmm Coiutui hxcnvalion: Pttitx trancltets
1-8. Sub-rWngulfl( truncated (l;ik<;
fragment! with stroisht single edge retouch. Nr
cw. 1-6
centre Kction*, 7 and 8 tip cuss,
9-II.Tri.inRiil.ur trunratetl (late fufpnentl (lip cr.ds) M-ilh slraiuhl sinsjlc cdse retouch.
12-16. Triangular tnuwMoJ (lakt fn^BKuU (lil( end*) willi c^rcd concive cclyc rclotich.
17-20. Truncatixl fl-ifcc fragment* with double sirjusjlil odc retouch. Broad trAivcxiums.
No. 20 po*sil>iv derived.
21. Awl.
No* 2, 8, tO, 13. 15, 19 diui 21, <|uoruilic fwcieti remainder ckalccdonic fci of
gra. polgmvrphe.
Illustrations by Betty Clark, 1963
59
Betty: It was a lamp usually.
Clark: What you did is you normally had the light coming from the left-
hand side, coming so that you could see where the darker parts of
it were. But you could do it the other way around. And of course
some of the really difficult artifacts to draw are made of semi-
crystalline quartz or quartzite.
Betty: It s hard to see the edges on that.
Troy: Have you ever reckoned how many drawings you ve done, Betty?
Betty: No! Quite a number, though. I spent hours doing them.
Clark: Some of the best are being published in Kalambo Volume 3. 6
Troy: Betty--did you get up into the Afar? Did you get up into
Ethiopia?
Betty: Yes. I went on some of Desmond s digs. I used to run camps when
I wasn t drawing the stones.
Clark: Betty organized the commissariat, all the accounts and so on in
1981, in the Afar.
Troy: We talked about mounting expeditions, Betty, and Desmond has told
me that you were essentially the person who ran the whole show.
Betty: Oh, I did, and I made the ends meet, you see. We never ended up
with having to pay a whole lot of money ourselves. It always
worked. I quite enjoyed it, actually. I wouldn t now.
Troy: I imagine in mounting one of those expeditions you d be up in the
middle of the night thinking things through.
Betty: And also you had the problem of feeding people, and our digs were
always miles away from anywhere, so you had to have a vehicle and
6
"Mama, whilst you said you couldn t draw those stones now, in point
of fact you were drawing them right the way through Father s time in India,
and for a long time, many years, you drew his artifacts for him." [EW]
"That s right. I even drew the little tiny microliths that were
so smallsome of them were no bigger than a half inch. I don t know how I
managed it." [BC]
60
you had to have proper facilities to buy the food you needed. And
there were always a group of us, so we needed lots of food. 6
Clark: Yes, we used to go into Gewane to buy a couple sheep or a couple
of goats or something.
6
"Mama, let s talk a little bit more about the camps and how you
organized them, the ones in Africa, in particular the ones in Malawi and
Ethiopia. How difficult was it, really, to run them?" [EW]
"When you got used to what you had to do, you knew automatically
what you were going to have to do. The food had to brought in from outside
the camping area, because usually where one camped, where the artifacts
were to be found, didn t have much in the way of game, and certainly in the
way of vegetable foods. So they all had to be brought in. You couldn t
always get fresh vegetables, but every so often we used to manage to get to
somewhere with shops. And you could certainly get canned vegetables. And
quite often, too, people would come to the camp when they found that we
wanted things that they had, and sell them to us. We did manage to buy
game locally, and sometimes vegetable foodstuffs.
"Basic thingswell, flour I don t think we had. Rice we had.
But we must have had flour, for bread. And for storing things we usually
had a large tent, which was the storage tent, and we had the food that we
were trying to store stacked in there as carefully as possible.
"We had to go into some headquarters somewhere regularly, maybe
every three or four weeks. Sometimes it took you a night on the way to get
there. And there weren t roads, they were tracks, but Land Rovers will go
in places like that. Incidentally, I used to drive one.
"We
usually found a source of water near where the camp was
pitched. But it had to be boiled before it could be drunk. And so we had
a whole row of canvas sacks, water bags, filled with water, set out to cool
off. Once you made the Africans understand that you had to have it boiled,
we didn t have any trouble." [BC]
"Was there sort of an evening drink?" [EW]
"Yes, there quite definitely was. What we did in the camp was,
when it was started up, everyone who was joining our work force had to
bring with them a bottle of alcohol, usually something like whiskey or gin
or something which could be mixed. We didn t bring any beer because a
bottle of beer was quite heavy and it didn t go very far- -it was only one
drink for a thirsty man. So we had spirits that could be diluted with
boiled water, if necessary. And then when I went shopping in the towns I
came back with as many bottles of hard liquor as I could bring.
"By the end of the day people were tired, and everything was
awful, so you had a good drink. When we had finished our work we went back
to our various tents and had as good a wash as we could manage, and then we
all met together in the main tent and had a drink, and began to feel more
human again. Even those who didn t drink- -this custom helped to bring the
members of the team together." [BC]
61
Troy :
Betty:
Clark:
Betty:
Clark:
Betty:
Clark:
And another of your roles was as recorder sometimes? You recorded
many meetings, didn t you? The big meetings like the Pan-African
Congresses and the Wenner-Gren meetings in Austria.
I don t remember. I may have.
Yes. Do you remember when you were one of the rapporteurs at that
three-week one that produced Background to Evolution in Africa
with Bill Bishop? And a previous one, as well, that had been
organized by [Clark Howell] and Francois Bourliere. You did all
of that, I think.
Well, I m afraid I ve forgotten it.
Sonia Cole and Barbara Isaac helped out. And everything said
around this big round table with lovely green baize on it was
recorded. Not by--did you use a tape recorder?
No.
I didn t think so. I think you made notes.
The Return to England
Troy: I ve talked to Desmond about his sense of being an African and he
feels strongly that he was always English, and that you got home
often enough to maintain those connections.
Betty: Well, we did of course, but when the war started we had to stay
therewell, it was 38 to 46.
Troy: Do you remember the return, Betty? Where did you arrive?
Clark: We arrived at Southampton, was it? Or Portsmouth, probably.
8
Betty: But the families didn t meet us at the dock, did they?
8
"Father says we possibly arrived in Portsmouth. We didn tthe
Castle Line always arrived in Southhampton, and we took the boat train from
Southhampton to London. I remember this distinctly: I was aged eight, and
I had been brought up on the Zambezi River, which is a river, and I had
heard of the Thames all of my life. And when we got our first view of the
Thames I have never been more shattered or disappointed in my life. I had
always thought of it as a River and it appeared no more than a stream. "
[EW]
62
Clark: My mother and father met us. And we drove back to North End where
we were, I think for a time. Then we had leased the White Cottage
in Granchester, thanks to Miles and Peggy Burkitt, and so we went
there. We had Christmas, of course, back in North End with our
family, which was nice.
It was bitterly cold--the winter of 46- 47 was a very, very
cold one in England, I think I ve mentioned it. And the roof
would leak and so on in this old cottage, and icicles would form
on the ceiling of the sitting room. But one of the great things
was we had an Aga cooker.
Troy: What s that?
Clark: It s a stove.
Betty: It works on little tiny grains of coal. And you have to stoke it
morning and evening. And it never goes out.
Betty: The kitchens were never cold, you see. And it also heated the
water and did all kinds of things.
8
Troy: [makes a joke about the Aga Khan]
Clark: Talking of the Aga Khan, he had a lot of his supporters,
followers, because he was meant to be divine. He would come
regularly to East Africa, to Nairobi or Mombasa or down to Dar Es
Salaam to meet his followers and he would actually- -he was very
generous. Of course he had enormous wealth, I think, which he
distributed to his Indian followers. He was actually weighed in
gold or whatever it was--he was a pretty heavy man, I ve seen
pictures of him- -and equivalent in coin or whatever it was would
be distributed to the various people.
There was one story--after this he would ask his followers,
"Do
you have any questions about me?" And he was of course a
divine Muslimat least that s what he was meant to be. And one
young Indian said, "Tell us, your supreme highness, how is it that
8
"Mama, if you recall, one of the other problems when you first got
back to England was that there was still rationing after the war, so that
you couldn t easily buy cheese and meat and eggs and funny things like
that." [EW]
"When we were staying in Granchester, Desmond used to cycle the
three miles into Cambridge every day, and he asked whether there would be
any food that we would like to have brought back, and I said yes, and he
came back with a pint of unpeeled prawns, which was a little of fputting !"
[BC]
63
you are a strict Muslim? We see you drinking champagne at parties
and that kind of thing."
"Oh, yes," he said, "but
you see, being divine, as soon as the
alcohol touches my lips, it turns to water." And the little
Indian lad thought for a moment and said, "Yes, your supreme
highness, it is of course much the same with us, but it takes a
little longer." [laughter]
Troy: When you went back that time, Betty, did you go to Bradford?
Betty: My parents didn t live in Bradford at that point. They lived in a
little place called Guiseley, in Yorkshire, near Ilkley.
Clark: Nice little place.
Troy: [discusses difficulties of Yorkshire English] Desmond, when you
first met Betty in Cambridge did she speak this difficult
language?
Clark: No she didn t, no.
Betty: [laughs] Of course I didn t, I wasn t allowed to.
The thing that surprised me recently about Australia is their
English is not understandable.
Clark: Some of it.
Troy: When you got back to England, both of you, were you overwhelmed by
what you saw as the result of war?
Clark: It was pretty impressive, so far as the center of London was
concerned. Yes, I do well remember that. It was the first time
that you could see St. Paul s. Previously there had been
buildings built right up more or less all the way around it.
Betty: The countryside didn t seem to have changed very much, did it?
Clark: No--it hadn t changed- -definitely hadn t changed. It took a few
years for things to change.
Troy: You hadn t seen your relatives going on eight, nine years, that
must have been a bit of a shock at first.
Betty: Well, I think it must have been a shock to our parents, because
they d never seen our children. The children didn t always behave
themselves as our parents hoped they might.
Clark: And my father was not well, which was sad. He had diabetes and he
may have had the beginnings of the prostate cancer that he had
that killed him.
Bushy the Galago. and Other Friends
Troy: You mentioned when you were off in Somaliland as an army officer,
and you only got back once, for training in gas warfare school,
and I think you came back through Livingstone?
Clark: And I had my leave immediately after that.
I only had one leave, didn t I?
Betty: No, I think you had two. You had a short leave when you brought
that manHarry Braddell was his name.
Clark: Yes, that s right.
Betty: I never forgave you for thatthe children. You d never seen the
little boy at all before this, and you took not the faintest bit
of notice of him. You were playing with this other man in the
swimming pool half the time.
Clark: Was I?
Betty: Yes.
Clark: Yes. That s right. I do remember I was due to go on leave to
pick up one of these big five-ton diesel trucks, the Italian ones,
and take it down to somewhere in Nairobi, I suppose, something
like that. And I think it was the day before, I went down with
hepatitis A, I suppose it s called now. What did we call it?
Betty: Jaundice.
Clark: Jaundice, that s right, yes. Jaundice. It made you all yellow.
I suppose it was something that attacked your kidneys, must have
been. I felt so dreadful.
And I just couldn t go, I couldn t get on it, but I did
probably two weeks later or maybe three weeks later, something
like that. I ve never forgotten that. I would lie in my bed and
watch the bush babies you know the galagos at night when they
came out. Delightful little creatures. They would jump. There
were posts, and then a big bit of mosquito gauze, you see on a
65
frame. And they d jump from the post, down onto the frame, up the
other one.
Troy: And this was in Livingstone?
Clark: No this was in Isha Baidoa.
I remember in Kenya some previous civil affairs officer had
built a mosquito cage, a big thing, would take just about a double
bed, I think, really. You d have your bed in there, a table and a
chair and so on, and with a door and the rest of it. So that way
you didn t have to sleep under the mosquito net.
Reminds me--Gervas Clay, when he was district commissioner at
a place called Sesheke, which is down in the southwest of
Barotseland I think I mentioned he married one of Baden-Powell s
daughters, Bettythey slept under one of these mosquito cages.
And a provincial commissioner, came on tour to inspect, a man
called Gordon Reid, an old ex-British South Africa Company man,
pretty rough and ready, and so on, and married to also a rather
rough and ready wife.
Well, of course Gervas and Betty- -you d turn out of your
bedroom because you probably wouldn t have another good one, and
give it to the provincial commissioner and his wife if she was
there. And Gordo, as he [Gordon Reid] was called, and his wife I
can t remember what his wife s name was, but she said, "Gawd,
Gordo! They ve given us the breeding cage!" [laughter] Think
they had three children- -always remembered that one, these are the
kinds of stories that you remember.
And talking of galagos , the Winterbottoms it s his elder son
that our daughter Elizabeth married, and they live in Australia,
she s Elizabeth Winterbottom. At any rate, Jack Winterbottom was
a well-known ornithologist. When he was in northern Rhodesia he
was the African education officer for the southern province around
Livingstone. Well, they had a tame galago, and they fed it. It
lived around the house, and their house was almost opposite the
hospital, and one day Bushy, as the galago was called, escaped and
turned up in the hospital where a chap, recovering from DTs,
turned toward his side table with his pills and so on, and saw
Bushy fingering the pill bottle or something, so he went back to
have more DTs .
Bushy after that was sent up to Kalomo to very good friends,
the Andersons, and they had Bushy for quite a long time. Bushy
subsequently escaped from there as well. He turned up about six
miles away at a farm house. They knew the farm people very well
the son lived there with his mother, I think his father had died--
66
Betty:
Clark:
Betty:
Clark:
Troy:
Betty:
Clark:
Troy:
and in the middle of the night, she woke up and called her son.
"Come quickly! I think there s a burglar here, and I ve shut him
in the wardrobe." [laughter] They opened the wardrobe and all
they found was Bushy. But that was the last we heard of Bushy. I
don t know what happened to him.
Another good friend we haven t talked about too much is Arthur
Brew. Remember Arthur Brew?
Yes. He was the curator of the Victoria Falls area when we first
got there.
Yes, he must have got there some time in the late thirties, about
when the Victoria Falls Trust was first formed. But he was an
awfully nice man.
With a termagant wife.
Curious sort of wife, Ruth Brew was her name.
What kind of wife, Betty?
I said termagant.
Well, she wasn t really. She was a bit irritating,
frustrated, if you see what I mean, I think.
She was a bit
I shall never forget one time after having gone to them to
have a beer at lunch time, and somebody had left their car in
front on the drive, and mine was behind that, and I had to get out
to go off. So I backed the car, backed it magnificently because
she had a bed of salvias--you know those blue salvias, really
rather nice and I managed to back the car so that the bed of blue
salvias was immediately underneath the car, two sets of wheels
were on either side.
Very skillful piece of work! She was quite pleased that I had
successfully maneuvered it and that the salvias had survived.
Betty, did you see women having various experiences as young
mothers in that climate. It must have been hard for some of the
women .
Clark:
Betty:
I would say yes, I think it must have been,
in remarkably well.
The majority fitted
We never knew, for instance, all the railway peoplethe bottom
part of the town was occupied by railway people who mostly came
from South Africa, and mostly weren t particularly well educated
67
or anything, so one didn t really know what was going on with
them. The people we knew were the government officers, if you
like, and the shopkeepers.
Clark: The provincial administration.
Betty: Yes. And they got leave back to Europe every three years.
Whereas the railway peoplewell, they must have had some kind of
leave, but they didn t go back anywhere because most of them
originated in South Africa anyway. So I don t know whether they
enjoyed it or not.
Clark: The railway was about a couple of hundred yards or so beyond the
museum and its mango trees. Always there the engineer, the driver
of the train, would always hoot like mad just to tell his wife he
was on his way back. [laughter]
Songwe and the Gorges . the People and the Geology
Troy: Now, where we were- -you got over your jaundice and then you came
down from Isha Baidoa.
Clark: And had leave, yes. I can t remember too much about it. How much
did I have? Two weeks? Probably something like that.
Troy: You didn t go back up to Somaliland, did you, after that?
Clark: No. I ve never been back to Somaliland.
Troy: One place you haven t been back to.
Clark: I don t think I have, no. No. Those were good days.
Betty: Well, I don t suppose the days were any better than they are now,
but we were young.
Clark: That s what I mean, yes.
Remember going down to the fifth gorge and then walking down
to the Songwe- -that was the seventh gorge, wasn t it?
Betty: Yes.
Clark: That s rightand from the Songwe we walked downmust have been
at least ten miles, I should think down to the Chimamba Rapids,
remember that? Climbing down.
68
Betty: Yes.
Clark: There were two little falls. The whole thing was about fifteen to
twenty feet or so, I suppose. Nothing very much. But there had
been a refuge on the other sidethe Zimbabwe sidethe local
people used. There s also one at the third gorge as well where
the local people hid when the Ndebele came up on raids .
They
would come up and steal cattle and women and kill the men.
Troy: That was the tribe downstream.
Clark: That one was a biggish one at Chimamba.
Troy: What was the name of the group that came up? Ndebele?
Clark: The Ndebele. They were the Matebele, you see what I mean? An
important group led by Mzilikazi. They were a group of Zulus or
close to that that had been displaced by Shaka when he formed his
kingdom and his army, which was more or less undefeatable with the
rigor of training and the way in which they carried out their
warfare.
At any rate, numbers of people from the town went off.
Mzilikazi--am I right in that? I think, yes, that s right. And
of course his son was Lobengula, and the wars between the Ndebele
and the British South Africa Company are well known after Rhodes
had come up there. Another groupthey were led by Sebatwane
went up to Barotseland and conquered the Lozi for about maybe
twenty years, something like that. And then they were clobbered,
although the language has survived- -and the language spoken in
Barotseland used to be called Sikololo in my day.
Troy: After the man.
Clark: Yes. After the people.
Troy: After the people.
Clark: The Makololothe people were the Makalolo.
David Livingstone knew Sebetwane and liked him very much.
Sebetwane died between the time that Livingstone had arrived in
1855 to "discover" the falls and see Sebetwane, and gone on to
Angola and then come back again. Sebetwane had died and his
successor took over. But Livingstone took, I suppose half a dozen
Makalolo with him down when he was going to reach the sea in
Mozambique, and they dropped off in Malawi mostly, I think it was,
where they formed little kingdoms of their own for several years.
69
But the other group who were Ngoni split off from Natal and
came up. There was a man, Zwangendaba, who was the main chief
there, and they crossed the Zambezican t remember where it was,
some rapids there where they crossed. And when they crossed there
was an eclipse of the sun, so we know precisely the hour, and the
time, date and so on when they crossed. And they moved up into
eastern what is now Zambia, established themselves there for a
time, and clobbered a whole lot of the people around very much so.
And then Zwangendaba had died and I think there was
dissension, of coursethere always is with sons. One group moved
up virtually to the southern shores of Lake Victoria and half way
back again, I think it was. The other group, they all finally
ended up in Zambia and Malawi, where they are today, very good,
excellent people.
Troy: And what are they called now?
Clark: Ngoni. And we had a number of them of course with us during the
war. Very good askaris [Swahili for scouters] .
Troy: These falls you were talking about hiking to. What do you call
those? Fault lines there?
Clark: Four or five faults or shatter belts filled up with loose material
you see, and when the river was able to cut back to the next one,
it maybe automatically found its way back into one as is the case
today if you look at the one on the south side, Cataract Island.
There is a fissure going back there and once the river gets back
if there s more water coming over it, then it will probably cut
its way back to another line of weakness. Then the falls will go
along this line, and the piece of the bed that was left would be
high and dry, you see.
Well, there was one of these between the second and third
gorges, or third and fourth gorges, which you could approach only
by knife edge, which we did. And up on the top there were a whole
lot of big pots, which would have been used for storage of both
food and water, put there by the local Toka people as a refuge.
Troy: And you remember going down there these would be picnics and
hikes you would take.
Clark: That s right. It would be a Sunday picnic or something.
Troy: And these pots were still up there.
Clark: At least one of them we took and put in the museum. The others
are still there unless somebody s moved them, of course.
70
Troy: Betty, would you like to be back in Livingstone?
Betty: Not now. We went back and somehow it wasn t the same, was it?
Clark: Not quite. No, it wasn t the same. And of course the only time
that we d been there, you see, after the war, Livingstone had
fallen on sad times because the tourist industry had completely
died. Most of the people coming to Livingstone would come from
the south and come over, you see. And during the UDI, Ian Smith s
government declared unilateral something [declaration of]
independence, and for several years of course that ran and there
was a complete cut off between Zambia and Zimbabwe.
It wasn t Zimbabwe at that time--it was called Southern
Rhodesia. Previous to that there d been the Federation of
Rhodesia and Nyasaland. And that of course had Dr. Godfrey
Huggins--Sir Godfrey, he was probably knighted a surgeon from
Southern Rhodesia in Salisbury now Harare. He was the prime
minister.
And then it was taken over by Roy Welensky. Quite a
character. He was a heavyweight boxer for Northern Rhodesia. He
was an engine driver, and I well remember a lunch in Government
House and the governor saying to Roy, "Tell me, Mr. Welensky, when
you re driving your train, your engine, what do you think about?"
Well, we know what he thought abouthe became a very fine
politician. Nice guy. Very good.
Betty: Don t you remember that he always had to reserve two seats on the
local airplanesbecause he was too heavy for one.
The Move to Berkeley
Troy: Betty, when you came to Berkeley were you in this house?
Betty: No, we rented a house from somebody that was on leave. I ve a
feeling we used to get to it by going up Marin, which was a little
alarming to begin with.
Troy: And your children were beginning to think about going off to
university at that time, is that right?
Clark: Elizabeth must have finished, I think. She came over with us,
didn t she? Drove out with us across country?
71
Betty: Yes, she did. That s right because she was driving the car when
one of the tires burst, and we couldn t replace it so we had to go
without a spare.
Troy: You had never been to Berkeley before, had you?
Clark: No, never.
Troy: It must have seemed a little cold.
Clark: We arrived here in August, I think. So that it was really sort of
pleasantly warm. It could even have been September, I don t know
--beginning of the fall.
I remember we had our friends Sherry Washburn and Bob Heizer
we saw a lot of. As in Africa, one had the custom of after dinner
the gentlemen would go into the garden in order to relieve
themselves--and the ladies of course, would in due course go into
the sitting room, and the men would come back and they would
converse.
Troy: Any particular place in the garden that you relieved yourself?
Clark: Well, there were a few forbidden places. There was a story about
one district commissioner s wife leaning out of the window and
saying, "Gentlemen, not on my geraniums, please."
So we simply went outside here, continued the custom, but when
it got a little colder we ended the custom. [laughter]
Troy: Betty, you get back to England quite a little bit?
Betty: Yes. I went to stay with my son near Canterbury. And my
husband s sister is there, and I have various relatives, but I
never see them. I never even saw them when we lived there. So I
don t know anything about them.
Clark: And your brother, Betty.
Betty: Oh, yes, my brother and his wife. Their older son was recently
killed by a lorry. He was on the side of a freeway helping a
woman whose car had got stuck, and the lorry ran into both of them
and killed them.
Clark: Betty s brother had been in the British Army. Korea as well.
Betty: He started at the age of eighteen, you see. He was just young
enough to be called up right at the beginning of the war. So he
had a long war.
72
Troy: Well, now we ve come to the end of our time. I want to thank you
very much, Betty, and wish you a fine visit back in Australia with
your daughter. You enjoy visiting there?
Betty: Oh, yes, of course Australia itself is quite pleasant.
But what I really like is my daughter! And they have a flat
at the bottom of their garden, which I was hoping that Desmond
would agree to come and live in, because it would be ours for as
long as we wanted it, but he won t.
Clark: I can t yet, darling. I ve got too much on my plate to do.
73
IV THE YEARS BEFORE THE WAR
Livingstone Museum Exhibitions. Collections, and Library
Troy: We re going to talk with Desmond about the museum world, but
before that I wanted to know if you ever met Elizabeth Thomas who
did the book on the Khalahari people?
Clark: Yes. I did know her. In fact, I think she s written two books.
She s still alive. Classic books. Wrote a book about the
harmless people, or something [The Harmless People, Knopf, 1959].
She also wrote at least one novel, which I have read, and I ve
enjoyed both of those books very much.
Troy: I think she wrote a novel called Reindeer Afoon [Houghton Mifflin,
1987] .
Clark: That s right, yes. It was much truer to what one reckons life
would have been like in the Upper Paleolithic than those much more
popular ones.
And Richard Lee, who was Sherry s studentmine to some
extent, actually, did the prehistory seminar with me--he has done
quite a lot on the Khalahari San of one kind or another, but
mostly, I think, on the IKung. As well as Lorna Marshall, who has
also written on the IKung.
Troy: I know that you did some wonderful survey work among the San
people, and of course, Livingstone was very close to that country.
Clark: Oh, yes. They come right up to the northern part of the Kalahari.
Basically up to the Zambezi.
Troy: And you ve discussed somewhere the origin of the name "Zambezi."
Clark: I discussed it in connection with the spelling. The official
spelling, which was recognized by the Royal Geographical Society s
74
place names committeeGod knows what happens now, of course,
after independencebut it was decided the spelling of Zambezi
would be Z-A-M-B-E-Z-I. I don t know what the origin of the word
is. It could, I suppose, possibly be a Makalolo word.
Makalolo were a tribal group who had been stirred up by Chaka
and his Zulu. Chaka was the great Zulu leader, you know, who
regimented the Zulu into almost undefeatable military
organization, defeated only byfirst of all, I think, by the
Dutch, and then by the British using, of course, guns and rifles.
But the Makalolo were a gr-up that came up, migratory group,
living basically off the proceeds of raiding and stealing cattle
and so on. They established themselves in the upper Zambezi
Valley in what is called Barotseland. It was the country of the
Lozi, and the Lozi were defeated, and the Makalolo established
themselves as a sort of elite force, married Lozi women.
And the language that they spoke was Sikololo. That language
is now really basically the language of the Lozi, because they
more or less took it over. There was a revolt in due course,
after Sebitwane was the main chief who brought them up there,
after he died, there was squabbling between sons and so on, and
the Lozi led a very successful revolt. I think they clobbered
most of the Makalolo males .
And the Lozi established themselves, established a very strong
central organization basically encompassing the whole of the
economy of the Barotse Basin, and this internal trade work went on
very successfully right through. After, the Lozi paramount chief,
Lewanika, had invited Cecil Rhodes to send up some people to start
an administration in what was called northwestern Rhodesia that s
the lower of the two bulges that form Zambia today that was in
1879. I met and talked for numbers of days with Frank
Worthington, the secretary or chief secretary, if you like, who
was sent up with [Robert Thorne] Coryndon, who later, of course,
went to Kenya, and after whom the Coryndon Museum was named. They
established the administration there.
Frank Worthington had magnificent stories. All sorts of super
stories. He came back, wrote his memoirs, or quite a lot of them,
and they are in the Livingstone Museum now.
Troy: When did he first get out there?
Clark: He got to Lealui, which was the capital of Barotseland, in 1879.
But let s talk about the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum.
75
Troy: Yes, let s. You brought a lot more people out, didn t you? You
mentioned that the staff was increased as the museum itself grew.
Clark: Yes. You see, it started off with me, and Betty as the secretary.
We had more secretarial help, which was invaluable. In due
course, we were able to appoint an archaeologist to deal with the
later archaeology of Zambia, namely, the Iron Age, as it s called.
Raymond Inskeep was appointed first to that position.
Then Ray had an offer back at Cambridge which he took. Then
we appointed Brian Fagan, and Brian was there for a number of
years with me. Between the two of them, they really established
the pioneer work for our understanding of the Iron Age of south
central Africa. Later Inskeep went to Cape Town to take over the
archaeology program there, which of course had lapsed after John
Goodwin s death, one or two interim people, and then Ray
reestablished it, and established it extremely well.
A number of people who have worked in South Africa in the
sixties, seventies, eighties and so on, and who are now starting
to retire, were trained by Ray. Excellent people. And he s back
now, he went back, had a position back in Oxford, retired about, I
think it was about three or four years ago now. We keep in touch
continuously.
Troy: Brian Fagan is down at UC Santa Barbara, is it?
Clark: Yes. Brian was working on the Iron Age very, very successfully,
up to the time when there was a disastrous fire down in Santa
Barbara and his house was burnt and all his notes and slides and
everything were all destroyed. I think it was around about that
time that he decided, rather than to continue with research,
primary research in Africa, that he would start writing more
popular books on archaeology. Archaeology, human origins, the
rest of it. And that s what he has done. He s written a number
of excellent volumes, extremely accurate.
I was told he actually was at the SAA [Society of Africanist
Archaeologists] meetings, but I never saw him, unfortunately.
Quite a lot of people, of course, one didn t see, because there
were a couple of thousand people there, I think. But we keep in
touch regularly, and when Brian comes up here he always phones up
and we go out and have dinner somewhere. And on more rare
occasions when I go down to Santa Barbara, I go and see him there.
Troy: In addition to the archaeology component, you brought in a number
of other people.
76
Clark: Yes. First of all, we had a man called Tom Wylie from Canada as
an ethnographer. He didn t do a great deal when he was there, and
so I think we decided that it probably wasn t, after the first
three years, wasn t worth his continuing. Then we appointed
Barrie Reynolds who was Cambridge-trained, and Barrie built up the
ethnographic department extremely well. A very fine collection
which has been-- [telephone rings, tape interruption for a
telephone call concerning the approaching death of Clark s close
friend and colleague, Sherwood Washburn]
Troy: We d like to record a little bit about Sherry [Sherwood] Washburn.
Desmond s been asked to write a piece relative to Washburn s work
at Berkeley and his memories of him, so we re going to leave off
the discussion of the Livingstone Museum for a moment and do this
more immediately important thing.
Clark: [begins dictating an obituary]
Sherry Washburn established the paleoanthropology program in
the University of California at Berkeley two years before I got
here, in 59. It became the most influential program for the
study of primatology of fossil man and the biological and cultural
evolution of humanity of this century. He recruited specialists,
some trained by himself and others from the international world,
which made this program the keystone for the ongoing research into
human origins and behavioral evolution of our lineage. Those who
were his friends and those who continue his work will forever be
in his debt. And his pioneer field studies began the active
primate research undertaken today. I think that s about all I--
[becomes emotional]. It s never easy to do these things on short
notice.
So now we can continue [with the oral history] .
Troy: Yes. I had a note that Clayton Holliday was also a brilliant
natural historian.
Clark: Oh, yes indeed. Clayton was appointed technical officer, and he
was responsible for conservation, preserving the exhibits and the
collections. He did a very good job. He came from South Africa,
from Natal. He had a natural science degree and he made some
interesting collections, started the basis, I suppose, for the
natural history collections that were built up in later years . He
was a very good photographer, photographed artifacts at sites and
so on, a number of them. He also carried out various experiments,
particularly one associated with rock art, and the medium for
mixing the pigment, and the amount of weathering and resistance
and so on that some of these mixed pigments had. Valuable work,
which we published a number of years ago now.
77
He in due course went down to Port Elizabeth, South Africa,
which is in the Cape province, and became the director of the art
gallery down there. And when we went in to see him there, one of
the very first things we saw there was a superb bronze of swimming
mermaids --or dolphins, I can t remember- -which was done by my
cousin, the sculptor David Wynne, which they had recently acquired
down there .
Troy: And you didn t know that he had gotten this piece for the Port
Elizabeth museum?
Clark: No. Clayton hadn t realized that David was my cousin, first
cousin. I see David from time to time. He s done various things
in conjunction with Prince Charles and so on.
Troy: Is he still with us, and living in England?
Clark: Oh, yes, very much so. He s working with--can t remember now, but
at any rate it s on the Save the Rhinos, and he produced a
magnificent rhino. His animals are superb. Did quite a bit over
here, I think, in Canada, one or two things in the United States,
a superb grizzly bear, I remember. Polar bear and so on. Also
did the hands on one of the English coins, the clasped hands.
Troy: Now, the new building had a new administrative wing, and I
understand there was a little tower in which you had an office?
Clark: Oh, yes. We moved in finally, and it was good. We had had
perpetual problems in the old museum with termites and various
things, hunting wasps and so on, those things that would destroy
pages in books. Thanks to the copper companies, the British South
Africa Company, various individuals, and the [Sir Alfred] Beit
Trust, we were able to get enough funding to build a new museum.
And there it is, at the top of the hill, going up to the main
street in Livingstone. Quite an impressive place. It has a big
tower, and the galleries and administrative wing are around a
square atrium in the middle, open to the sky, with more exhibits
and so on in it.
Troy: And that s where you had the murals by Ranford Sililo?
Clark: That s right. They were fine, and we built up, of course, a
series of cases with little dioramas and various other literature
that would travel around to schools. They were all primary
schools in the villages, and we would go out and give little
lectures, little talks, rather, to them, and in that way we
established, and then began to build up, an interest in the people
who might find things. So they began to write in to tell us that
78
there were all sorts of interesting things in their area, which
was a good thing. We had a close relationship with the people.
Troy: So this was really early museum outreach, with your small
traveling exhibits, and you had films too, as well?
Clark: We had films which we made, yes, indeed. The museum did research,
and with its exhibitions and traveling exhibits and so on, it
produced this outreach to the people in order to try to impress
upon them that much of their history and their ethnic history lies
in the archaeology to be cnnducted and interpreted.
We also established the National Monuments Commission, which
prevented people doing wholesale looting of important sites,
damaging sites, that kind of thing, and generally started to
develop among the people an awareness of historic and prehistoric
sites that could be made accessible to people to go and visit.
The Livingstone Memorial, for example, where David Livingstone
died, on the end of Lake Bangweolo, was perhaps the most famous of
these.
Troy: These were tracts of land and various sites.
Clark: Small tracts of land around the actual sites, yes. And we would
put up some kind of a small monument, a standard kind of monument
with a bronze plaque saying what it was and a means of access to
go and look at them.
Troy: I was going to ask you why that Livingstone Memorial was located
where it was.
Clark: It s because that s where he d finally died. At Chitambo s
village. Chitambo was the local chief. [spells]
Troy: I remember finding it on a map, Desmond, and I thought, My gosh,
why was this up here? It seems like beautiful country. But it
was north and east of Lusaka, I think.
Clark: Quite a long trek. And of course, what he was doing is he was
walkingit was during the rains as well--and so he was walking
through water round the edge of Lake Bangweolo, which had flooded,
of course, at that time. He d lost his somebody had stolen his
medicine chest. He must have been suffering from malaria,
hookworm, probably several other of the sort of parasitic diseases
and so on.
Troy: How old was he at this point?
79
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
I think he was about sixty-odd. I think that was it. It was 1873
he died; it was 1871, I think, if I m right, that Morton Stanley
met him at Ujiji, where he had been staying as a guest of the
local Arabs, because his funds had run out, his resources had run
out. But there he was with his notebooks, small notebooks which
he would write in as he walked through the bush, and then write up
his big journal about every three to four days. Must have been a
remarkable man.
To carry his journal and do that,
centers of the slave trade?
Ujiji was one of the Arab
Ujiji was the main trading center on Lake Tanganyika, yes.
Wasn t necessarily just for slave trade, but certainly that was
probably a reality in the 19th century.
It was very much of a reality.
And then he left Ujiji and he was on foot when he passed away?
Yes. By that time, he essentially was an explorer, rather than a
missionary. What he was looking for was the lake from which the
Nile had its source. In point of fact, he never found it, you
see. He found the Lualaba River, was on the Lualaba for quite a
time. But this is a different story in itself. We had a
remarkably fine collection of, you might call it Livingstonia,
relics and so on, letters that he had written to various people;
notebooks; his sketchbook, when he revisited the Victoria Falls
again with Thomas Baines in 1863, I think it was. All remarkable.
One can still visit that memorial today at Chitambo?
Oh, yes, indeed. Well, so I believe, if they have kept the road
up. It was a longish way from the main road, actually, west of
the main road, towards the very large lake, Lake Bangweolo.
Although I say it myself, I think the museum was one of the
leading research museums in southern Africa at that time. We were
regularly producing published results of our field research. We
established the Robins Series, named after Ellis Robins, who was
the director of the British South Africa Company, who had been so
generous to us over the years . He had been an American but became
a British subject.
The Robins Series, several volumes came out in it, mostly
historicalprehistoric as well, if it comes to that. That sort
of packed in after independence. We had an extremely fine
historical collection, early books. We had a copy of [Livio]
80
Sanuto s Geography of Africa [1588], one of the very earliest
volumes. We had John Ogilby s history of Africa [1670], another
great tome. We had a copy of [Filippo] Pigaffeta, talking about
the Congo [Description of the Kingdom of the Congo, c. 1591], and
Andrew Battel [1589]. We had the [Huygen van] Linschoten [1563-
1611] on the Indian Ocean, Portuguese work in Goa and the east
African coast. And we had a particularly fine collection of early
maps. It was started originally by the former governor, Hubert
Young, who had started the institute and the museum.
Troy: Desmond has handed me an article from the Daily Telegraph [of
London, March 29, 2000] titled "The Last Record of the African
Explorers Faces Ruin." The first line of the piece states that "a
priceless collection of books and documents detailing the earliest
days of European exploration in Africa is under threat of
destruction." This is the library you built there in Livingstone.
Clark: That s right. And I thought of writing to the National Monuments
Commission, and to the director of the museum, whoever that is
now, I m not certain. And I thought I d write to the president.
It won t do any good.
Troy: Well, there s an international organization, the International
Federation of Libraries [IFLA], a very powerful group that meets
every year. This would certainly be an organization that you
could contact.
Who sent this to you?
Clark: Gervas Clay, who was one of our trustees for a number of years.
He was provincial commissioner in various places, ended up in
Livingstone. And then he took over the museum for two years after
I retired.
Troy: It says herethis is most depressing [see appendix] --"The
Livingstone Museum in southern Zambia has hundreds of valuable
books written by the first missionaries, adventurers, and
prospectors in central Africa. But the building s leaking ceiling
collapsed in recent heavy rains, and many publications were
damaged beyond repair. Others need expensive conservation work to
save them." We ll need to rally the library community, Desmond.
If it made it to the London paper, though, I think that s good.
Clark: Well, the European Union gave them--it says right in the last bit
of the article, I forget how much it was.
Troy: 250,000.
Clark: 250,000, yes.
81
Troy: "It is the former colonial masters who have stepped in to help the
museum out of its immediate crisis. The European Union has
pledged 250,000, and conservationists fear that the money is too
late, because so much damage has been done. Nor will it be enough
for the extensive upgrade needed to preserve the collection for
future generations."
Clark: Exactly, yes.
Troy: It seems to me that there are certainly people in England who are
on top of it, and maybe some in South Africa.
Clark: I ll bring this up at the SAA meeting that I m going to in England
in July. It s mostly an American organization, but sort of
international. They have the annual meeting over here one year
and somewhere else the next. 1
Field Work on Prehistory and the Movements of People in Africa
Troy: I found a quote from "Digging On: A Personal Record," in the
Annual Review of Anthropology. You said, "Not only could the
Sahara have been a controlling factor over movement north and
south within the continent, but also for peoples and animals
moving in and out of Africa, linked as the Saharan climates must
have been, with similar ecological changes in the Arabian
peninsula, the Levant, and northwestern India." I thought that
was an interesting kind of bringing together of ideas. 2
Clark: And now what I would actually say is "was," not "could have been."
Maybe that s being a little strong, but you can see it certainly
in the earlier Paleolithic with the Acheulean. There are about
four periods when the Acheulean was present in the Sahara.
Whether the Sahara became more favorable in the north first of
all, and moved down; or whether it was vice versa, and the more
favorable climate in the south enabled the Sahel and savanna
vegetation to move much further north; or whether they were
contemporaneous movements in the north and the south, which I
think is unlikely. It introduced, of course, the big Ethiopian
Appendices for further on the Library situation.
2
For further discussion, see the Dialogue with Desmond Clark and
Andrew Smith.
82
game, all the elephants and the rhinos and the giraffes and the
hippos and the rest of it and so on.
Troy: Megafauna.
Clark: Megafauna, that s right. And with them, of course, the human
population. This you can see in the rock art very well, and it
was some time probably about 5000 B.C., something like that, that
pastoralists appear. Prior to that, they appear to have been
specialized hunter-gatherers.
Troy: In this movement of humanity from Africa into the Levant and into
Asia, I had kind of left the Sahara out of my thinking.
Clark: Oh, no, it s vitally important. I ve been emphasizing that for
quite a long time. First, I think, sort of strongly, at the Royal
Society-British Academy two-day symposium held in London, in the
early nineties. And you see, this is very important. If you
believe in movement of populations out of Africa and into various
other parts of the world at different times, the Sahara has a
direct bearing on this. The only other way you can do it is to
walk around the coasts, I suppose. And even the Saharan coasts
are pretty grim.
So it s frightfully important, and it would certainly seem,
probably around 130,000 at any rate, that there was a favorable
climate in the Sahara. That was the last interglacial. And that
went on until about 95,000. That could have been the time when
anatomically modern humans left the African continent. Or
conceivably, I suppose they could have got out somewhat before,
200,000. The data is not adequate at the moment to really confirm
this, the hard data.
Troy: Which makes it continuing to be so exciting.
Clark: Yes, it does. It really does. You can understand it, you see,
because of the richness of the African savannas. There is no
other part of the world that had such rich plant and animal
concentrations, in various different ways and different places and
so on. It s quite remarkable. You had movements of animals, of
course, out of Asia into Europe and that kind of thing. But the
climate was appreciably less favorable when it came to plants and
all of that, and it appears to have been sort of more grassland
species.
And then, of course, by the time you get to the end of the
Pleistocene, or the end of the Acheulean, at any rate about
300,000 years ago, something like that, things were becoming
favorable in the Equatorial regions. Later it became less so,
83
probably due to glacial conditions in higher latitudes, you see?
And the forests had to retreat, and did. You had forests in
various different refugios then. Savanna became the dominant
ecosystem.
You can still see this kind of thing today if you ve been in
the Ituri forest, where the Efe pygmy live. I was there with
Glynn Isaac the last time we were in the field together. If you
climbed up on one of these little inselbergs that stick up out of
the forest the vegetation on the top is savanna. Absolutely
fascinating. And during that last period, probably many of the
forest species disappeared.
Mumbwa Cave and Joseph Siatumbu
Troy: We have talked a bit, just to get back onto a chronological track,
about Monica and Godfrey Wilson. They were being quite supportive
of your field work. And then you got involved with the Mumbwa
Cave.
Clark: When I say they were supportive, of course they were. But when it
came to financial support, that was a problem, because fair
enough, you see, the [Rhodes-Livingstone] Institute was a social
anthropological institute, and I wanted to get some money to go
out into the field and do some archaeology. At any rate, Godfrey
Wilson said, "Yes, well, I think we can spare you fifteen pounds
this year." So that s what I had. It went further than fifteen
pounds would go today.
Troy: And you were interested in looking at some of the earlier
archaeological work at Mumbwa Cave that the Italian, Gatti, had
done, and also F. B. Macrae, who was one of Burkitt s students.
Clark: Oh, yes. I knew F. B. Macrae, a delightful person. He was a
district commissioner, very interested in Ibn Battuta as well.
Ibn Battuta was one of the early Arab geographer explorers. He
went down the East African coast and recorded all of that. And in
fact, I was given F. B. s English translation of Ibn Battuta. It
turned out to be not as complete a translation as perhaps one
would have liked, but that was left to me. He gave it to our very
good friends, Brian and Florence Anderson, and Brian had died, and
when I was last in Harare Florence asked me if I would take it . I
was given it by her son, Henry. That s by the way.
So Macrae did this, and he wrote up a short report on it, in I
think NADA, the Native Affairs Department Annual, or something.
Troy:
Clark:
Somewhere I must have a copy of it. Mumbwa Cave was one of the
first sites other than those in the Zambezi Valley to which I went
in 1939, I think it was.
What was it like when you got to this cave?
like? Had you seen photographs?
What did it look
I m not certain that I had seen a photograph. It was a fine
isolated inselberg of I think Precambrian limestone which had two
biggish cave entrances. They did, in point of fact, join up
through one or moreone, I think it wascorridor.
We made good use of that corridor, because on one occasion
when we were excavating there in the big cave, it was time for the
local villagers to fire the grass in order towell, two things.
One was to suffocate the burrowing animals, of which the most
important for them was the cane rat, which was said to be
excellent eating. The grass in this valley that the cave looked
out onto, and it came quite close to the foot of the cave, was a
pennisetum grass, about eight to ten feet high, a millet, one of
the first millets that was actually cultivated, in the sort of
Sahel region of West Africa, north of Ghana, that area. About
1100 B.C.
But this fire the wind being in the right direction roared
down the valley, fantastic, came right up, filled the cave with
smoke !
Troy: They gave you no warning that they were going to do this?
Clark: No. And we crept out along the passage to the other side, which
of course was okay. Then you could see all the local women going
around with their hoes, digging out the various burrowing
creatures and so on for food. Very impressive, actually.
The other reason for doing that, of course, was to encourage,
with all the sort of carbon around and so on, encourage regrowth.
And when you do that, of course, it encourages the game herds to
come to it.
Troy: This was not a major agricultural area?
Clark: Oh, this was village farming. Millet, and I think they must have
been growing maize there at that time. Certainly sorghum. Millet
and sorghum. The millet, the pennisetum, was particularly good
for beer. The sorghum was good, and was ground on grindstones.
Troy: Now, did you try these cane rats, Desmond?
85
Clark: No, I m afraid I never did eat a cane rat. I should have. Later
I was secretary of the Victoria Falls Trust, the game park, and
one time we found somebody who had just poached a cane rat, and I
called to him to stop, and he didn t. I ran after him but he
could run faster than I could with his cane rat, so I never got
that one. [laughter] But you find them in all later Stone Age
sites, and I think it appears as well in the Middle Stone Age.
Troy: Is the cane relative to sugar cane?
Clark: Oh, no, it lives in swampy areas.
These are probably phragmites, that s the most likely one.
Troy: Good size.
Clark: Yes, decent sized, probably about that long, [motions] and about
that wide. It has nice fur around it. Yes.
Troy: About the size of a rabbit. Different shape.
Clark: That s right, yes.
Troy: Now, there had been excavation at Mumbwa, Macrae, and also Raymond
Dart had been involved there, hadn t he, at that point?
Clark: Yes.
Troy: When did you first meet Dart?
Clark: I probably met him in 1948, when we had a big meeting to put into
operation the Scientific Council for Africa. That was the French,
Belgians, Portuguese, British, South Africans formed this.
Basically, of course, all Africa south of the Sahara. That was
very good. I was on that council for some years.
Troy: Multinational and multidisciplinary.
Clark: Absolutely, absolutely, yes.
Troy: Now, when you got into the cave, you d had some archaeological
experience in England, and you d done some work in the Zambezi,
but here you were, faced with a re-excavation project. How many-
was it just yourself?
Clark: It was just myself, and I suppose probably the one assistant in
the museum that we had when we first started off, whose name was
Joseph Siatumbu. He was with us right through, and most of the
field excavations that I did, Joseph came. He was called the
86
capital, a Portuguese title, the head man, in the museum. And he
was truly superb . He was with me right through the Kalambo Falls ,
and came with us after I had left the museum, when we were working
in Malawi.
I keep regularly in touch with Joseph over Christmas, always
send him a small amount of money. I saw him the last time at the
Harare Congress, which was, what, 1995, I think it was. Actually,
we didn t meet in Livingstone that time. I saw quite a lot of him
in 1988, when Nick Toth and Kathy Schick were there. We were
staying in an old museum house, I think it was. Joseph came down
from his farm way out on the Ngwesi River, west of Livingstone.
And then I saw him at the Victoria Falls, where we had the
excursion from Harare to the Victoria Falls and the Zambezi. The
group had its lunch at the eastern cataract on the north side.
Troy: He was one of the many people, Africans, with whom you worked
through the years either formally through the University of
California s program, where I know you had African students, or
otherwise. But certainly Joseph would have been a literate,
relatively unschooled, but very loyal kind of supporter.
Clark: Exactly, yes. Yes, he didn t write frightfully well. He must
have had primary school, I suppose. In 1938, there can t have
been very much education beyond that level. He was an excellent
man. I think two of his children were educated over here.
Certainly one was. I didn t hear from him this last Christmas--
and he s about two years older than I am. At any rate, he s
probably one of the few who survived from my early days . Our
carpenter, who was an excellent man, he died. And various other
people.
Troy: You and Joseph got to the cave, and this must have been daunting.
I mean, you hadn t had an awful lot of experience with excavation.
Clark: No, I had not excavated caves, but it was the usual sort of
technique. You went along, you found a cave, you walked up the
talus slope. Then the floor would be level, and it would go in,
and of course come down it was that kind of a cave. So many of
the sites in Africa are rock shelters rather that deeper caves;
this happened to be a deep cave.
Then you look around the talus slope to see what has been
washed out by rains and so on, what kind of stone artifacts, and
whether there s fauna there, as indeed there was, of course, in
limestone country. And you set out a series of rectangular grids,
divided into squares. I can t remember what we did then, probably
three-foot squares or something- -no, it must have been more.
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Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Can t remember, but you can break them down. If you have a four-
foot square, then you can break it down into divisions.
And then one started excavating, spit by spit. In those days
we probably excavated in ten-centimeter spits, something like
that.
You anticipated being out there for a while with Joseph,
brought food?
So you d
Oh, yes. We bought food in Mumbwa, which was the district
headquarters. You could buy it in the stores. I lived in a tent
on the boma grounds underneath a tree or two.
B-o-m-a?
B-o-m-a. I suppose that means it probably means perhaps even a
fortified center. Would be a political center, I think, you d
say, or an administrative center at any rate. Again, that must be
a Portuguese word, you see, because after all, we were in the
middle, and there were Portuguese colonies on the west side and
also on the east side of Northern Rhodesia. Particularly the east
side, where there was influence coming right up to Feira. And one
of the Indian traders would from time to time send round those
little sachet things with meat in them and so on, which was very
nice of him.
So the local people were aware of your presence up in the cave.
Oh, of course. And we employed two or three of them, maybe more,
to do things .
Somebody to look after the tent and the equipment
when I wasn t there, you know, all that sort of thing.
Other Early Scientists in Africa
Troy:
Clark:
Was there a sense in which you were thinking things like, "My god,
I m one of a very few people in all of Africa doing this kind of
work." Because there were only the Leakeys, only a very few
people.
Well, there was John Goodwin down at the Cape [of Good Hope] .
one never thought of anything like that.
No,
Troy: You were so immersed in the project.
88
Clark: Yes. There wasn t time to think about that. There was Neville
Jones, of course, down in Bulawayo, which was good. And a
geologist came up and we did one or two things at the falls
together. His name was Maufe. He was the director of geology,
actually, in Salisbury, as it was then called, named after the
Marquis of Salisbury, who was the foreign secretary, I think, at
the time that Rhodes was out there. And then Frank Dixey came
from Malawi, and we did quite a bit of the Zambezi Valley
together. Yes, it was good.
Troy: How much time did you have off from the museum on this expedition?
Did Godfrey Wilson give you open-ended time to spend up there at
the cave?
Clark: During the dry season, that was the time to get around. It was
also the winter, of course, because it s summer rains that you
have there. And not so much was going on then. I probably had
six weeks there, I can t remember. May be in the report.
Troy: What months were those, Desmond?
Clark: I would have thought it would have been June or July, something
like that. Yes. Because there certainly wasn t any rain.
Troy: And then you brought quite a little bit of what you found at
Mumbwa back to the museum.
Clark: Yes, it all went back to the museum. Well, we analyzed it. Betty
drew it. We sent the fauna off to Robert Broom in Pretoria, and
pottery to a man called [J. F.] Scofield, the only person really
doing anything with pottery in those days.
Troy: Where was he? In Cambridge?
Clark: No, he was somewhere, I think it could have been Grahamstown in
South Africa. You see, one looked to South Africa at that time,
because everything in England was so far away. I did ask
Frederick Zeuner, who was appointed shortly after the war to the
Institute of Archaeology, to lecture and do research on paleo
environments. He concentrated on glacials, interglacials, and
that kind of thing. I asked him about a curious deposit that we
found in the course of the excavating I did in the other entrance
to the cave from the one we were talking about a short while ago,
where Macrae had done his excavation.
What we actually had was a buildup of carbonate forming a kind
of cone as a result of water dripping from the roof, and so
producing this buildup. If it had gone far enough, it would have
brecciated the whole deposit, but it only partially went that way,
89
which was quite interestingeverything was the same inside as it
was outside. I got a lot of good Middle Stone Age material there.
Nothing very much of the Late Stone Age.
I then moved over to the big cave, which was where Dart and
Attilio Gatti were. Gatti was one of these sort of "explorers" in
inverted commas, sort of public relations man, that kind of thing.
He came out with about half a dozen attractive looking Italian
females, so I m told, some of whom apparently came up to Mumbwa,
and they sort of opened that cave up. Gatti, of course, got in
contact with Dart, who by that time had published the Taung s
child s skull, and off they went. Why they went to Mumbwa, I have
no idea, but they did. They dug very large holes.
The other man with Dart was del Grande, a nice little chap,
probably knew nothing about excavation or anything but he was good
at singing Italian opera. [laughter] They camped on the ground
looking west. Flattish sort of area. You could see they laid out
little lines of pebbles for their tents.
Troy: He wasn t there when you were excavating, though?
Clark: Good heavens, no. I think it wasthe report would tell you,
probably very early thirties.
Troy: I imagine he discovered that his voice sounded very good in that
cave.
Clark: I should think it fairly magnificent, actually. Yes, yes.
I excavated only a small area in order to find out what the
Later Stone Age looked like, but the rest of it was huge. Larry
Barham went out there, in 1990 or something? Can t remember. And
re-excavated there.
Troy: So there was a good long period when people weren t at the cave at
all. All through the war and whatnot. There had been some claim
to Iron Age smelting, but you, I understand, refuted that.
Clark: Oh, yes, that was a complete nonsense. Total, utter nonsense.
Dart had some very strange ideas, one of which, as it developed
subsequently, was that the Bushmen had come by sea from somewhere.
Of course he was an excellent anatomist, and paleoanthropologist,
bones and teeth and that kind of thing, but when he got onto
archaeology, he was absolutely beyond the pale.
In 1929, at the joint meeting of the British and South African
Associations for the Advancement of Science in Pretoria, he made
some dreadful remarks about Gertrude Caton-Thompson who had just
90
been excavating at Zimbabwe and had shown that Zimbabwe had not
been built by strange, exotic people coming from outside and so
on, putting these stone ruins there, but they were in point of
fact the places where ancestral Shona-speaking people had lived.
He was quite dreadful in all of that.
Troy: Early on I suppose, people who were out on the fringes would
venture these kinds of opinions, and there was so little going on
that they could get away with it.
Clark: Well, the main achievement of Dart, relative to archaeology, was
to so incense the archaeologists that they really got down to
looking at things a little more carefully than they had before.
No very great care was the situation at that time.
It wasn t until after the war that people digging Stone Age
sites collected everything. Until then everything was put into a
riddle, a sieve, and you looked through it, and you selected what
you thought were half a dozen sort of pieces that would be good to
have, and the rest of it was shoved on the dump, you see. And
then the next sieve would come along, and the next sieve would
come along, et cetera. That s what was done up through the war.
Then things began to become much more systematic . As they had
been with Neolithic and Bronze Age, Iron Age, and so on, before.
The Iron Age was never of any interest except for stone ruins
and things, or where an important site like Mapungabwe on an
isolated hill in the middle of the Limpopo Valley, yielded very
rich gold burials associated with a small group of skeletons up on
the top there. Apart from that, the Iron Age was generally
considered to have started around about 1500 A.D. when the Bantu
speaking peoples were thought to have got down into that part of
the world with their stock and their plants for cultivation.
And it wasn t until 1950 when Willard Libby dated a wooden
beam that had been removed from a drain in the elliptical building
at Great Zimbabwe, dated this to the 7th century A.D., that people
got wildly excited and thought, Yes, indeed, there is some
archaeology here after all. The only person that I know who was
really interested in the Iron Age before that was J. F. Scofield,
mostly on pottery. Then interest in the Iron Age increased and
increased and increased and is now much more important for the
people who live in Africa than anything connected with human
origins and that sort of thing.
Troy: It s more immediate.
91
Clark: Exactly, yes. It s their ancestors, and it provides history.
Many of these countries in the interior of Africa have had no
written history before the 19th century.
Troy: The colonial era.
Memories of Colleagues and Residents of Livingstone
Clark: I thought of various things [pulls out papers] about life in
Livingstone, what it was like.
Troy: And you have a list of names here. Douglas Hall.
Clark: Douglas Hall was the district officer. His wife, Rachel. They
were our best friends when we first got there. And then, of
course, you see, they would do three years tours, and they would
go on leave, and they d get posted somewhere else, so you wouldn t
see them for several years. But they were the people that we
first went on ulendo, safari, with tents out into the Toka
country, sand country, walking, of course, with carriers, with
camp set up every night and so on.
Troy: Were Doug Hall and his wife about your contemporaries?
Clark: He was a little older than I am. He s still alive, and we keep in
touch every Christmas. He ended up as Sir Douglas Hall, the
governor of British Somaliland, the last one, before the country
was handed over to the Somalis. And he s also a baronet,
actually, in his own right now. His wife died, and he lived alone
in Devon for a long time and he s just gone to live with his
daughter somewhere in Derbyshire. Rachel was very good with
vehicles and so on. They had a Trojan there. Very nice people.
Vernon Brelsford, a superb man. He was district officer,
later district commissioner, did a lot up in the north around Lake
Bangweolo. We met from time to time. He founded the Northern
Rhodesia Journal, of which we have six biggish volumes here, which
are excellent. Crammed full of all sorts of information about
Northern Rhodesia and the people who were there, the existing
population, the animals, and the rest of it, and so on. He was
the editor of that. We would collect lots of stuff together, and
we did all the rest of the work from the museum. At least Betty
did, essentially. We saw a lot of him. He was excellent on the
history of Northern Rhodesia in particular.
Troy: J. D. Martin.
92
Clark: J. D. Martin was a super chap. Amazing man. He was a forest
officer, and he was a man who set the plan for the exploitation of
the Barotseland Forest--Rhodesian teak, which is a very hard wood,
and mukwa, a fine furniture wood.
Troy: He was involved with making this a commercial enterprise.
Clark: That s right, and looking after the forests and all that kind of
thing, which were being exploited by the Zambezi sawmills. A
railway system went out and gradually went sort of further out and
so on, brought all the logs back to Livingstone where they were
all sawn into whatever it was. Parquet flooring was one of the
things they did. Furniture was made from it. Houses were built
of it, or rather the floors. All that kind of thing.
I remember Tom Jaeger, who was the director at one time- -some
American forestry people came out and said, "You know, what you
should do is float these logs down the Zambezi. Don t bring them
down by rail." He said, "Yes, that would be fine. The only
trouble is, they don t float." [laughter]
J. D. [Martin] was a great chap. He was a fine hunter.
Basically he hunted lions, and every two months or so he would
come into Livingstone, where he would more or less sit down and
drink beer solidly. He d then argue religion with the Catholic
bishop. That s how it was there; the bishop was a Franciscan.
J. D. was from Northern Ireland, a cousin of Lord Londonderry, I
think it was .
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
So he would have been High Church.
No, very low, because the Church of Ireland is as low as you can
get. It s Episcopalian, you see, the direct opposite of the
Catholics. And that s the way I was brought up. My mother s
family came from Ulster.
And were the beer-drinking and philosophical discussions carried
on at the Zambezi Boat Club?
Sometimes. Sometimes in the Catholic seminary. Sometimes in the
hotel. And then you d go out, I went out with him twice, I think
it was. You d start off about one in the morning. It was dry
season, of course. Stars, probably a moon. On one occasion,
there was a young police officer who was stationed out there. Two
vehicles, going out to find our way. There was a road for about
the first thirty- five miles, I think. After that, you had to go
through the bush, and the bush was mostly mopane veldt, the mopane
trees, all fairly close together, with grassy dambos, as they re
called. Sometimes swampy in between.
93
J. D. was magnificent at finding his way through these.
Absolutely incredible. He built his house out there of mopane
poles.
Troy: How do you spell mopane?
Clark: [spells] It s Copaifera mopane.
The house was raised up I don t think it was anything very
much on the bottom. The main thing was that looking over the
valley, you could see all sorts of game coming along around there.
And there was some interesting archaeology that I discovered
there. Early Iron Age--dimple-based ware.
Troy: This was fairly flat country.
Clark: It was all sand veldt, all Kalahari sands.
Troy: How would you find these sites?
Clark: In point of fact, they had dug rubbish pits behind the houses, and
of course, if there were a hole, I would look in the hole. We had
them out there. I remember on one occasion seeing a number of
holes in the side sections. These went down maybe six feet.
Rubbish tossed in from time to time. Then of course they d cover
them in. But coming from one hole, going round, going into
another, was part of a very large snake. I watched it for a time
and decided perhaps it would be best to leave it alone--they were
after the burrowing animals.
But that was good, and that s when I really first came, I
think, to enjoy classical music. I enjoyed opera before, but this
wasyou know, Handel s Water Music and that kind of thing.
Troy: J. D. had a gramophone in his house out there?
Clark: That s right, exactly.
Troy: Was this an isolated house? No one else out there.
Clark: There may have been another house fairly close by. I don t know.
Possibly the police house was. Later on, several more houses grew
up there.
Then J. D. joined up, went to be trained with the air force
down in Southern Rhodesia. They passed out [graduated] very well
and he and three or four of his friends went out, had a real
fantastic dinner and celebration with lots of alcohol and so on.
J. D. wasn t driving, but they went into something and he was
killed. Absolutely tragic.
If he d been driving, he would have survived. Because the
first time we went out to Machili--that s the name of the place
where he had his house he never got more than a mile and a half,
maybe two miles or so, from Livingstone, some time in the middle
of the night, when he ran the car off the road and we landed up in
the ditch, and we spent the rest of that night until it got light
there, and then drove on. That was the kind of chap he was.
Troy: J. D. was a person about your age at that time, twenties?
Clark: He was, I suppose, probably two or three years older than I was.
Troy: And where was it that he was killed?
Clark: Somewhere in Southern Rhodesia. Wherever that large training camp
was. Not all that far from Bulawayo, I think. Possibly Plumtree.
Troy: Outside of Bulawayo.
Clark: Yes. Bulawayo is, or was, the second largest town in Zimbabwe,
then called Southern Rhodesia.
Troy: Bulawayo is still the capital, isn t that right?
Clark: No, the capital is Harare, which was Salisbury.
One of the interesting things, talking of capital cities, was
that important visitors who came to Northern Rhodesia talked with
the governor and people in Lusaka, the capital, and then there was
nothing for them to do. So the government would send down to
Livingstone to us, and we would take them and show them the
Victoria Falls and the museum and talk to them and so on. Various
people, the Marquis of Salisbury was one of those.
I remember the Marquis of Salisbury telling me that he d
signed a check when he was staying down in Salisbury, and the girl
behind the bank counter said, "Oh, you don t have to sign the name
of the town, you know." He d signed it "Salisbury," you see,
which was rather fun. [laughter]
The Archbishop of Canterbury came down. [Clement] Attlee I
remember coming. King of Greece came on one occasion. Various
other people.
95
Troy: Now, somewhere in the handbook, I saw a picture of Princess
Elizabeth and the King. Do you remember their being there?
Clark: No, I happened to be away when they came. I was in England,
believe it or not, at that time. But the year before, we met the
Queen Mother and Princess Margaret at the Rhodes Centenary
Exhibition in Bulawayo. In fact, in my office I have a photograph
of them looking at the Livingstone Museum exhibit we had down
there, which was quite fun.
Troy: You have Martin Morris on your list of people to talk about.
Clark: Martin Morris was the information officer. Nice, funny sort of
chap. Interested in all sorts of things. He was a good artist.
He used to produce the Northern Rhodesia handbooks and that kind
of thing. He would come on picnics with us and so on. You had to
be very careful- -when we first got there, we could afford only one
bottle of scotch a month, and he was certainly a two-finger man,
so you had to be very careful. [laughs] But he was nice, I liked
him.
And lots of others. We had friends who came and went in the
provincial administration, and the police as well.
Troy: What was the population of Livingstone, would you say?
Clark: At that time, oh, I don t know. It could have been four hundred,
something like that. I really don t know. There were a number of
Jewish people, mostly merchants of one kind or another. Some of
them awfully nice. And we had good friends among them.
Troy: Did the Polish community stay after the war?
Clark: No, it disappeared. It went back. Well, 1 don t know whether
they went back, probably didn t. What we used to call the
aristocratic Poles probably didn t go back. We kept in touch with
one family, Rybicki. Her name was Rubitska. She ended up in Cape
Town. She did a lot for the Polish community down there.
Stores and Suppliers
Troy: I remember we talked about the poor Poles coming through, and how
there was that stratification, and that was a troubling time.
Clark: Oh, yes. Very trying, that kind of thing. Of course it s gone
now, thank god. At least I imagine it has.
96
Troy: You have on here somebody s name that ends in w-i-t-z.
Clark: That s Kopelowitz, a delightful chap. He was a merchant who had
been established there, I don t know, several years before, and he
dealt mainly with the kind of things that Africans were interested
in buying, those who would come into his store. When I went out
with Joseph to do field work, and to collect ethnographic examples
of stools and pots and all that kind of thing, we would take
beads, we would take some calico, and we d take tobacco and so on,
and I would get all those from Kopelowitz. He was an awfully nice
man.
Troy: He was your primary supplier of what you would need in trade
goods?
Clark: Yes, that s right. Well, there were lots of others, but we always
went to him.
Troy: Where would you get your food for your expeditions? From other
sources?
Clark: Bread we would make. We d take tins of food of one kind or
another. Rice, I suppose to start off with, potatoes and so on.
Troy: Lots of dried goods.
Clark: Yes. We d probably take oatmeal. Powdered milk. Tea, of course.
I m not certain whether we took coffee. And you d carry it along
with all your pots and pans and that kind of thing, and cook over
an open fire.
We d employ a cook. When I went the first time into the
Gwembe Valley I went with Geoffrey Bond, the geologist from
Bulawayo. And our cook was called Cabbage. He d been the cook
for the policemen down in Southern Rhodesia. Sounded all right--
they said he could do things. Typically for breakfast we would
have oatmeal, something like that. Jam, butter. For lunch there
would be thickish slices of bread with butter on them, and if we
had any meat, we d put it on it, something in between the two
sheets.
Well, I remember the first time we went out, no butter on the
bread. So I said to Cabbage, "We would like butter on our bread."
Cabbage said, "Yes, of course." It came back, we had butter on
one piece but not on the other piece. So we said, "Cabbage, we
would like butter on both sides." So what we got was indeed
butter on both sides of one piece of bread. You could see, it was
great fun. He was okay, but we were quite glad to see him go.
97
One of the things down there as well was--we did take some
gunpowder, but I didn t register about this until sometime
afterwards. The man who had opened the store in Gwembe, he had
gunpowder there, and nobody would buy it. He asked some of the
local people, he said, "Don t you use gunpowder?" "Oh, yes,"
because they all had muzzle-loading guns--at least the hunters had
muzzle-loading guns. But they said, "We re not going to buy it
from you, because we can scrape it off the rocks over there."
Which of course, they could, by getting the saltpeter from the
fossil dassie [Afrikaan word for hyrax] urine.
Troy: And they knew how to make gunpowder from the dassie urine?
Clark: Oh, yes. We documented the whole technique, actually, and put it
in the museum. It was a first-rate museum.
Troy: And this Gwembe area, those were trips with Bond?
Clark: In 1950, yes. The next time I went down was in, what, 1956,
probably something like that. The Kariba Dam was going to be
built, and we wanted to do salvage archaeology before the lake was
finished.
98
V THE WAR YEARS, SOMALILAND
Entering the War, 1939
Troy: Was there a point, Desmond, in those prewar years when you
realized that this was going to be your continent, your terrain,
particularly after the Mumbwa caves work in 1939? You d been
aware of the Neolithic in Great Britain, and you were aware of
certainly the French and Spanish and the Pyrenees caves in Lascaux
and so on, but those were 20,000 B.C. or so, Neolithic kinds of
things, Mesolithic. And here all of a sudden, you were in a
situation where you re dealing with an extraordinary age.
Clark: And of course, we had no clue at that time as to how old
everything was. It was all purely relative. And one of the
estimates for the beginning of the Pleistocene, which is round
about 1.7 million years ago, was about 500,000. In other words,
for a date when hominids first made their appearance. Now we know
that appearance occurred 4.4 million years ago.
Troy: In those early years in Africa, in 1938-39, was there a point in
there when you suddenly realized that this was going to be where
you wanted to be, versus back in England?
Clark: I would say not at that time, because we hadn t really had time to
think about it before the war came along. It wasn t until after
the war, and I knew that it was possible for me to go back, to
develop the museum in Livingstone. But that was when we, I think,
made our decision. But of course, we wanted to. The previous
experience of working in the Zambezi Valley, working at Mumbwa
caves, and various other sites, filled one with sort of the young
enthusiasm to go ahead with it. So that was it. We greatly
enjoyed our time in Livingstone.
Troy: Do you remember when you first began to be aware of the war?
99
Clark: Well, of course, when it started. I think it was August, 1939. 1
joined up with a local unit, ended up being a bridge guard on the
bridge over the Zambezi, over which the railway and, of course,
motor vehicles went back and forth, I suppose, and human beings.
There was the possibility that Germans from Southwest Africa, or I
suppose from South Africa, might attempt to blow it up, so we were
there as a small guard to ensure that this was not so. And it
went on.
Troy: Did you have Germans in Livingstone that became suspect?
Clark: No, no. And we never saw any from Namibia until afterwards, one
remarkable man, Henno Martin, a German geologist, and a friend of
his, named Corne--both in the Geological Survey in Southwest
Africa, as it was called thendecided rather than be interned
they would go into the Namibian Desert, which they did for two
years. Then Martin s friend got ill, so he had to bring him in.
What they were mainly after when they came in, of course, was some
food to eat.
Henno Martin wrote a superb book, which I think has been
republished, called The Sheltering Desert. Marvelous book. I met
him in the years afterwards, very nice man.
Troy: You spent some time in the Namibian Desert. Or you visited there?
Clark: Not too much. Yes, I ve been there.
Troy: What sort of a man was Henno Martin when you met him?
Clark: Sort of tallish, spare, you know. Gentle man. Just a nice man.
You know how you can get that nice and not so nice and so on. You
can sense it.
I also met--no, I never met him, corresponded with him--Von
Lettow-Vorbeck. He was in German East Africa, which later became
Tanganika and now is Tanzania. When that collapsed, mostly from
the British forces in Kenya coming down, he was the only man who
continued. He was a magnificent guerrilla leader. He must have
been an extremely fine man, because all his men--he must have had
eight or nine German officers and NCOs with him, and his askaris,
who of course were the African troops, they all went everywhere
with him.
Troy: Was askari a tribal name?
Clark: No, an askari, I suppose it must be Swahili. It means a native
soldier. They re armed with a rifle and bayonet and so on. But
they were amazingly attached to him.
100
He managed to elude the British forces chasing him and so on,
right until this is the First World War I m talking about right
until the end, 1918. He managed this with no money; his people
hadn t been paid for a long time. So he d nip over to Angola and
scoop up some money there. Where else did he go? Mozambique, I
think.
Then he told me he was going back to Angola again to get some
more money when he was sitting on the north side of a river called
the Chambeshi, a big river that ran into the Bangweulu Swamps,
running to the west. And the British forces, such as they were,
which included the district commissioner, were on the south side.
A telegram came through, "The armistice has been declared," and
the district commissioner, whose name was Croad, went across in a
boat with a white flag and told him, and Von Lettow said, "Okay."
It was agreed that he should go back. They marched, actually, all
the way back to Lake Tanganyika via Kalambo Falls, and there they
got a boat which took them, I suppose, to Kigoma and the railway
down, and so there back. They were well looked after. They were
allowed to take all their arms with them.
He was eighty-four when he came out again to Africa. Got as
far north as Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, and I was trying to
invite him to come up to Livingstone. He was being looked after
by a granddaughter on that trip. He said, "No, I m sorry, I can t
come up." I asked him a question, I said, "Where were you heading
for when you were on the Chambeshi?" "Oh," he said, "I was going
back to Angola to get some more replenishments."
Troy: So he thought nothing of crossing Rhodesia to get to Angola. In a
way, that was the logical route to go to Angola, across.
Clark: Yes, it was.
Troy: And he went back to Europe after the war?
Clark: They all went back to Europe, except the askaris. It was
interesting, we had a Tanganyika battalion with us in the 26th
Brigade [WWII], and I remember being told that a couple of the
askaris there who had joined up wanted to see the colonel. They
said, "We re afraid we find we re fighting on the wrong side."
[laughter]
Troy: And were any of those fellows with Von Lettow-Vorbeck in the First
World War?
Clark: I wouldn t have thought so.
Troy: But they were confused about what side they should be on.
101
Clark: That s right, yes. [laughter] Yes. Well, it tells you a little
about Von Lettow s reputation and legacy in Africa.
Seventh East African Field Ambulance
Troy: Now, you were at the bridge in Victoria Falls in August 1939, and
then eventually, you moved on to another situation with the army.
Clark: Yes. We had a lot of soul-searching, long discussions with
Godfrey Wilson--he and his wife were very sincere Christians, and
so was I at that time, believe it or not. We decided that I
certainly did not want to go slaughter people, although, of
course, at school, I d been in the OTC, the Officer s Training
Corps, and we practiced war exercises and so on. One somehow
thought nothing very much of it. But when it came to the issue
and so on, we both decided that we did not want to go and kill
people .
So I joined the Northern Rhodesia Regiment, its field
ambulance, which was being formed at that time. The Seventh East
African Field Ambulance. Godfrey Wilson went down to South
Africa. I stayed on in Northern Rhodesia, and after a bit of
training in Lusaka, the capital, which was the regiment
headquarters, we drove north. The field ambulance group on its
own arrived in Nairobi. We sat there for a little while. Then we
went up to British Somaliland.
Troy: Had you been to Nairobi before?
Clark: That was the first time, when I met Louis Leakey in 1941. Oh, and
I had met him in Cambridge when he lectured. That was the first
time I met Mary, actually, yes.
Troy: And do you remember that drive up there?
Clark: Oh, yes, I remember the drive. Stopping every night camping and
so on. It was rather fun. We had, I think, about four one-ton
trucks or whatever they were, two-ton trucks. And about two motor
cars. I was lucky enough to drive in one of the motor cars.
Troy: You went up as a unit with the ambulance group, but you weren t
with the entire regiment at that point, you were going pretty much
on your own as an ambulance unit, is that right?
102
Clark: That s right, yes. The roads, of course, were pretty primitive.
No tar or macadam or anything like that. But it was the dry
season, and we were able to get by without any problems.
Then we moved to surround Djibouti, which was French, because
we hoped that it would declare for de Gaulle. It didn t when we
were there. Then the time was ready for us to get busy to move
north, for the Gondar campaign in Ethiopia. So that was one of
the first times that I saw, or that I can remember, seeing one of
these dry rivers with a rainstorm in the catchment area come
whooshing down. Very impressive. The rattle of stones, and then
a tiny bore came down. It got higher and higher and higher.
Didn t overflow our banks.
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
A little wall of water came down.
Well, it was quite a big wall. And it lasted for about four
hours, and then we were able to cross. We were on the south side
and we needed to get to the north side to continue up to Addis
Ababa where we were going to establish a camp.
What time of year did you go up to Gondar?
Probably early September that we would have actually got up there,
and the assault on Gondar would have taken place. Much of the
rest of the time was taken with getting up there.
Do you remember some of the fellows in the ambulance group?
they like-minded, relative to war and pacifism?
Were
Not particularly, I don t think. One was a regular army ambulance
man. One was someone from Liverpool, I think. There was one man,
quite large, I enjoyed him, called Busty Williams, who was good at
singing Italian opera. We always reckoned that at the end of the
war he d run a pub somewhere. I never got in touch with him
again. Then we had the man in charge of the company, a captain, a
man called Baskind, who was trained by [Raymond] Dart, and
[Phillip] Tobias in Johannesburg. He was a nice chap.
And he had some familiarity with archaeology?
I think he probably did, actually. Yes, he was certainly
interested in what we were finding.
And so as you were driving north with the group, you were probably
keenly aware of the possibility of archaeological sites.
Clark: Oh, certainly we were on the lookout.
103
Troy: Rock shelters and caves.
Clark: And of course, one of the things that you had to do, whether you
were in the ambulance or straightforward battalion, was to dig
latrines, pits, and rubbish pits and so on. I always used to look
very carefully at the sections, and anything that came out of
those. Which were really good.
Troy: That was like J. D. Martin, the game keeper you talked about last
time, who had a pit in back of his house.
Clark: A rubbish pit, yes. Those are the kind of places where you find a
lot of interesting stuff.
Troy: And then before you went to Gondar, you spent some time in British
Somaliland?
Clark: Yes. We were stationed at Hargeisa, the capital, more or less had
to sort of sit there until we were ready to go north. Hargeisa
was a funny little place on a wadi [a small lake], which had
water, of course, but in the dry season you had to dig for it.
There was a little hospital there. It was the government
headquarters. Our camp was on the south side of the wadi, and we
had a local field ambulance hospital.
There wasn t all that much that one had to do. I used to ride
Somali ponies. There was a funny little airport, airstrip, all
grass. I would go out, would take one of the vehicles, usually
one of these sort of panel van things, and look at dry wadi
sections, beds, collect a lot of stuff, lot of things on the
surface. On one occasion they were looking for me, but only found
the vehicle. They didn t find me. I was a little way off from
it. The transport officer said, "Oh, I reckon that they probably
shot you." That is, the guerrillas or somebody had shot me. They
were quite surprised when they found me picking up little Stone
Age artifacts.
Then we collected quite a lot in that way, which was
invaluable, and which is all published in the volume Stone Age
Cultures of the Horn of Africa.
Troy: Which was really your first book.
Clark: So it was. Betty always enjoys telling people that on one
occasion I asked the man who was helping in the editing of my book
at the press, a junior man, who in fact ended up as the director
of the place [Cambridge] something about the number of books they
published, and he said, "We
always expect to publish at least one
book a year for which there can be no possible sales." [laughter]
104
Troy: Which made you feel just terrific.
Clark: That s right, yes. Well, you see, Cambridge, and Oxford, and Eyre
and Spottiswoode, are the three presses allowed to publish the
Bible. And of course, that s a best-seller. That s probably
changed now, I don t know.
Casualties of the Gondar Campaign
Troy: When you finally got up to the retaking of Gondar in Ethiopia,
were there a lot of casualties?
Clark: There weren t too many casualties at all, insofar as I know, with
the rest of the group, the rest of the battalion out there,
nothing very much. But it was the 4th NRR [Northern Rhodesia
Regiment] that was with us, and they did lose two or three people.
And askaris as well, because they were advancing up a hillside.
Presumably, the Italians were thought to be on the top, but
the Italians had put personnel mines on the slope. We were told
that they had put them there to try to prevent Ethiopian
guerrillas, or whatever you d like to call them, from coming up.
They wounded some of our people. News came back of this probably
two o clock or a little later, and so I went out with probably
four of our askaris and stretchers, supplies, and walked to it,
which was a little distance away. You didn t want to stick the
field ambulance right down in the mine area.
Troy: This was what time?
Clark: When I actually got there, it was about four-thirty. We were
walking around on the slopes. There were still troops there,
trying to dismantle personnel mines, which had little strings,
that kind of thing.
Troy: Trip wires.
Clark: Yes. They had to move in fairly quickly to get to the wounded,
and they reckoned that they d cleaned most of the mines. One man,
I suppose you d call him the medical askari, had collected a
number of people, and put them down onthere was a steepish wadi,
maybe as high as that wall [six feet], which had a flattish sort
of rock down below. He had them all the wounded there, about a
dozen of them.
105
We continued looking on that hillside until dark, sort of
walking around in the dark and calling. Fortunately, the people
who were dismantling the personnel mines had done a pretty good
job. We found nobody else there. 1 went back, and we did what we
could with the people who were down on the wadi floor. We had
four stretchers or so, I think.
Then there was the question of, who should we take? Who were
the most critically wounded? One man in particular was
complaining bitterly of pain in his stomach. It was pretty
dreadful. Otherwise he looked all right. We took him
nonetheless. We went back. By that time, I was so tired, I
remember walking, a longish walk, the moonlight was out, and I
remember talking to some Ethiopian guerrillas at the side of the
road who in point of fact weren t there. Do you see what I mean?
Troy: You began to hallucinate.
Clark: Probably.
Troy: Or were asleep and dreaming but still moving.
Clark: At any rate, we got them all back to the field ambulance
headquarters, where they operated on those that needed operating
on, particularly this fellow, the man. He had a bit of shrapnel
or something that penetrated the intestine, and he had
peritonitis. They did what they could, but he died. Operating
conditions were fairly primitive in those days.
And then we moved into Gondar. Surprisingly enough, when we
were overlooking the valley that we were going to move down into,
the whole battalion moving down there, I found stone artifacts
erodingearly Middle Stone Age, or maybe even late Early Stone
Age. Collected some of them, put them into a sack in back of an
ambulance, and they arrived in Gondar. They re now, 1 think, in
the Rhodes -Livingstone Museum. 1 wrote them up, very interesting.
Troy: You were able to see these obscure artifacts.
Clark: They were biggish sort of things.
But going down into the valley to establish our camp, we had
to go down animal trails, and for that we hired donkeys, or mules
mostly donkeys. I remember we had no idea how many stretchers
or anything a donkey would hold, so you put one on one side, one
on the other. Mules in particular were like this. Then you put
another one, another two, I think. You put a third one, and the
whole animal would fall down. [laughter] We got most of them
down. Some fell into gorges.
106
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
And then I think we probably must have moved straight on into
Gondar and established a camp on a flat sort of area between two
hills. Wasn t a good place to establish a camp because the people
on one hill were firing at the people on the other, which was fun
for a time. Ethiopians of different factions, I suppose.
In Gondar, I met an old school friend who I had rowed with,
Stan Laurie--a brilliant oarsman, Olympic oarsman, died year
before last, I think it was. He was with the Sudan Defense Force.
He was there with another magnificent oarsman, Alan Wilson, and I
met them in the main square in Gondar. That was the last time I
ever saw them.
Was Gondar a small city, or a village?
of
Quite a big town. Gondar is an extremely fine place. It is,
course, a tourist center, because in the 18th century, the
Fasididas family established a dynasty of [Ethiopian] emperors,
and they built castles--that s all that you can call them, I
think--as well as churches in stone, bridges, et cetera.
Absolutely superb. We think they probably must have had some
Portuguese assistance, but that s by no means certain. The
Italians had reconstructed the largest of these and used it as
their administrative headquarters. They were magnificent.
And of course, if you want to know about what went on during
that time in Ethiopia, you need to read [James] Bruce, who was
there in the latter part of the 18th century. Of course, the Blue
Nile rises not all that far from there, Lake Tana.
So it s a high, high country.
Oh, yes. Eight, nine, sometimes ten thousand feet, yes.
Beautiful country. I remember seeing wild dogs racing on the
Dabat Plateau, which is where we had our camp before we moved down
into the valley for the assault on Gondar. Wild olives growing
there, all sorts of things.
The Italians, in the short time that they were in Ethiopia,
had built magnificent roads main roads, if you see what I mean.
Had some of these going up over ten thousand feet, coming all the
way down again and so on. That went on I think three different
times as we moved north. One of the most impressive of those
roads was at Amba Alagi, which was where the Italians made their
last standthis was before Gondar--and where the Duca d Aosta,
who was the commander-in-chief , surrendered. It went up and up
and up.
107
And a very impressive thing was the terracing for agriculture.
What they grew, of course, was the Ethiopian domesticate, teff,
which is still the most popular food or grain in Ethiopia, other
than in the desert areas and so on.
Troy: They make that beautiful thin Ethiopian bread from teff?
Clark: Yes, and ungira. That s right, it has to be made from teff, which
is slightly fermented. I can t eat that any more, because it
upsets my tummy.
Troy: After Gondar, then you headed back down.
Clark: Then we headed back down, stopped in Addis for not too long, and
went down with the brigade to a place called Negelli. By that
time, an administration had been set up, because the emperor had
come back and was now in Addis sort of running things.
Troy: That was Haile Selassie?
Clark: Haile Selassie. And he was brought in by people from the Sudan, a
lot of very interesting stories and so on about it all. Wilfred
Thesiger s Life of My Choice says a lot about all of that, and a
number of other people as well.
There was down there, actually, a man who was a district
commissioner from Northern Rhodesia who we knew quite well, a man
called Thomas. It was fairly wild in those days. There was
forest not too far away. In fact, the Adola Forest was the place
where there was a lot of alluvial gold working. I think that s
where most of the Ethiopian gold came from.
Troy: This would be to the south on the way to Somaliland again?
Clark: This was going south, southern part of the plateau, really, that
was Negelli. And then you went down into the beginning of the
Rift.
Yavello and Rock Art
Clark: And we later on for a short time established ourselves at another
little sort of village center called Yavello, where I did a little
work in a rock shelter with paintings, wrote that up as well. And
then we moved south, across the desert from Mega to--what was the
name of that mountain in northern Kenya? Mount Marsabit.
Isolated mountain, north of the town of Isiolo where we stayed.
108
One of the most amazing things was getting there after the
dreadful desert. Oh, the road was terrible, potholes, dust
everywhere. And you climbed this, and eventually you got into a
forest, a rain forest on the top.
Then I went off to Nairobi for a gas course, I remember.
Troy: What is gas?
Clark: Well, if the enemy were going to use mustard gas or chlorine or
something like that, what do you do, all that kind of thing.
Troy: Yavello was where the Italian gun emplacement shelters were?
Clark: There was, yes, that s right.
Troy: But in putting those emplacements, they hadn t wrecked everything,
relative to the archaeology?
Clark: Oh, no. No, they just dug a hole. I was able to see what there
was there and collect stuff.
Troy: What age would that be?
Clark: That was Middle Stone Age there, and Late Stone Age. And one of
Steve Brandt s students, Girma Hundie, has done his dissertation
on what he found at Yavello. He s writing it up now.
Troy: He s at Berkeley?
Clark: In Gainesville.
Troy: So he has reexamined the rock art that you found there?
Clark: Yes. It was rather inferior rock art, but it was rock art.
Hopefully he found some better stuff.
Then from Nairobi we went on maneuvers, which browned us off.
Somewhere east of Salisbury, now Harare. And there I acquired a
kidney stone, which was excruciatingly painful. A result, I
think, of not drinking enough water when we were in the desert.
At any rate, it passed, thank god. Awful looking, with all sorts
of spikiness all around it.
Troy: How long did you suffer from that?
Clark: Oh, I went into Salisbury Hospital. They looked after me there.
I think they probably enlarged the urethra so that it passed,
thank God. My God, it was painful. Like peeing powdered glass.
109
Then we must have gone down to Durban to get the boat to go to
northern Madagascar, to Diego Suarez, which is a magnificent
harbor, something not unlike the San Francisco bay here, actually.
Very narrow entrance, and an enormouswell , it was wider than
this one is. Absolutely fantastic. I remember I got a dugout
canoe, a single outrigger, and tried to paddle across the strait.
Troy: You had taken a ship up there from Durban?
Clark: That s right, yes. Everybody being sick, of course, you know.
The usual kind of thing. We established our company hospital unit
out at a place right on the southern tip of the entrance, which
was where Marshall Foch of First World War fame had mounted
enormously heavy guns all pointing out to sea. The only problem
was that you couldn t move them round. The trajectory was
probably forty-five degrees, something like that. And as the
attack came from the land, those were quite useless. But they did
have the French 75, which was an extremely efficient piece of
artillery.
Troy: Before the Second World War, Madagascar was occupied by--?
Clark: The French. I suppose it must have been sometime maybe as early
as 1860 or something like that?
Troy: So Marshall Foch was French?
Clark: He was one of the famous leaders in the First World Wardefended
Verdun. Foch also later was brought in to parlay with the Germans
when they overran France in the Second World War. Poor chap.
Troy: So he was caught in that quandary of the Vichy and trying to make
decisions about what to do vis-a-vis the Germans.
Clark: Yes, that s right. And we were there, with nothing very much to
do.
Troy: Why do you think they sent you up there?
Clark: Well, they were thinking that there would be a further attack
against the Vichy forces in Madagascar. But nothing happened when
we were there. And by that time, I think I had realized that one
really has to do a bit more to try to help end the war, so I then
went off to the OCTU in Njoro.
Troy: Officers Candidate Training something?
Clark: Maybe Officer Cadet or something, I can t remember what it is. I
went there, Njoro, on the other side of the rift from Nairobi.
110
Njoro, the Huxleys and the Leakeys
Troy: How far is Njoro from Nairobi? Not too far, right?
Clark: I should think maybe 150, 200 miles. Something like that. Nice
little place. That s where Elspeth Huxley s mother had a farm,
and I used to bicycle up there every Saturday evening, I think it
was, spend the night.
Troy: Is that Nellie Grant?
Clark: Nellie Grant, yes. She was a magnificent person. Her husband was
a charming man, but a bit inconsequential, I think. As she said,
he started off as a major in the Boer War; he was a captain in the
First World War; he was a lieutenant in this. But he was nice.
He more often was away than not. Nellie kept dachshunds. They
went everywhere with her.
I did a little archaeology there, because there was a rock
shelter near the one that the Leakeys had excavated, Njoro River
Cave. Very fine stuff coming out of it. Later Stone Age, of
course.
Troy: And then how close was yours to the Leakey cave?
Clark: Oh, probably quarter of a mile, something like that. It was in a
little gorge.
Troy: So you ve known a lot of the Huxleys.
Clark: One or other. Julian we knew, came to Livingstone, spent two or
three days there. And then the last time I saw him was when he
came out in connection with the formation of the Galapagos,
whatever they call it.
Troy: And Nellie would have been what relationship to Julian?
Clark: I don t know. Probably cousin or aunt or something.
Troy: How big was her farm? Was it a working farm?
Clark: She grew pyrethrum, which of course was good, you know, good for
keeping mosquitoes away. And she had cattle. She stayed there
for quite a while, and then upped and believe it or not, she went
to southern Portugal where she started growing strawberries. Then
she died about two or three years after that.
Ill
Troy: And she was very accommodating? She liked you to come up there
and work?
Clark: Yes. She was super, absolutely super.
Troy: And how did you get there from where you were staying? Did you
ride your bike up?
Clark: I rode a bicycle, yes. Quite an effort going up. [laughs]
Because it was up the mountain.
Troy: Had the Leakeys introduced you to her, or had you known her
through contacts in Livingstone?
Clark: I think I must have known her through the Leakeys, but I don t
think we were all together. They were in Nairobi.
Troy: And during all of this time, Desmond, you had no chance to go back
to Livingstone to see Betty?
Clark: I think--yes. My one leave was after the OCTU and I probably had
three weeks , I think it was , and I went down with a good guy that
I had met at the OCTU. He d been in the Tanganika administration,
a man called Harry Braddell, who had an estate outside Dublin.
Troy: And he had some interest in your archaeological interests?
Clark: To some extent. Not very much. He could play a recorder, which
he quite enjoyed, and he was a miler, a fine runner.
Somaliland. the People and the Italian Forts
Troy: Throughout your career your interest in the local people,
contemporary people, leaves me thinking that in many ways you re
as much ethnographer as archaeologist. You always had that
interest, and have written about contemporary tribal peoples.
Clark: Well, of course one has to get as much information as one can
about the local people, about their relationship with their
surroundings, and with the environment, with the resources of the
land, the trees, the plants, and so on, the animals that are
there. And of course, their domestic and other ritual practices
and all of that.
Troy: You were really the key person who articulated that need to know
the current people, the present people, in order to know the past.
112
Clark: I have always emphasized that. That was something that I
emphasized when I was talking to Diane Gif ford s seminarwhen was
it?--about a month ago now, I think. If you really want to know
what the country is like, then you ve got to go and walk through
it with the people, get to know them, get to know the plants, get
to know the animals, and everything sort of opens up.
That s why I enjoyed so much Somaliland. When I was with the
British military administration latterly, I think about 44, late
43, something like that, we did a tremendous amount of walking,
because we had to see what was going on, try to understand. These
were mostly semi-pastoral people. The Eile were the most
importantwe used to call them tribes in those days, but whatever
you d like to call them nowin a very important group called the
Rahen Wein Confederacy. It is the main group of what is normally
called the Sab Somali population, as opposed to the what the hell
are the others called? Somali, I think. Yes, Sab and Somali.
That s right, the northern ones.
Troy: How is that spelled?
Clark: [spells] One of the problems, of course, about spelling is that
Somalia was Italian, so you have Italian spellings all over the
place, and so on. The English spellings, the place that I was
looking after before I went into Mogadishu was a place called by
the Italians Oddur, and we called it Hoddur. This was almost on
the old border between Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia. And the
part of the Ethiopia that came up to the border was the Ogaden,
which the Italians later, after 1935, incorporated in Somalia,
because most of the people there were pastoralists of one kind or
another.
I had one place called Wejit. We spelled it W-e-j-i-t.
Italian maps had it as Uegit or something. I remember people
would call up and say, "I m trying to find some place called
Wejit. Where the hell is it?" At any rate, there it was down at
the southern end of my territory. And this is where there had
been Italian regiments stationed for quite a long time. There
were important springs there, and I remember seeingthe only time
I ve ever actually seen this, I thinkseeing a man fishing in a
well, believe it or not, because it was all limestone. Sort of
blind and whitish looking fish would pass through the well every
so often, the well they lived in the darkness down below and
this chap was pulling them up. Fascinating. Puts one in mind of
the nursery rhyme about the chap who was fishing in the well?
At any rate. And there, each of those Italian regiments had
put its regimental coats of arms, or whatever it was, on the
buildings quite impressive. Nobody lived there.
113
Troy: Kind of abandoned by that point.
Clark: Yes, but I would have to go there probably every month.
Troy: Was it desert country around there? What was that like?
Clark: No, it was scrub, low bush, I suppose, trees about twenty feet
high, something like that. Very difficult, in point of fact, if
you got disorientated in finding your way back.
Troy: Still probably mainly unirhabited.
Clark: Well, the amazing thing is that if something happens to your car,
if you have a puncture or something like that, it won t go for
some reason, or you stop, sooner or later, sure enough, you will
look up and you will see a Somali leaning with one foot and
leaning on his stick, staff, watching. [laughs] And of course,
they are great people for giving advice. Terrific people for
giving advice. But impossible to get them to actually do anything
about it.
Troy: I remember a description of you going into one of the villages,
and the name of these people--Eile means owners of dogs.
Clark: Eile, yes. So we could come to that. The other places I had were
old forts these Italians had built. One was Tigieglo, and that
was quite interesting. It was fairly complete. It was around a
hollow square. The only thing was, there were no doors or
windows .
Troy: How did you get in, and how did you get out?
Clark: Oh, you just drove in and drove out. The main gate had been
removed.
The other fort was very good- -damned if I can remember the
name of it now [El Goran] .
Troy: Did you have to make the rounds of these places?
Clark: Yes, I made the rounds, and we used them as the sort of place
where you spent the night, you see.
The other place, which was really right on the border [of
Ethiopia], was a typical sort of Beau Geste fort, again no windows
or doorsthat had quite a biggish tower. There were lions around
there. What one did is one put one s bed up on the roof.
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Troy: You d be out there by yourself sleeping on the roof of the fort
with the lions roaming around?
Clark: I think at the same time a number of the Somalis would lie up
there as well, because they didn t like lions. [laughter]
Troy: And no Italians for hundreds of miles.
Clark: Well, the Italians had packed in, you see. Yes. And nothing very
much was coming out from Ethiopia at that time, it was just the
normal movements of tribal groups there, pastoralists and so on.
And one would make excursions out from time to time, which was
quite fun.
One of the things, of course, were these cultivated places.
They were quite good, the Rahen Wein, at that. There were thorn
hedges on either side of the very few motorable tracks that there
were, and every so often, you would find you had a camel or
several camels on this road. And of course, they couldn t get
off, so they went like this [mimics loping movement] . You could go
for several miles until you could get to gaps where you could get
them off.
Troy: And you were in a Land Rover?
Clark: No, we were in an old two-ton, open-back truck, a Chev, I think
they were. I m not certain, Chev or Bedford. All the kit, all
the people and everything shoved in the back. I drove it, of
course.
Within the country itself, within the districtwell, that was
the area of the Elai and the Eile. That was within Isha Baidoa
district, which is the one that I went to first of all, and I was
an assistant civil affairs officer there. Again, regular touring,
which was fun.
Isha Baidoa featured very prominently in the famines and also
the fighting in Somalia. And one of the things that I shall
always remember is at the endagain, we were in another of these
Beau Geste forts. That s where the headquarters was, which was
the provincial headquarters. Built rather like a Vauban fort. At
the end of Ramadan, all the local inhabitants in the town of Isha
Baidoa, which is about the second largest town in the whole of
Somalia, I think, of course, were on the lookout for the first
sign of the new moon, which meant the end of Ramadan and the
beginning of the feast, Id al-Fitr.
Everything was sort of quiet, and then, a couple guns or so
went off, and steadily, a crescendo of noise developed. That was
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it. Then the next day the local people, headmen of the Arabs and
this group and that group, would come around in all their finery,
and they would make speeches and you would make speeches back and
so on, in the office, which was fun.
From time to time we would have these people, the Elai--
Troy: That s the E-i-l-e.
Clark: Not the Eile, the Elai. There was an important religious cult, I
suppose you would say, there, in that area.
Troy: But not a Muslim thing.
Clark: Muslim, yes, they were all Muslims. Probably not frightfully good
Muslims. But this [cult] was called the Rer Sheik Munin. Sheik
Munin must have been an important sheik, and he and his tomb were
revered. This group centered around it was quite a powerful
political group as well, which to some extent was rather
suppressed.
Then within the Rahen Wein group, confederacy, I should say,
there were a whole series of other peoples, like the Hawiya. They
were early peoples. They wouldn t get on at all well with some
other group. It was very nearly a warfortunately it didn t come
to that but we had to confiscate an enormous amount of bows and
arrows, poisoned arrows as well, quite a lot of them, and quivers.
Beautifully made, some of these things.
Troy: While the Italians had left, you had your hands full with all of
this internal struggle and strife.
Clark: Oh, yes, because you see what happened: when the Italians left,
they destroyed many of the records. They weren t there to hand
over, or very, very few ever were. But I think there was a hand
over in Isha Baidoa. But Somalis, they would also destroy quite a
bit of stuff. Groups would come along and say, "I was an
important chief under the Somalis, I was always given so many
lire," I suppose it was, "a month." And some people, if you
weren t careful, would write this down, and they d somehow get
onto the books, so to speak.
We had one group called Shegits. Shegits mean that they were
incorporated peoples. They were Shegits of the Elai. They would
be people who would have come from some other group, maybe
somewhere up in the north, come down, asked for land and
affiliation, and that is what they had. Sort of tenant farmers or
something, is probably what it means. We had one of those groups
which wanted to break away from the Elai. We had an awful
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nonsense. I remember being sent out to show the flag. I think we
had about half a dozen gendarmes who were pretty useless, and
district messengers who were excellent. You d sort of travel
around the country and try to see what the situation was.
Showing the Flag, During the Rain
Troy: When you say show the flag, you meant to make your presence known.
Clark: That s right, yes.
And one of these was during the rains. It was quite obvious
that it was going to pour rain later in the evening. We put the
tent up on this small rise this was down on the sort of alluvial
coastal plain area, went on down to the Indian Ocean eventually.
I got in that, put up my bed, my table, and my chair, and there we
were. Dark came on, poured with rain, and lightning stabs all
over. One of the most unpleasant evenings I have ever had. Of
course, we were probably in one of the higher spots. Sudden
lightning stabs and cracks of thunder and so on weren t so good.
And of course, water came through the floor of the tent, and I
remember hearing pop, pop, pop, pop, and I watched one of those
big frogs, bullfrogs, flopping right across through the tent. The
thing grunted as well.
At any rate, these Shegits were trying to break away and sort
of establish themselves as a separate entity from the Elai, and
the Elai objected very much to that. We had, I remember, a
deputation from the Elai. There must have been, oh, I don t know,
forty, fifty people, all clambering in the office, all these sort
of spears waving around and so on, you know, and saying, "This is
disgraceful, we can t have this," et cetera, et cetera. And the
civil affairs officer, nice chap, Derek Roman, who d been in the
Wajir in the northern frontier district of Kenya before, he
pacified them. There we all were, you couldn t get any more in
the office. But at any rate, there it was. They went off, and
then we had a barazar, you see, a big meeting out in the Elai
country, talking about all of this, sorted all that out.
Troy: They initially came to your office in the district headquarters in
Isha Baidoa?
Clark: That s right.
I had a problem in Hoddur, because there were continual raids
between the local tribe and the Ghaljal. Ghaljal were basically
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pastoralists who would raid these people and steal their camels,
you see. [laughter] And the other people, of course, would do
that as well. In this particular instance, they had stolen
twenty- five camels from the Ghaljal, and I commandeered the
camels, and we were going to give them back. That enraged the
local people, who protested more or less for about two days, drums
going like mad, et cetera.
I was due to go on tour the next day in my open truck, and I
was getting ready with it. Went normally with district
messengers--elalos, they were called. Great people, they really
were.
Troy: Is that their tribal name, or was that just a word for messenger?
Clark: It s a word for a district messenger, yes.
We opened the gates, and there was a solid mass of all these
people crammed into the door with spears and sticks and so on, to
prevent me going. I did the wrong thing, I think. I should never
have got into the kind of position that we did, but I think we
sort of talked to them for a while, told them to get out of the
way, clear out. Then I must have had three or four gendarmes
there, I think, and I said to the sergeant of the gendarmes, "All
right, Sergeant, clear these people out of the way." I should
never have got into that kind of a situation, because if they
hadn t got out of the way, I don t know what would have happened.
But they all scattered.
Dog Assemblies, Camel Raids. Poison Arrows, the Mad Mullah
Clark: With the Eile--there was another occasion, as well. I was at Bur
Acaba, which is near this isolated granite massif, huge great
thing out in the bush in this red sand country which I enjoyed so
much, acacia trees all the way around and so on. Very impressive
mountain, a sacred mountain too. I was camped there and a troop
of local women came by in the middle of the night. They were
ululating, making that high-pitched warbling sound with their
throats and mouths. They were headed up to Bur Eibe to put up
strings, little pieces of thread, offerings to the mountain to
ensure that they would have children. It was a glorious full
moon, I remember.
Bur Eibe was a super place. There was rock art there as well,
Down in the bottom of it there lived the Eile, and they were
hunters and dog-owners. Dogs, of course, are anathema to good
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Muslims. But they were quite successful hunters. They lived in a
little village. They grew crops, of course, as well.
Troy: But they were definitely not Islamic. They were not Muslims.
Clark: Well, I think they were meant to be, but pretty--they were
tolerated, if you see what I mean.
They must have been some of the original Batwa population that
had become semi-incorporated at that time, when I was there. We
used to camp in a large rock shelter there, a great place for
camping. Rock art on the walls of some kind or another. The
great thing was to get the local chief huntsman, or actually,
leader of the dogs, to call them together for a hunt. This was
very fascinating, because the dogs would be all over the place.
Troy: All shapes and sizes?
Clark: No, basically they were the kind that didn t bark, curly tails
mostly, short, pointed ears, about that high. But they could
howl, of course.
So the chief lifted up his voice, sort of a few howls and so
on, and all these dogs, thirty-odd dogs, would run all around, and
they d form a big circle around him. They d stay there and
they "d--every so often several of them would howl. Most
impressive, incredibly impressive. Then he would lead them off;
he d run off, and they d all follow him.
Troy: And he d have his spear and bow?
Clark: Bows. It was all bows. The only time I ever saw any people-
well, I don t think they were Eile, I think they were Rebei [local
name for the hunter-gathering people of the area] , another group-
actually out hunting, they had nets with them as well. The dogs
were all kinds of different colors and shapes and things. Yes.
But they did have spears with them as well.
Troy: And the dogs would spread out and chase the game into the nets?
Clark: I think that s the idea, yes. The dogs were probably well trained
for all of this.
But on one occasion, we were camped at Bur Elbethis was in
the evening. And suddenly, some Elai arrived. They said, "We re
chasing Ghaljal, not very far ahead." The Ghaljal had stolen
camels. They d had an encounter with them, and one chap had a
whopping great gash behind, you could almost see his kidney. I
said, "Good gracious, we ll have to do something about that." You
119
know, you carried a first aid kit and everything. "We have to sew
that up." "Oh, no," he said, "we can t possibly. We re so close
to them, we must go."
And off he went. I inquired afterwards,
and they said, "Yes, okay, he survived."
I think probably one of the things is, you see, if you ve got
really dry country, you can get away with it. If it s damp, wet,
that s the danger.
Troy: The infections.
Clark: All these damn things settle on it. One of the worst places, of
course, is the tropical forest. I did not like the Ituri
[Forest]. That s where you get all sorts of more nasty things-
like elephantiasis. I think we were said to have that as well.
Troy: In the Ituri Forest?
Clark: Yes. I forget what it was that one took to get rid of it. Glynn
Isaac had it. But you can get rid of that now.
Troy: So these people, the Eile, were somewhat allied with the Elai.
Clark: Yes. They were closely related to them. I suppose the Eile were
protected by the Elai.
Troy: What s the future of Somalia?
Clark: God only knows. It s just going its own way at the moment. No
central government, anything.
Troy: Do you miss it, though? You liked Somalia.
Clark: Oh, I greatly enjoyed it there. It was absolutely super. I
thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes. I did an excavation at Bur Eibe
because it was the only time that I ever managed to get any local
leave. I think I had two weeks local leave, so I went and did an
excavation at Bur Eibe. The rock shelter that I excavated was the
Cure Warbei, named after the arrow poison.
Troy: Where do they get the arrow poison out there in that country?
Clark: I think it was from acocanthera--it s an evergreen tree, and it
is, I think, the fruit of it that they use. Could be a root, but
I m not certain. The interesting thing is that acocanthera was
also used in Kenya, along the Ngong Escarpment going down into the
rift south of Nairobi. You see, the only trees that you can see
are these evergreen trees. Everything else has been cut down for
firewood long, long ago, but these are kept because the Masai and
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I suppose other people, mainly the Masai, never quite know when
they might want to have a bit more poison again. So they don t
cut them.
Troy: The Masai use the same poison that was being used in Somaliland?
I had no idea that they had poisoned arrows.
Clark: Yes. They were mostly used, of course, in hunting.
Troy: Quite a potent poison, you wouldn t want to scratch yourself with
one of those arrows.
Clark: No, definitely not. That s why they kept them wrapped with cloth,
little strips of cloth. And the head was slightly blunt at the
end, went like that and had two pointed wings. And then the
poison after that, poison on the tang.
Troy: You re probably one of the few people in the world who has the
sense of this complex land, Somalia, that you essentially
administered for a couple of years.
Clark: Yes, the administration was quite efficient. Didn t prevent one
or two of these tribal wars and so on. There was one up in the
Mudugh, perpetual fighting up there. But mostly they were pretty
peaceful, particularly in the southern parts, because of the
cultivation there was. And, of course, the Italians had been
there. Along the coast, you see, there was Mogadishu, Merka,
Kismayu, all important little towns that had influence to a
certain extent in the interior.
I haven t thought about this for really quite a long time.
One of the amazing things is going touring, as we called it,
during the rains and during the dry season. We d go in the dry
season to some of these well areas. There was dust all over the
place, people hauling up water from the wells, putting it into
wooden troughs so that the camels and the other animals could all
eat. All very dusty, rather miserable looking place.
Then we went in the rains, no sign of anybody anywhere at all.
And beautiful emerald green grass all over.
Troy: Where did everybody go?
Clark: They move off. They take the herds up to different areas, you
see. This was something that regularly happened in the north, all
those that go right down into thewhat was it called? The Haud.
Red sand, scrub, a bit of grassland. And termite mounds that
looked like Henry Moore sculptures . The Haud was the permanent
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home of one group, but when they moved off seasonally, another
group would come in temporarily, and so on.
Troy: Do you think most of pre-colonial Africaif they were hunter-
gatherers and raiders, then there would always be those kind of
chaotic alliances and misalliances.
Clark: Depended, of course, on what kind of political and economic,
social organization the group had. The strong political
organizations, of course, were the most warlike, and some of those
up in the north, like the Fang and so on, they would regularly eat
people as well.
Troy: In the north of where were the Fang?
Clark: Fang were up in the Rio Muni region and, what would it be, some in
Gabon, some in southern Cameroon or southeastern Cameroon, down
there.
But in Northern Rhodesia, the Barotse were basically peaceful
people, very efficient internal trade organization under the
paramount chief. And all that kind of thing was preserved by the
British administration, and I think the French did exactly the
same kind of thing as well. Under the British rule, of course, it
was Lord Lugard who establishedwhat is it?--Preserve and Rule or
something like that, so the chiefs remained chiefs, and there it
was .
Troy: When was the last time you were in Somalia?
Clark: Oh, 1946, but it s still fairly vivid, going through the bush,
walking through the bush during the rains, coming across a henna
tree. Henna has a fine scent. It s used as an aromatic by the
women, I think it was, and it produced a red pigment they put on
their nails or something. But the flowers of the henna tree, the
scent, you get within about twenty-five yards or more from the
tree, absolutely magnificent. Superb.
Troy: Would you say that Somalia in its odd way was one of the most
exotic places you ve been in? I know that s an awfully loaded
word, but it sounds like a fascinating place.
Clark: Well, they all have their fascination, if you see what I mean.
And it was a great opportunity of seeing the general way of life
of the people, before it had been altered too much by European
interaction. There was not all that much that could be done with
pastoral people who move off.
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One of the great things is that you re mobile, and if you
don t like the--I remember having to tell Soraalis that the
government had controlled the price of maize, to keep it down so
that it didn t go up. There was a sort of famine, and merchants
were sitting on sacks and sacks of sorghum, which was the common
food that was used there, waiting for the price to go up. You
would get a headman or someone would come in, you d tell him about
this. He would have in his nice fuzzy hair one or two very nice
little wooden hairpins, which from time to time he would take out
and use because some little animal would be irritating his scalp.
And he d be standing on one foot, leaning on a staff or spear, and
he would listen.
And if he didn t like what you were saying, he would
eventually leave. [laughs] I m afraid that s what I tend to
think of the government here as well, from time to timewhat are
they getting out of it? And not only the government, but everyone
else. I learned that from the Somalis. If the Somalis didn t
like it, they didn t want to adhere to what it was that you said,
they d just go off for a month with their camels.
And you admired them for that. Great individualists.
Troy: But at the same time, a touch of cruelty, really, isn t there? I
mean, sitting on all of that food while other people were
starving.
Clark: Oh, those were the merchants. They were bloody awful people.
Troy: And were the merchants Somali?
Clark: Not infrequently they were Arabs of one kind or another.
Troy: And they d wait for the price to go up.
Clark: I remember seeing a woman with a child sitting in the market at
Isha Baidoa after, I think, the sale of sorghum, picking
individual seeds out of the sand where the bags had been and
putting them into a little tin. [becomes emotional]
Troy: Sounds like Somalia- -Somaliland then, Somalia now--in some ways
represents everything good and bad about humanity? The chaos and
the anarchy and the alliances and the love. I mean, I think we
were appalled when they were dragging the American soldier through
the street, but certainly that wouldn t have surprised you.
Clark: Richard Burton, of course, very nearly died at Berbera. Remember?
When was it, 1842 was it? When he first got there. He landed
with I think two other people. Was it [John Banning] Speke that
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was with him? I don t know. There was somebody else. And they
were attacked by the Somalis. You see, Berbera was one of these
important trading centers on the coast. It was later the capital
of British Somaliland. And when the dhows came in, of course, the
town would swell with huge tents, or gurgi, as they were called,
with mats, of course. The rest of the town would almost be
deserted.
Obbia was another place like that, on the coast. The Sultan
of Zanzibar had his viziers, or forts, up and down the coast. Ras
Hafun and other places. But this was the kind of situation that
you got, and the same in the interior to some extent, these
markets and market towns. I greatly enjoyed that.
Troy: I sense you had tremendous admiration, and exasperation, over the
great independence of these people. They would just listen and
leave.
Clark: Yes, that s right. One cannot but admire them for that. But of
course, you see, it means that they never formed an important
military group or anything. In British Somaliland the Camel Corps
was formed to try and deal with the so-called Mad Mullah. They
were reasonably effective at that time, but not very.
Troy: Was the Mad Mullah one person?
Clark: Yes, the Mad Mullah was one person who led quite an interesting
sort of, I suppose, revolt. But he mostly did it from the
outside, coming in on raids and that kind of thing, and the
British couldn t cope with it, because they couldn t go outside.
They couldn t go after him, That s the kind of situation that
developed in Vietnam, you see, where the Northern Vietnamese would
get into Cambodia and Laos. You never need to get into that kind
of dilemma.
Troy: When was the Mad Mullah doing his thing?
Clark: Sometime in the twenties. But they had an expedition to Obbia,
where British troops--! m not certain, must have been a battalion,
I should think- -landed, and put all their stores on the coast, and
they marched all the way up to a place which in my day was called
by the Italians Rocco Lettore, the Rock of the Lectors. The
Somali name for it was Galkayu, which means "the white man turns."
By the time the troops got up theremiserable countrythey had
to walk, marched all the way up with all their kit and everything
and of course, the Mullah had disappeared. There was nothing they
could do but go back again. So back they went, and what they left
behind was a whopping great store of bully beef. This is now a
mound, quite a big mound, sand all over it, but if you look at it
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carefully, little bits of completely rusted through bully beef
tins are still there.
Troy: Really?
Clark: Yes. I collected some.
Troy: And this is near a town, or near nothing?
Clark: There s nothing very much at Obbia, other than the sultan s, or
the vizier s, little white-painted fort. Nothing.
Miiirtein. Punctures, and the Charms of Cheetahs
Troy: How long were you in that assignment, Desmond?
Clark: Until February, 1946. When I knew I was going to be discharged, I
talked to the chief administrator, who was Dennis Wickham, very
nice chap--he d been the provincial commissioner in the northern
frontier district of Kenya, and a number of those district
officers, district commissioners, were recruited to go up to
Somalia afterwards and start the administration again there. He
had a house in Lamu, superb Arab town on the coast, where the
dhows still come in, basically an 18th-century Arab town.
I said, "I
have, in the course of my time here, managed to
visit, see, and collect and so on, a certain amount of archaeology
from various parts, but I have never managed to go into north,
into the Mijirtein. Is there a chance that I could go up there
before I have to go down to be discharged?"
He said, "Yes, of course. We will give you a lorry and
rations, and off you go for a month," which is what I did, with my
cook and my personal servant. I think that s all we had.
Troy: Kind of scary, wasn t it?
Clark: Oh, not really. We didn t think of it like that in those days.
What was scary was when I got up to the boundary between
British Somaliland and Somalia. This was a wide, man-made strip,
maybe thirty feet, cut straight through the bush, and it was all
limestone. And I got a tire puncture, so we stopped and put the
spare on, and the spare had a gash in it! What we were going over
was limestone which had been weathered in many places to needle-
like points. 1 was dead scared, because there was absolutely
125
nobody around at all, that we would get stuck. However, we did
not, you see, and we went on.
Troy: What did you do, fix the puncture somehow?
Clark: We fixed the puncture, yes, and we then took the spare off and
dealt with that.
Later, I went down the Nogal River from a place called Garoe,
which is another of these Italian administrative stations, another
of these little forts. The Nogal is a river that runs into the
Indian Ocean. In other words, flows east. At the mouth of the
Nogal, I found a group of people living in a cave, fishermen who
had come from another cave, about a dozen miles away or something
like that. The fishing had become a bit thinthey d been there
for about six years, I thinkand so they moved down to this new
cave and established themselves. They had a few goats, with a
little goat pen. And there they were, living in this rock
shelter. I got a picture of it; I think what may be the
frontispiece, actually, in the book on the prehistoric cultures of
the Horn of Africa. That was nice. And I learned quite a bit
from them. One of the great things about the Nogal mouth was that
you could have almost unlimited amount of crayfish to eat. Superb
crayfish. Nothing apart from these people, nobody normally lived
on that coast at all, of course.
At any rate, I met a very nice chap, the district officer, and
he had a pet cheetah. Many of them did, because there were
cheetahs around, and I don t know whether--! suppose the Somalis
probably had shot the mother or speared it or something, I don t
know. But at any rate, several of them had these pet cheetahs,
and on the whole, they didn t do too well in being domestic,
because they got rickets or something. Probably didn t have
enough meat. Not that we had any meat very much at all ourselves.
But this cheetah was a delightful thing. It knew that it
should hunt, but it didn t quite know sort of how to do it, and it
would stalk a goat. You d see it stalking a goat, and then
suddenly it would jump at the rear end of the thing, and of
course, the goat would go like that, and that would be that,
[laughter] The cheetah would sit in a corner of the room and it
would look at us. And then you would realize after a while the
most amazing noise. This was the purr, the purring was beautiful,
a lowish but pervading purr, you know.
Very nice animal indeed, although I don t think that you can
make a true domestic pet out of a cheetah. But in the past, both
in China and also in central Asia, the cheetah was used for
hunting gazelle from horseback. On the saddle where the hunter
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was would be a little round platform like that at the back, and
that s where the cheetah would sit.
1947-1948 at Cambridge, and the Travels of the Burkitt Collection
Troy: Somewhere in there you received permission to take leave to go to
Cambridge to finish your Ph.D. work.
Clark: Yes, it was 1947 to 48. They gave me dispensation for two years
working in the field, which I certainly did, but one had to have
one academic year back in Cambridge.
Troy: Back at Christ s.
Clark: At the university, not necessarily Christ s, no. And I was
married then and we had two children.
Troy: Did you look forward to going back to England?
Clark: Very much so, yes. I greatly looked forward to finishing my Ph.D.
And I took all my collections from Somaliland. I d already
shipped the Zambezi ones, but all those from Somaliland--there
were twenty-two boxes. I went down to Cape Town and handed over
to Thomas Cook, who was so slow with doing anything about them at
all that I almost didn t get them before I had to go back to
Africa again. But they arrived, fortunatelyonce they left Cape
Town, I got them pretty quickly.
Miles Burkitt really handed over his office to me in the
museum on Downing Street, and I was spread all over the place.
Troy: Downing Street in Cambridge?
Clark: In Cambridge, yes. That s where the anthropology and archaeology
museum and the faculty and so on are, and a number of other
museums there as well. And from time to time, he would poke his
head round the door. I think he was rather shocked, he saw every
table and surface covered with piles of artifacts and rocks of one
kind or another.
Troy: The contents of twenty-two boxes of materials that you d collected
during the war.
Clark: That s right, yes--much traveled. They traveled from the Horn of
Africa right through the whole of central Africa down to Cape
Town. In fact, they traveled two thirds of the length of Africa.
127
Troy: And then went back up again across the Equator.
Clark: And then went back up again, yes. That collection is now in the
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, except for a
small collection which I gave to Miles Burkitt, because he used
these in his seminars. That small collection subsequently came
back to me. We have it here now. It s in Tim White s lab, what
is called the Burkitt Collection, which Miles left to me, one
third of his collectiontwo thirds went to Cambridge. This was
used in teaching prehistory in Berkeley. So there it all is, all
being catalogued, computerized, and available for study and lab
courses and so on.
Troy: And part of that collection, of the third that he gave you, was
material that you had collected in Ethiopia, that came back to you
in essence?
Clark: That s right.
Troy: Did you have trouble getting a place to live when you went back to
Cambridge, or how did that work out?
Clark: No, that worked out very well. I think that it was probably Miles
Burkitt who asked around, and the White Cottage in Grantchester,
about a couple of hundred yards from where Miles Burkitt lived,
more or less opposite the church, I think, as well, had recently
fallen vacant. The old lady who died was a Huxley, and she left
the cottage to Michael Huxley, who was living somewhere else and
wanted to lease it. So we rented it for the time that we were
there, and very nice it was.
Troy: And just a short run from Grantchester into the campus, into town.
Clark: Yes. I would say it s maybe two miles, something like that, so I
did it, of course, on a bicycle.
Troy: You and Betty were happy to get back, and the children had a good
time in England?
Clark: The children thoroughly enjoyed themselves.
Troy: They were five, six, somewhere in there, probably, by then.
Clark: They were quite small. I don t think they were as old as that.
It was a very severe winter. Lots of cold, ice, and snow and so
on.
In the middle of all that I went out, 1947, to the First Pan-
African Congress in Nairobi. I flew out with Bernard Fagg, who
128
was in west Africa. He was in the colonial service there and did
a great deal for prehistory in Nigeria. When I came back, they d
had rain and snow and so on, and the roof --it had a thatch roof,
the White Cottage--the roof had leaked into one of the upstairs
bedrooms. The leak was starting to come down into the sitting
room below. But it was so cold that the water froze, so there
were staligmitic icicles, or stalagmites. [laughter] And you
could break them off the ceiling, so they didn t flood everything.
I well remember that.
Troy: Well, that was a very cold winter.
Clark: It was a very cold winter. And of course, food was rationed, you
know.
Troy: Because even though the war was over, you were still in a
rationing situation.
Clark: Yes.
Troy: Did all of this, this severe winter, suggest to you that perhaps
you really had become a Rhodesian and a tropical man?
Clark: Oh, no.
Troy: You still had the love for England.
Clark: Oh, all one s basic associations were there. No, I never became a
Rhodesian. One was always looking to England, you see? And one
expected one would go back and live there in due course. Every
three to begin with, later two and a half, years, we had what was
called long leave, which was six months out of the country, plus
the traveling time, to sort of recuperate from the tropical
climate and the rest of it. And we invariably would go back to
England, and rent a cottage somewhere within the Cambridge area.
129
VI POST-WAR ARCHAEOLOGY
First Pan-African Conference, 1947
Troy: At the First Pan-African Congress in Nairobi, I remember that one
of the major agenda items involved the issue of nomenclature, what
to call or label industries and so on.
Clark: Yes, that was a big issue. We talked about that extensively. In
trying to make connections, one really needs labels--Stillbay,
Wilton, and so on. But one doesn t want to overextend those, if
you see my point, take something beyond what the data will
support. We were struggling with the nomenclature in those early
years .
Troy: Tell me a little bit about how you and Louis Leakey came about
planning or thinking about the First Pan-African Congress. Do you
remember first talking about that with him?
Clark: I don t necessarily remember Louis talking about organizing it.
But I do, of course, remember going to it, and it was remarkably
important.
Troy: And where was that first one?
Clark: Held in Nairobi, held in the town hall. Everybody attended all
the papers and sessions. We had all kinds of excursions to
various sites, Louis s sites at various places. It was superb.
Troy: How many people came, roughly?
Clark: I should think between sixty and seventy people, on the whole.
But they came from every part of Africa, that was the important
part about it, and it was the first time that they had all been
brought together, if you see what I mean. There were geologists
there, there were physical anthropologists, there were
130
archaeologists. What else would there have been? That s
basically it, I think. People on fauna as well, of course.
Troy: Social anthropologists, even?
Clark: No social anthropologists. There were Egyptologists.
Troy: And you had European people there too. The Abbe [Breuil] .
Clark: Oh, yes. Those were the kind of people who were working in
Africa, you see. [Armani] Ruhlmann, working in Morocco, awfully
nicepoor chap. He was digging a very important site at Dar-es-
Soltan [Morocco, between Casablanca and Rabat] and the cave was a
cave that had been excavated by the six meter raised beach of the
last Interglacial, I think it was. At any rate, he was showing
somebody around and he stepped back and half fell into the trench.
He got up, went on working, then went home, and died- -he d broken
his neck or something. Rotten luck.
Troy: So you met a lot of new people at this congress. You had known
[Van Riet] Lowe from South Africa. You d been in contact with a
lot of people.
Clark: Oh, yes. Dart, Neville Jones, Barry Malan, Basil Cooke. And I
met a whole lot of new people, yes. That was of major importance.
Troy: Had you met the Abbe Breuil before?
Clark: Yes. I had met him when I was an undergraduate, because he would
come and visit the university and stay with Miles Burkitt.
Troy: He was of that older generation.
Clark: Yes. I saw quite a lot of him after the war, as well. He spent
at least two years, 1 think, in South Africa afterwards working on
paintings in the Brandberg mostly, in Namibia.
Troy: Brandberg is a site?
Clark: It s an isolated granite mountain, younger granites. And on it
there lived interesting black hunting-gathering peoples called the
Bergdama. The wife of a very good friend of mine, former
colleague, Ray Inskeep, has just translated now from the German
[Heinrich] Vedder s [1929] volume on the Bergdama, which no one
has ever been able to read before. But there s a whole lot of
rock art up there.
Troy: What kind of a man was the Abbe?
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Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
The Abbe was the sort of doyen of prehistory.
Revered?
Revered, very much so. He was authoritarian.
Opinionated?
Yes, I suppose, definitely opinionated.
He was superb at copying rock paintings,
lot of rock paintings in France.
He copied a whole
I have seen pictures of him on his back, smoking a cigarette,
making copies.
Yes, that s at Altamira. Of course, the amazing thing is the
style of the Abbe s paintings. I ve got one very nice one in my
library, of the wooly rhino at Font-de-Gaume. 1 suppose his main
contribution was sorting out the terraces and their cultural
content, and fauna, in the Somme Valley.
Growth of the Museum in Livingstone
Troy: That was an extraordinarily busy time for you, because you were
also reorganizing and building the museum, and seeing the need for
expansion, and you were doing work in the Zambezi.
Clark: Yes. We kept very busy, and we worked very hard. My wife was by
then the secretary of the museum. She of course was invaluable.
Sorry about this [donut that he is eating, brought by the
interviewer] .
When I started off, the museum had the nucleus of a good
ethnographic collection. There was the nucleus of a good
collection of early maps of Africa, showing the explorations and
so on. There was virtually nothing except some boxes that
contained, without any notes attached, material excavated by the
Gatti expedition with Dart, which we could not really do anything
very much with. That was in the old United Services Club, a nice
sort of palladium-like building, riddled with white ants. You
would get visitors coming by, coming into my office, saying, "Oh,
yes, this was the card room, yes." And here out on the table--a
lot of this stuff was still on tables, because we hadn t got any
cases--"Yes, this was the bar." You got the impression that it
was a much better club than it was a museum, in those days.
132
When I was away, my wife was looking after the museum. Then
when we came back the museum and the institute were separated- -the
institute went to Lusaka. And with the help of the British South
Africa Company and the copper companies and so on, and the
government, we were able to think about building a new museum,
which we did. Ellis Robins, a British South Africa Company man,
was a great help to us.
Troy: There was a lot of connection between South Africa and Rhodesia.
Clark: Oh, tremendous.
Troy: I mean, a lot of your early publications are with the various
South African scientific organizations.
Clark: Everything, yes, the Royal Society of South Africa and others.
Troy: And so Robins was able to orchestrate the funding for the new
David Livingstone Memorial Museum. Was there tension between the
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and the museum? When you say that
was an issue there for a while?
Clark: We got on extremely well with their people and so on. Elizabeth
Colson, of course, for a time, was the director of the institute
when it was in Lusaka. The only tension was when it came to
funds, and it was much easier for the social anthropologists to
get funds than it was for the museum, for quite a long time.
Troy: And the institute people were the social anthropologists?
Clark: They were the social anthropologists. I m not certain what s
happened to it now.
Troy: It s still in Lusaka, possibly?
Clark: It s still in Lusaka, but I think it s been merged into some
psychology department or something.
I saw on Wednesday an e-mail that Elizabeth Colson had gotten
from somewhere, saying that the European Union was giving the
Livingstone Museum funds to repair the roof, which leaked. I know
where it leaked: it leaked when I was there in 1988, it certainly
leaked in the library. They said that with the heavy rains that
they ve had there they are catching all the drips in tins. Well,
thank God, because that was a priceless collection. Early books--
I built the library from virtually nothing. It was a very fine
library, actually. Looked very good.
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
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When did you first meet Elizabeth?
African Congress?
Did she go to the first Pan-
I think it must have been almost 1946.
Oh, before the first Pan-African.
Something like that. It could have been 48. I can t remember
offhand. We certainly, both of us, went down to South Africa to
Johannesburg at the time of a big conference that was being held
there to form the Scientific Council for Africa. This was
attended by representatives from the colonial powers and South
Africa, namely the Belgians, the French, Britain, Portuguese-
anyone else? No, that s about it, I think. South Africa, of
course.
Spaniards?
I don t think there were any Spaniards there,
about that .
I may be wrong
The Council was formed, and that was pretty good. It did a
whole lot of things. There was a very fine climatic atlas for
Africa which they did. They also published a whole series of
vegetation maps.
Which must have beautifully interlaced with your atlas [Atlas of
African Prehistory, 1967].
Clark: Oh, absolutely. Yes, that was valuable, that atlas. It s out of
date now, of course. But we got in everything that we could.
Nobody had ever done anything like that before. Now that this man
Sinclair in Uppsala has sort of taken it over I hope it goes well.
I haven t heard any more.
Troy: With the computer imaging and all of these new things now, it will
be much easier to continue that cartographic work.
Clark: Exactly.
Troy: The physicalness of your atlas was daunting. Just the sheer
attempt to bring in layered kinds of ethnographic and
archaeological data was extraordinary.
Clark: Yes, it was. [laughs] It was interesting.
134
Nachikufu. Chifuba Stream
Troy: We talked about Yavello, and your work there in the Italian gun
pits. I saw the schematic drawings that were in the article that
you published about that. I know there s been a lot of work done
in trying to interpret some of those schematic drawings. There
was possibly some Arabic influences, I recall reading.
Clark: I doubt that, I think. I don t know. It was at Nachikufu.
Troy: Nachikufu. And somebody had interpreted one of the symbols to be
Allah.
Clark: That s where I tried out ultraviolet light, at night, with one of
those lamps. I ve often wondered--! don t know to what extent I
looked at those, but it doesn t do eyes any good to look at
ultraviolet.
But at any rate, we did get some reasonable results, actually.
Troy: Now, tell me about Nachikufu. When did you go there first?
Clark: I went there probably in 1946 or 47.
Troy: Before the first Pan-African, do you thinkthe first Pan-African
Congress was in 47.
Clark: No, it must have been I think after that, probably 48 then.
Troy: And where is Nachikufu?
Clark: Nachikufu is in the Muchinga Escarpment, which is in the northern
halfyou know, Northern Rhodesia, or Zambia, has two bulges it s
about in the lower part or the southern part of the upper bulge.
Troy: I remember looking at that on a map. I found a terrifically
detailed map, the [London) Times Atlas. It s not bad at all.
Clark: Oh, that s one of the best atlases. I think that atlas is done by
Bartholomew. They re super. They re much better than these Rand-
McNally ones. I think those are dreadful maps. I can never find
anything that I want on them.
Troy: So the interpretation of these schematics probably will go on
forever.
Clark: Yes. I think it s remarkably difficult. It is possible, I
suppose, that if somebody worked reasonably quickly with some of
135
these so-called Ba Twa groups.
1
They seem to have been the people
who were responsible for doing those paintings. It does look
certainly as if schematic paintings are as old certainly as the
naturalistic ones in other parts of Africa.
There was a site that I excavateddid we mention that last
time?--Chifubwa Stream. It s in the Zambezi-Congo watershed area,
on the Zambian side, not too far from Solwezi. It had been
excavated by the local district commissioner, Tweedie, and I think
Raymond Dart as well. They dug out most of the shelter. The
interesting thing was that these schematic paintings, which were
inverted U s or parallel lines, some of which had been painted
you could see evidence of pigment still there the other half was
exposed in the little rock shelter. The lower half was covered by
deposit. This was a sterile deposit which went down to just about
bedrock, and on bedrock there was a single occupation site and one
biggish block of rock, which had two, I think it was, engraved
lines. These lines were mostly pecked out, if I remember rightly.
But at any rate, there they were, and I published this,
together with a description of the industry. One single industry
based upon the use of crystalline quartz. This subsequently was
datedwe had a date of, I think it was 8,000 or something, at the
base of the sterile deposit. But later, when we d finished the
work at Nachikufu, for example, we had dates then. The youngest
date for the Nachikufu I, which was a very characteristic thing,
which was what was in this Chifubwa rock shelter, was about 10,500
B.P., before the present.
That s an important site. The paintings undoubtedly, I think,
are connected with ritual of some kind. And the site is adopted
by Bantu- speaking peoples as well, because in northeast Angola, in
the area where the Chokwe are, are some people who were going
outside of the village with concentric circles painted on their
foreheads--! think it was ritual to prevent rain, probably
thunder, lightning, something of that kind.
Troy: Protection against lightning.
Clark: Certainly protection, yes. And it was evidence that the Batwa
down in southeast Angola, who were in a sort of subservient
relationship to the Bantu-speaking peoples down there, were
brought in from time to time in connection with initiation of one
kind, or rain-making. That s another situation. And they would
make these signs in the rock shelters.
Ba Twa: a general term the Bantu- speaking people had for the mostly
black hunter-gatherers of one kind or another.
Troy:
136
Somebody needs to really go and look. The trouble is, you
can t get into southeast Angola now, you see, because of what s
his name, [Jonas] Savimbi there, awful nonsense. Terrible
nonsense.
And it would be good to talk with these Ba Twa people before those
traditions pass, to find out what these schematics mean and then
tie these into Chifubwa and elsewhere.
Clark: Yes, exactly.
Patterns of Movement
Troy: So you ve also over the years published and thought about the
connection of a lot of this schematic art, and have drawn the
possibilities of connectedness throughout the continent.
Clark: Yes. In the north, the first that you see is in Tanzania. There
you get some of it around the Kondoa paintings area, that Mary
Leakey worked on. Not very much, but there it is. You get more
of it in the southern parts of Tanzania, and then the whole of
Zambia, Malawi, parts of Angola as well.
Troy: Zimbabwe, to the south too?
Clark: No, in Zimbabwe it appears all of it, 1 think, to be naturalistic.
And I suppose this could be some indication as to sort of northern
limit for the San bushmen peoples, as opposed to those who were
black to the north. I don t know. There are descriptions, of
course, of these Bantu people.
I wrote a paper about the pre-Bantu-speaking peoples of
Northern Rhodesia, I think. Forget what it was published in.
Could it be in the Northern Rhodesia Journal? They were said to
be small people. Sometimes they were said to be sort of black,
and very broad-shouldered, big heads, short people. Sort of thick
bodies. Other times they were said to be rather thin and sort of
more light- skinned.
But one interesting thing is that on one of the best maps
before chronometers were developed and so on, the map by the
mapmaker [Jean-Baptiste] d Anville, an early 18th-century French
mapmaker, it shows the areas where the Pygmies are, and they re
called Tikki Tikki. And the interesting thing is that in southern
Africa, certainly in Northern Rhodesia and so on, when we still
137
had pounds, shillings, and pence, the small silver coin was a
sixpence, and that was always known as a Tikki.
Troy: And this was Rhodesian coin?
Clark: No, they were English coins. I think it was all English money--in
the Federation days, they probably coined their own.
Troy: And you think there s a relationship between Tikki Tikki and
Tikki?
Clark: Yes, I think so: small, in other words. Just means small.
Troy: Well, the San people of the Kalahari are not Pygmy, but they re
certainly very small.
Clark: Oh, they re all smallyes, they re smallish. It varies very
much, of course. The people that they were mainly talking about
in the earlier days were the southern Bushmen or whatever you like
to call them, the southern San, and the Khoi Khoi, who were not
small. In other words, the Hottentots, who were cattle owners and
small stock. But when you get into the northern Kalahari,
northern Namibia and northern Botswana, they re much taller.
I think I mentioned, I was twice with the Bushmen group that
came into the extreme southwestern part of Northern Rhodesia,
meeting them and collecting, getting, all sorts of information,
going hunting with them, and so on. That was good.
Troy: You were also at that time doing work at Mumbwa and drawing
linkages the Wilton, Stillbay--lots of interesting work, as I ve
been reading, in drawing linkages with south and north.
Clark: Well, you see, that s what one had to try to do in order to try to
describe what it is that one thought one had when one excavated
and found artifacts of one kind or another.
I don t think at that time we had any idea that there were
ethnic populations of the same kind. Later, of course, it became
obvious that what we were looking at was the technology, which did
not tell you anything particularly, if anything, about the human
population that made them, made the tools. That came later. But
initially, when I first went out to Africa, it was thought, you
see, that when you found something like the Wilton Industry blades
and microliths, it meant that it was a migration of people who had
moved down with all this .
After the war, of course, one realized thata little after
the war, I suppose that it need not necessarily be the case
138
whatsoever. You can get change in technology in the same way as
we ve got change in technology today from what we had when I was a
boy, without any movement of people whatsoever.
Troy: But possibly stimulated by changes in climate, by changes in
amounts of rainfall.
Clark: Yes, that s a different matter. You ve got the environmental
factor, which I think was one that we applied a lot at one time.
And then there came, as there always does, the opposite view, that
it was not so important after all, et cetera. Now it s coming
back. Now as a result of more precise dating and more precise
evidence to the movement of the intertropical conversion belts,
shifting jet streams, and so on, we can see how really very
important, particularly in those marginal areas like the Sahel,
with small amounts of rainfall today, how even relatively small
changes one way or another could produce significant results in
the vegetation and animals in those areas, and human population,
of course, with it.
Then the other aspect, of course, was the human side.
Population loss and movement as a result of warfare. What did
they do? Did they to some extent destroy vegetation, due to
everburning, that kind of thing? Maybe cutting down. Certainly I
don t think there can be wholesale cutting of trees with stone
axes, but quite a lot could be done, of course, with burning, and
indeed undoubtedly was.
Troy: And we ll talk about all of your theories of use of fire, which
you ve written quite a little bit about.
Rhodesian Man Revisited
Troy: The war was over, you were working in many, many sites, Mumbwa,
you went to do work at Bone Cave, and you were doing reanalysis of
Rhodesian Man, new information was emerging on that.
Clark: Yes. Broken Hill. That s right, yes. That was really
interesting. I think probably the first time that I realized that
one could perhaps do something there was when we took the Pan-
African Congress excursion there, and Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark
explained about Broken Hill Man and where it came from. It s a
huge hole in the ground where the original kopje, or hill, had
been, and ninety feet down this skull, like a miracle, had
survived. The story--! think you know about that.
139
Troy: Yes, the whole story of its discovery by the young Dutch miner.
Clark: Zwigelaar. Swiss, actually. Kenneth Oakley and I met him, I
think about a year before he died. We were asking him about it
all, and he was living in Broken Hill, a retired miner, with very
little education.
He told us, "We had put the charges in, and I set the fuse
off, and we retired, and went back, and as the smoke cleared away,
we saw this skull looking at us on a ledge." [laughs] He said,
"We took it and I stuck it on a pole to encourage the gang" --gang
of Africans, of course. And there it remained for about, I don t
know, three days or something like that. And then the mine doctor
came round and saw it, realized that it was something of some
importance, took it back to the office, and from there, it became
something of importance. That was 1922, you see, one of the very
oldest. It was likened to Neanderthal, because it had big brow
ridges and so on, but it is not Neanderthal at all.
You can see the foramen magnum, which is that big hole through
which the spinal cord goes, had been damaged, and that presumably
the damage was when Zwigelaar put it on his pole.
Troy: And this was to encourage his workers, or to terrify the workers?
Clark: I should think both. [laughter] Both, I should think.
Troy: And then there was the controversy over the lead-zinc and other
postcranial bones.
Clark: That s right, there were postcranial bones there. Part of the
pelvis. I think there was a femur, or tibia. Probably there may
well have been most of the body, because it wasn tthis must have
been a big hole at the back of the cave, filled I think with
water, and people who lived in the cave nearby threw bones and
waste down the hole, because it was filled slightly higher up.
When [F. P.] Mennell was there, it was filled with bones.
Troy: Mennell?
Clark: Mennell was a geologist. He was there before the discovery, and
then he left. If he d only been there at the discovery, it would
have been a different matter. He was a good geologist.
Troy: He would have been able to contextualize the skull a little
better.
140
Clark: Yes. There was a man called Franklin White who was not a
geologist but who was a bright sort of person, and he recorded a
whole lot of information about it.
At any rate, when I went there with the Third Pan-African
Congress in 1955 we had an excursion going right through Zambia,
and it crossed into the Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo.
That was a fine series of visits to sites. And in those days you
could collect anything that you found on these sites, which is
what, of course, we did. There are little collections in
Livingstone, important little collections now, from some of these
sites.
Troy: Then there was this wonderful thing I was reading about Captain
and Mrs. Whittington of Broken Hill, who held hostage some
materials that you wanted, and they wanted you to buy them for the
museum.
Clark: Oh, yes. That was interesting.
Troy: He wanted you to pay for it [the materials]. He had lowered his
sister-in-law, who was an adventuresome woman, into the pit, and
she had found a stone ball and another piece of femur.
Clark: Yes, that s right.
Troy: And you thought, as I recall, that the piece of femur might fit
the pieces earlier found, which were then in the British Museum.
Subsequently, they didn t fit.
Clark: No, they didn t. Very interesting thing, it was part of another
femur. Extremely interesting. And in the end, Whittington, I m
glad to say, gave I think both the ball and the femur to Kenneth
Oakley at the British Museum.
It was interesting, particularly those excavations. In 1955
we looked at the section just below where we were standing looking
at the hole. You could see that there were certainly at least two
or three horizons there, and when I excavated, I did indeed find
Acheulean and flake and core assemblages. And that I published.
So the likelihood is that the skull belongs with the Acheulean,
and the fauna seems to bear that out as being somewhere perhaps
500,000 years old.
Troy: There was the whole issue of the zinc and lead, and it turned out
that the skull had been in a unique deposit of zinc, and that s
why its lead content was less.
141
Clark: I didn t remember that. I don t know, the zinc was somewhat
higher in the excavation.
Troy: It was hoped that the skull would be more lead than zinc, to show
that it was as old as it was, but then I think it ended up having
more zinc in it than lead. That was the British Museum s
analysis, but then it was thought that probably, through the
descriptions of how it came to the museum, that there was possibly
a pocket of zinc which could explain that anomaly.
Clark: Well, that could do it, yes. But it was certainly known that it
was at the ninety-foot level, below the surface. That was well
recorded.
Troy: Well, the Rhodesian Man work was a wonderful bringing together of
the early, freewheeling, amateurish sense of archaeology, and your
trying to piece things back together again, and bring some real
analysis to the situation.
Clark: Yes. There s a great joy of doing that. And of course, you see,
when the skull had been found and it went back to the British
Museum, there was an immediate request for associated fauna. I
think they did send something. I don t know, there was certainly
some in the Bulawayo Museum, which I think was later thrown away
by one of the directors. We were never able to find it. But some
went to the museum, and then Louis Leakey in 1929 visited Broken
Hill and collected quite a bit of the fauna, which he sent back to
the British Museum. Nobody had ever done anything about this.
Troy: With Leakey s material?
Clark: With Leakey s material, until the new man, Tony Sutcliff, who was
in charge of the subdepartment of paleontology, I think it was,
took over, and we got in touch with him. 2
He opened the boxes that
Louis had sent back. Old wooden petrol boxes. They were still
packed in the grass from the dambo which he had used as packing.
Troy: What was that, the river grass? The dambo, what does that mean?
Clark: A dambo is a seasonally swampy grassland, an old mature valley--a
local name, widely used in central Africa.
We were able to show from that some estimated dates. He wrote
it up in 1952, I think it was, a paper in the JRAI [Journal of the
z
Desmond Clark later notes, "Tindale Hopwood was Leakey s geologist at
Olduvai Gorge in 1932, and was the keeper of paleontology in the British
Museum before Sutcliff."
142
Royal Anthropological Institute], his list of the fauna. Then
Richard Klein looked at the fauna again, and maybe identified one
or two other pieces, compared it to Hopefield, or Elandsfontein,
in South Africa, where a similar skull or cranium had been found.
It s around 400,000 or 500,000 years old. So that s basically
what it s dated on. Now I think that you can associate it with
the Acheulean.
Troy: Captain Whittington holding those things hostage was, I suppose,
reality in those dayswell, to a certain extent, it probably
still is. Amateurs having things that other people really need
for proper scientific analysis.
Clark: Oh, yes, I think there s a lot of that. Probably Belgians from
the Congo have all sorts of stuff. We bought a collection from
some man when I first got here and we needed material for the lab
teaching collections. That kind of thing.
Second Pan-African Congress, 1952
Troy: The Second Pan-African Congress on Prehistory was in Algeria in
1952. Do you remember that one?
Clark: Yes, I do, fairly vividly. I enjoyed that one immensely. Very
well organized by Professor Lionel Balout. A good volume on the
proceedings came out after that. I gave, I think, two papers. I
was on the council, whatever it s called council, I guess that s
right. One of the youngest members.
An interesting little anecdote in passing: normally, of
course, in these kind of conferences, particularly when they are
in some other country from the last one, you have a new president,
Well, at the First Pan-African the Abbe Breuil, who was the
leading prehistorian in Europe, Africa as well, or perhaps the
Western world, was made president. At the Algiers conference,
Balout, who was the organizing secretary, said, "Well, we should
appoint the president." I think he suggested the Abbe Breuil
again. And I, being very brash, said I thought it was normally
customary to have a new president every four years or so. I was
going to propose Dr. Louis Leakey, who was the last secretary
general, but the Abbe Breuil said, "Well, who would you suggest?"
[laughter]
Troy: And what did you say?
Clark: I don t think I said anything more after that.
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Troy: So the Abbe wanted to continue to be the head.
Clark: Oh, the Abbe was some people called him, I think in France, the
Pope of Prehistory, which was fun. He was a remarkable man, had a
fantastic memory as well. He did very fine work in France,
particularly on the Somme Valley, fluvial sediments there, and the
associated fauna and archaeological assemblages. I don t think
anybody has really seriously challenged that since. They ve been
refined, certainly. He also did a lot of work, of course, with
some of these sites in Portugal for a time, and just generally
covered the whole of Western European prehistory, with the sites,
and of course, he was especially known for his work of tracing
theand so recording the rock paintings and engravings in the
French and north Spanish caves of Upper Paleolithic age.
The famous cave of Altamira, of course, not far from
Santander, he lay on his back on some scaffolding, I think, for
weeks at a time, more or less, tracing these fantastic bichrome
paintings of bison and wild boar, deer and so on. They were
mostly bison. Fantastic work.
Troy: And then he did, of course, some work in southern Africa too.
Clark: And then he worked in South Africa as well, did a lot of work.
Peter Van P.iet Lowe brought him out to the Archaeological Survey
for South Africa and he was out there I think for two years during
the war. Did quite a bit there in the Vaal River Valley, and on
coastal sites as well, and in particular, of course, again with
the rock art. During the latter part of his stay, he went and
traced a whole series of paintings, rock shelter paintings, in
Namibia, particularly in the Brandberg and the Erongo Mountains.
And these are published in several volumes of his paintings, of
which I have a few.
Troy: I was looking at the South African survey the other day--it was
either Van Riet Lowe or maybe it was John Goodman? --there was an
extraordinary map locating all of the South African sites of
paintings.
Clark: Yes, that was Peter Van Riet Lowe, I think.
Troy: And an absolutely incredible number of sites.
Clark: The paintings and engravings, yes, that s right. That was in one
of his volumes. Did you look at them?
Troy: Yes, I did. I found it deep in the stacks of the Doe Library.
Clark: Really? Well, I ll be dashed. Yes, yes.
144
Troy: You know, we tend to see the major sites indicated on maps, but
this survey showed me how extensive the painting was.
Clark: Oh, yes. There s a tremendous amount, and some of them are really
superb. Some of the early engravings, which are fine line
engravings, naturalistic, of rhinos and I think there s even a
hippo, with lots of antelopes of one kind or another, bison,
horses, and so on, beautifully done. Superbly done. On rocks in
the open. And of course, the paintings as well. Bichrome,
polychrome, some of the finest ones.
Troy: And your interest in the paintings has been a reality since your
work during the war in one of the sites that you visited when you
were in the service during the war, Yavello.
Clark: Oh, yes, Yavello.
Troy: And that was one of the very first sites where you saw the art?
Clark: Well, the very first site where there was any art at all were
pecked engravings of metal axes on rocks in the open, on the
northern edge of the Kafue Flats, southwest of Lusaka in Zambia.
I saw those in, I think it was 1939. It could have been 1938,
actually. Yes. Very interesting. Belong to the Iron Age, of
course.
Troy: Yes. From the very first contacts you had with that, and through
the war, and following the war, and throughout your entire career,
you ve expressed and written about and been very interested in
both the naturalistic and the schematic, and pondered all of that.
Clark: Yes, I ve always been interested in that, of course, because it
tells you so much about the people who were doing the paintings.
A tremendous amount. I wrote a paper only the other day on a rock
shelter that we had excavated in the escarpment country, southeast
plateau of Ethiopia, a place called Laga Oda, which had been
known, oh, since about 1929 or something like that--no, I think it
was in the thirties. The Abbe Breuil, I m not certain he ever
went there, but he went to other sites.
Laga Oda is very interesting because mostly the Ethiopian rock
shelter paintings, and sometimes engravings, are of cattle and
herders. Essentially, they were pastoral people who made these,
and fairly peaceful pastoral people, as far as one can make out.
We were able, with our little excavation in one of these rock
shelters in Laga Oda, to show where cattle bones first came into
the stratigraphic sequence. It was somewhere around the very
beginning of the first millennium B.C. or the very end of the
second millennium B.C. And I think that probably holds up. That
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is, in point of fact, the only firm date that we have so far for
any of the rock art in Ethiopia. So it was quite useful.
Troy: When were you at that site?
Clark: Probably 1974. That was a fine site, and that paper is coming out
in a memorial volume in an ongoing series from the Revista
Institute Italiana di Paleontologia e Stratigrafia. It will be an
issue dedicated to Paolo Graciosi, who is a fine Italian scholar,
particularly of rock art, essentially European mobile art, and
also in Africa with the rock art.
Troy: Now, had you been to Algiers before that meeting?
Clark: No. Never before, and I greatly enjoyed it. I met there two
Americans, Hallam Movius, who had started prehistory at Harvard,
European prehistory in particular, and Joe Brew, who was the main
excavator of Mesa Verde. Movius was a well-known figure in
prehistory in America. His final work was the excavation of the
Abri Pataud in the Dordogne in the Vezere Valley, close to Les
Eyzies, which he excavated for several years, and there trained a
number of students who subsequently have taken leading parts in
prehistoric studies.
Troy: So these were folks you d not met, and you d never been in north
Africa?
Clark: No, I d never been in north Africa before.
Troy: You d always gone around it, either by plane or on a ship.
Clark: That s right.
Troy: Well, I guess at this point in 1952, you d never flown down to
Livingstone. You d mainly done ships.
Clark: Oh, no. It was a ship the whole time. There weren t any
aeroplanes at that time that went down. I don t know if there
were any aeroplanes at all in that part of Africa. It was ship
and railway, and it remained like that right up to just about the
end of World War II and two or three years after that. And then,
of course, the planes started coming in regularly.
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Kalambo Falls. 1953
Troy: Tell me a little bit about Kalambo Falls. You began work there in
1953. Had there been some mention of Kalambo Falls before, or did
you discover it?
Clark: Kalambo Falls was thought at that time to be the secondalmost
the highest falls in Africa, I think. Subsequently it was found,
in point of fact, that there was a similar falls on the Katanga
side in the Belgian Congo, which was a few feet higher.
Everything was in feet, of course, in those days. It was 726 feet
odd at a single drop. Beautiful. I d seen pictures of it.
Nobody had found any archaeology there or anything.
I had been excavating down at a shell midden site at the south
end of Lake Tanganyika, at a place called Mpulungu [a port at the
south end of Lake Tanganyika]. I was there with John Hodges, who
we d recently appointed as inspector of monuments of the heritage
kinds of sites.
Troy: And that s the commission that you started?
Clark: That was the commission that we started, managed to get started,
yes. National Monuments Commission, I think it was called. Now
it s called National Monuments and Cultural Heritage.
Hodges had been a Grenadier Guardsman, and his wife [Lillian
Hodges] was very keen on archaeology.
Troy: Was he an archaeologist or geologist?
Clark: No, he wasn t. But it could well have been that she had persuaded
him to apply for this job, I don t know.
Troy: Cambridge-educated, or Sandhurst?
Clark: No, no, probably sort of secondary school education but not more,
I think, really. He was a very good man. We excavated there, and
she was particularly meticulous in her excavation. I can t
remember whether she had done anything in England before, but she
was remarkably good at it.
Mpulungu has never been written up. It wasn t frightfully
exciting.
147
We also had a man who was the government ethnographer, from
South Africa. Van Nieka. Nice chap. Bit ineffectual. He never
did anything but look, if you see what I mean.
Troy: No digging.
Clark: No digging, no. At any rate, there he was, he was there.
Troy: Was it required that you have somebody with you when you did these
things?
Clark: Oh, no. He wanted to come and see, so I said, "Yes, by all means,
come .
"
Well, not long before, I think, a man who was a game guard,
awfully nice man, good friend of ours, Gordon Lancaster, worked in
the Luangwa Valley, found a lot of stuff there. He was a member
of the National Monuments Commission board. He had discovered
some broken pieces, I think there may have been one or two whole
ones, bored stones up on a ridge overlooking the falls and the
gorge. So we decided to go and have a look and see, there might
be some Late Stone Age stuff there.
So we did, and we got there in the afternoon. There was a
little hut without walls, on a ridge overlooking the falls which
were down here. You looked over the gorgevery impressive
looking gorge.
So we put up our camp beds and our sleeping bags around that,
cooked an evening meal, and went to sleep. That was on the
Saturday, I think--yes. It was a beautiful moonlight, clear sky,
and I remember being woken up in the middle of the night by
hearing a kind of whoosh, ssssswhooosh, ssssswhooooshhhh. I sort
of looked up, wondered what this was. What it was were these huge
marabou storks, sweeping back and forth, obviously looking for
something to eat. As we found subsequently, they had their nests
on a ridge, on a precipitous cliff that went straight downone of
the few places where they were bound to nest anywhere around.
They looked like witches on broomsticks. We saw them doing
that kind of thing in the daytime, a collection of them. It was
very curious.
Troy: You were quite close to water where you were camped?
Clark: Yes, we were quite close to the little stream, and the falls.
The next day, we climbed down, and of course looked over the
falls. You can t see anything very much. In the dry season, of
148
course, there s not very much water coming over. But there s
always something coming over, and of course, down below you have a
continuous mist, and there s a little forest growing down at the
bottom which supports wild--I think they re ensete, the wild
banana, false banana, or whatever you call it. It s intensely
cultivated by some people. A main staple food, first cultivated
in Ethiopia, domesticated in Ethiopia.
But the next day, of course, we went around, and the falls
were a sort of so-called tourist place, and che Monuments
Commission had cleared thr>
path around so that you could--and you
walk about half a mile and you got a glorious view of the falls.
It was on the south side, I suppose.
Troy: You re still in Northern Rhodesia. The river is the boundary at
that point?
Clark: The river is the boundary, yes. On the other side is Tanzania.
Troy: Small river?
Clark: It s a small river, you can wade across it.
Troy: Is that Kalambo?
Clark: Yes, it s called the Kalambo River, yes. It rises up in the Ufipa
Highlands, comes down south, turns almost a right angle, then
flows west, and in due course, over the falls. At one time, it
was held up by a rock barrier of quartzites and deflected north
into Lake Tanganyika. And some time subsequent to that a little
spillway gorge was cut, broke through, and so the river went over
the falls and eroded that incredible gorge. It must have taken
some time it was a very, very impressive gorge. In two sections:
a much wider part, and then a steep, almost vertical inner gorge.
It s about fourteen miles, I think, down to the junction with Lake
Tanganyika, something like that.
After having looked at that, we then, John Hodges and I,
walked up through the spillway gorge, where there was quite a lot
of vegetation and so on. On the left hand side, we very nearly
fell into pit traps. There were several pit traps for wild pig.
They were old, they weren t really set, but of course, they were
still there. We walked through, and we must have climbed up
somehow and got on to the south sidethe gorge went like that
[demonstrates] . There was the north side where we were down
below, in the low terrace, and then on the south side. We walked
around, we came out on top, came down, and the local people had
cleared quite a bit of ground for finger millet, I think it was,
that they were growing there.
149
You could see there was a cliff, clearly a cliff. We were up
on top, the cliff was there, and I remember saying to John, "You
know, I suppose we should look at that." I personally was feeling
hot and tired. And he said, "Yes, I suppose we should." So we
went down. There was this cliff which I suppose was somewhat
higher than this ceiling here but not much. I dropped down, and
halfway down there was a horizon with stone tools in it and I
spent about half an hour or something, on that, looking at that,
wiggling out a few tools, that kind of thing.
John had gone further down to the bottom. He didn t know all
that much about stone artifacts and things, but he said, "I think
there are stone tools here." I dropped down, and sure enough,
there were hand axes and cleavers in very fresh condition, and
coming out from the deposit were tree trunks, carbonized tree
trunks. And that s how we found it. It really was remarkable.
I also foundthis was what we later called A Sitewhile
clearing to see what horizons there were and so on, quite a bit of
new material. Got all that in Kalambo Falls Volume 3, of course,
and published the initial discovery in the South African
Archaeological Bulletin.
Troy: Were you the only person in Africa at this time, Desmond, with the
extensive knowledge of stone tools?
Clark: Oh, no, there was Louis Leakey and myself, various people in
northwest Africa. I suppose people in the Nile Valley. John
Goodwin and Van Riet Lowe in the south.
Troy: But you d been in Somaliland, you d been in Gondar, you d been in
Kenya, you d been in Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and in many
ways, you had probably the more extensive knowledge.
Clark: Well, that could be. I think I d probably been in more places,
yes. Yes, that s right, because when one goes on--yes. But that
was most exciting. It really was.
Troy: And you had a week where you could stay at Kalambo Falls and do
this initial excavating?
Clark: That s right, and then the rains came. So we did what we could.
Troy: Did you have enough food? Had you planned to be there for a whole
week?
Clark: Oh, we had enough food, yes.
Troy: And there were the three of you.
150
Clark: There were three, plus me, four. John Hodges, his wife Lillian,
this Van Nieka, and myself. We excavated there, and as I say,
Lillian was very good at excavating.
And then we all went back to Livingstone. John had employed a
young chap as a servant, taking him down and back to Livingstone.
John and his wife were living in one of those sort of rondavel
things that there were at the Victoria Falls. Awfully nice little
camping places they were.
Troy: These were little shelter s that had been built for the people.
Clark: Well, they were little houses. I forget what they had; they had
an outhouse and so on, and they had I think something for the
servant to live in.
At any rate, this chap sort of misbehaved himself, I think, so
John sacked him. But very shortly after that John was taken
violently ill and was in hospital with frightful tummy upset. I
don t know whether it was diarrhea or something like that. The
doctor was very worried. Considerable pain, I think. I remember
going to see him, poor chap. He died very shortly after. I ve
often wondered whether that chap had poisoned him in some way.
John had employed the young chap out of I think Kalambo, but
it could have been Abercorn. Brought him down to the houses in
the camping area where they lived, and it was there he was taken
ill and died. The doctor put it down to some violent kind of
bacillary dysentery or something like that. But I certainly
wonder- -couldn t have done anything about it.
Troy: Well, that was terrible. So his wife was left.
Clark: And she was still very interested in archaeology, so the Monuments
Commission took her on to do some things at the museum. She did
some excavation in 1955 for the Pan-African Congress excursion
which visited Kalambo Falls, and she did quite a good job of work
there. Then she came with us for the 1956 season at Kalambo. She
was very good at excavating and overseeing the Africans and so on,
and when I had to go back to Livingstone in order to deal with
administrative stuff and all sorts of things, she would carry on
there. She was very good.
Troy: Is she still alive?
Clark: No, she died, oh, I suppose, I don t know, five or six years ago.
She left us after she d been with the Monuments Commission for a
little time, and then she got a job with the Southern Rhodes ian,
the Zimbabwe Monuments Commission. She worked with them at Great
151
Zimbabwe for a time, and then she left them, and I think
independently had a book shop in what in those days was called
Fort Victoria. I don t know, Betty and I visited her inwell,
probably could have been 86 or something like that. She died, I
think, a couple of years after that. She lived by herself with a
huge dog. Yes, that was sad. But she was very good, and I ve
indeed acknowledged that in the Kalambo volume.
But we had a great time in Livingstone, in building up the
museum and everything. I must have, I suppose, a copy of the
catalogue of the David Livingstone exhibition. We had all sorts
of things there, including his red shirt, his very characteristic
consular cap and so on.
Troy: You had a wonderful philosophy, I was reading some about your
sense of what a museum should do, and you had some educational
programs .
Clark: Oh, yes, we did indeed.
Troy: You had a sense of integrating it into the local population.
Clark: We used to have little exhibits that we could take around.
Troy: Tell me a little bit about those traveling exhibits.
Clark: We went around to the primary schools. They would open up--it
would be a case that which would have things in it, and the two
doors would have more exhibition materials on the inside of them.
We had a film as well later on.
Troy: And where did you get these ideas, Desmond?
Clark: Oh, I suppose from museums, maybe South African museums and
what s it called, the Museums Association of London? I think I
was the first person from southern Africa to sit for the Museums
Association diploma, or whatever it was called, which I got years
ago.
Troy: It s remarkable, because you were increasingly involved with this
world of archaeology, paleoarchaeology, and yet you had all of
these administrative responsibilities, and you managed to keep a
sense of what the museum should be.
Clark: Well, yes, of course we had that. Yes. And I wouldn t have been
nearly as good at it if it hadn t been for Betty being there as
well, you see. It was a fine team, the two of us.
Troy: And then after the war, you had other people come out, too.
152
Clark: After the war, after we built the new museum, which was great. I
remember putting things into a whopping great copper cylinder,
which the copper companies gave us, all sorts of contemporaneous
things. Some were documents, some were touristy kinds of things,
pictures of animals, may have been the odd medal or two of one
kind or another, all sort of popped in there, telling about the
museum. And that was built in behind the foundation stone. We
opened thatprobably Ellis Robins opened it, or could have been
the governor, I m not certain.
Twin Rivers , the Winter Schools . Leopards Hill
Troy: One of the sites that you folks visited during the 55 Third Pan-
African Congress was on your way up to Kalambo, you stopped at
Twin Rivers. Where is Twin Rivers?
Clark: Twin Rivers, I think it s about twenty-four miles southwest of
Lusaka. It s on the escarpment, or rather an outlier of the
escarpment, of the plateau on which Lusaka is. Lusaka is on
what s usually called the Miocene Plateau, an old, mature surface.
This has been cut at a later time, some time in the Plio-
pleistocene, where broad river valleys like the Kafue and the
Zambezi indeed, have carved out a lower surface, which is called
the end Tertiary surface of the Pliocene. It s about 700 feet
high, I think it is, isolated hill or kopje as they call them down
in southern Africa.
Troy: A long way from the main road?
Clark: It was not on the main road. But there s a sort of farm road that
goes down close by it. On this hill of dolomitic limestone there
is a fissure, not a very wide fissure, that has filled up with red
sandy clay, which has been as a result of percolating calcium
carbonate, forming breccias, two phases of breccias: fossil bones
preserved in it, and cultural evidence of artifacts which we now
know may well be as early as about 230,000 years old. Very
interesting assemblage of artifacts, and we have just published
the--or just sent off to the press to be published later this
year, the final report on our excavations there in 1954 and 1956.
Troy: Was that a site you had found?
Clark: It s one that we found. Found first of all in 1939, but at that
time, nobody was particularly interested in breccias. It was only
after the discovery of Australopithecines and the need to look for
breccias with bone that I remembered Twin Rivers, and in 1953 we
153
went with Kenneth Oakley, and we looked at one of these fissures.
It had a slight remains of a roof over the top, and we found a few
artifacts. We found bone in association, and it looked as if the
artifacts had, amongst other things, at least one chopper-like
tool, a little core. So it looked as if these were probably
early, and so we decided to excavate.
But we found that, in point of fact, they were not as early as
we expected they were, but they were equally interesting. We now
know they re Early Middle Stone Age, which is somewhere a little
after the end of thewell, a little after the end of the Middle
Pleistocene, when it comes to that. Yes.
Troy: Tell me a little bit about the winter schools that you started at
the museum.
Clark: Those were really quite successful. After we got Ray Inskeep,
first of all, as keeper of prehistory, and Barrie Reynolds, keeper
of ethnography, and myself, and Clayton Holliday, the technical
officer, we decided that we had the opportunity of holding what we
called winter school, because it was indeed the winter there, the
dry season, in June or July, and the weather was absolutely
glorious. We sent out invitations to people in Northern Rhodesia,
Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, Southwest Africa (now Namibia),
other places Swaziland and so on. Probably Tanzania, I think,
and Malawi certainly. And we had people coming to it. I think we
limited it to about twenty-five people.
These would be people, not archaeologists, but people, maybe
doctors, lawyers, teachers, people whomaybe a farmer or two
certainly from Namibia, a couple of farmerswho were interested
in archaeology. Because there was so much of it lying around on
the surface, you see. Both men and women. We always had one or
two of our two or three of our Africans on the course as well.
It was great fun. We had them for, I suppose, somewhere
between a week and ten days. We would talk, lecture, or whatever
you like to call it, part of the time, and then they would examine
the particular set of material or something that we were talking
about. And that s the great importance of the whole thing: that
they should handle the artifacts. If you re going to be an
archaeologist, then you ve got to get your hands dirty. The first
thing, of course, is to excavate, and we taught them how to
excavate. We took them out and we did a small excavation of one
kind or another, and they all took part in this, playing various
roles which they would interchange, have an opportunity of finding
out about it all. Then further examination back in the
laboratory. And it went extremely well.
154
As I said, I can t remember if I told you, I think it was
Thackeray [John Francis Thackeray of the Transvaal Museum in
Pretoria] who said it was one of our winter schoolshe came from
South Africathat first got him interested in archaeology and
prehistory. I m not so certain it wasn t also the same with the
man who wrote that book about Great Zimbabwe, Peter Garlake. He
was another.
And we had quite an association with people in Namibia. There
was Gerhard Foch, and a man called Viereck who was a farmer, and
somebody else, I can t remember the name [Rona MacCalman] . There
was a man called Swartz who I think was the secretary of the
Karakul Association.
Troy: What was the association, Desmond?
Clark: Karakul. The karakul is a particular kind of sheep that did
apparently remarkably well there.
Yes, those were good days.
Troy: And radiocarbon dating had come along, and that had quite an
impact on things, didn t it?
Clark: Oh, a tremendous impact.
Troy: Leopards Hill Cave and the dating there.
Clark: Well, that was extremely interesting, actually. It all came out
so much earlier than we had expected.
Leopards Hill is about thirty miles east of Lusaka, a big
cave, in limestone. Bat-infested. Narrow sort of entrance. The
excavations done by Lillian Hodges produced a very interesting
sequence of Nachikufan stages, which we had first found at
Nachikufu cave, up in the Muchinga Escarpments about thirty- five
miles south of Mpika.
It was the Yale lab that did the dates for us on that, and I
remember saying, "I think your dates are much too early." In
point of fact, they were absolutely dead on. So we had to revise
our ideas of the age of these industries. Very interesting. The
earliest of Leopards Hill we radiocarbon date about 24,000. And
there was there also one of these stones, roundish stones, with a
hole through the middle known as a bored stone. The only time
anybody saw these ever being used, I think, in southern Africa,
was they were mounted on a digging stick and used by a bush San
woman for digging in the ground. It added weight to the stick, so
they were called Ikwe stones, [pronounces with click).
155
Troy: Click.
Clark: K-w-e, yes, with a probably exclamation mark or something
beforehand. I found those stones being used on the Harer Plateau
in 1941, which was extremely interesting. They were mounted on
the top end of a digging stick, quite a substantial sort of stick,
for digging new ground, digging up sods and so on, for planting on
the Harer Plateau, and in the walled city of Harer is where I
found it being used as a weight on the end of a pestle stone for
pounding chat. Chat is a rather mild narcotic if you chew the
leaves. It s grown all around Harer in a series of terraced
gardens. It s a tree, but it doesn t grow all that high, maybe
the height of the ceiling up there. And that s been used for a
very long time, and still, of course, is extensively grown and
traded.
Troy: And this realization of these bored stones from Harer and the far
north, Ethiopia, all the way down into the Kalahari area, did this
lend credence to the growing sense of the Luangwa River as being
part of a kind of northeast-to-the-southwest conduit of culture?
Clark: Actually, it is quite interesting, because there is a fair amount
of high ground in southern Tanzania, and this goes right through.
You get to what s called the corridor area, between Lake
Tanganyika up here and Lake Malawi down there, there s Lake Rukwa
there. But there s high ground right through this, coming down,
and down on thewell, it could be both east and west of the
Luangwa Valley. Those were tsetse-free. The tsetse fly, of
course, is the thing that kills cattle.
That must have been one of the main routes, particularly the
eastern route, of the high ground through Malawi and the eastern
part of borders of Zambia, down into the watershed country of
Zimbabwe, and then through into Namibia and South Africa. That s
probably the way in which the Khoi or Hottentot cattle got down
there in the first instance, and subsequently, the way in which
Bantu- speaking Negroid peoples were able to introduce their
cattle. Sheep and goats, I think, are immune to tsetse. But
cattle are not. Glorious country, that part of that, grassland,
with patches of forest. I suppose at one time, there must have
been forest spread widely over much of that.
Angolan Work, Diamang
Troy: Now, before you came on to Berkeley you were beginning to be
sought after to do work in Angola and Nyasaland. Some of those
156
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
were government requests, weren t they?
about the Angola work.
Tell me a little bit
Well, at Angola, there was a very interesting Belgian geologist
working for the Portuguese diamond company, which was called
Diamang, a subsidiary of DeBeers. Up in northeastern Angola, the
Lunda Province, as it s called, and also, of course, in the
eastern part of Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo, there were
good diamonds.
This man, whose name
Janmart?
Janmart, yes, indeed. Thank you. Jan Janmart, 1 think,
him probably through the Pan-African Congress in 1947.
I met
He got very interested in the archaeology, because to get at
these diamonds, they had to dig through sometimes over 100 feet of
Kalahari sand to get down to the diamondiferous gravels. And
doing this--it was pick-and-shovel work, amazingyou got straight
sections, of course, and you cut through places where there were
horizons with stone artifacts. He was very interested in this and
he did one of those volumes for the Diamang publication series.
He subsequently invited the Abbe Breuil to go up there, and the
Abbe wrote another one of these volumes .
Then, it must have been after the 55 Congress, he invited
Louis Leakey to go up and Louis went up and produced another of
those. Janmart was going to retire and live back in Dundo, which
is the little township of the area in the Lunda Province, and
concentrate on doing the archaeology. Well, he may have been
there for a year or so, but after that he had a heart attack and
died, which was very sad.
They wrote to me and said would I like to come up and continue
Janmart s work, and I said yes, I would be delighted to do that.
There followed the volumes that I did for the Diamang people. I
greatly enjoyed that.
And that went on for some time, didn t it?
you came to Berkeley.
Before and even after
Yes, I must have been up there, I don t know, at least four times,
I think, if not more. Yes. I think 1968 was perhaps the last
time that I was there.
What was the context of the archaeology relative to the diamond-
bearing material?
157
Clark: It was above the diamonds, but I suppose, certainly where the
diamondiferous gravels were, higher gravels of the valleys, the
overburden was Kalahari sands, which were redistributing about two
or three times from the original Tertiary sands. Down in the
valleys there were also gravels which contained diamonds, but they
also contained stone artifacts as well. I never really looked for
diamonds. [laughs] And it probably wouldn t have been a good
thing to do so.
These mines were all opencast mines, initially dug with pick
and shovel, and cocopans removing the waste. But later they
brought in earth-moving equipment which messed it all up.
Troy: Cocopans are workers?
Clark: No, they re triangular-shaped little containers, on a trolley
line, which were tipped like that. I say they were triangular-
shaped--they were rectangular, but triangular in cross section.
You filled those up. They were pushed along the trolley line to
the mine, and the mine consisted of a structure which had a series
of moving belts in which all the gravel was pushed into a series
of sieves from coarse to fine. You eventually got down to what
was called the concentrate, which would be in a small sieve, and
that would be put into a metal jug.
Troy: And that would be sent every evening to the picking station.
Clark: Yes, and in the picking station, of course, there they would use
the same kind of principle, with Vaseline-covered rollers that
they use in Kimberley. Diamonds would stick to the Vaseline,
being heavier, and the rest of the concentrate, like the
tourmalines and agates and things like that, would all fall into a
trough.
There was one Portuguese who ran the whole mine, and he was
more often than not always at the sieving part of the mine, the
machinery. And all the rest of it was African labor.
Troy: Would the mine be a giant hole in the ground, or not very big?
Clark: Some of them were really giant holes in the ground, yes. Some
were smallish, down in the river valleys. Yes, they varied a
great deal. I think it depended, of course, on how much there was
in the way of diamonds. They did, apparently, have good gem
quality diamonds, if you see what I mean, for mounting into rings
and those kinds of things, rather than the commercial kind of
diamond .
Troy: Did you learn some Portuguese, Desmond?
158
Clark: Oh, a minimal amount. Yes. My wife learnt quite a bit of
Portuguese. She could translate things. And we still keep in
touch, 1 still keep in touch with the man who was given to me as
sort of assistant when I was there, Vincent Martins--he spoke a
certain amount of English. And also the man who ran the biology
lab, Barradas Machado. He was the son of a former president of
Portugal. Very nice man.
Gun Flint Maker
Troy: Pretty underpopulated part of Angola, would you say? Except for
the diamond mines, what were people doing up there? Herding
mainly?
Clark: There were sheep and goatscertainly lots of goats, I m not too
certain about the sheep. No cattle, except on the Dundo Farm,
because of tsetse fly.
They cultivated maize, millets of one kind or another, used
vegetable crops, did a little bit of fishing in the streams, quite
a bit. And they hunted. We did some very interesting work with a
gun flint maker, but that s another story.
Troy: Good quality flint?
Clark: It wasn t flint, it was mostly a very fine grained sandstone or
quartzite. It was called gres polymorph, polymorphic sandstone.
That was, being silicious, that was quite good. They also did use
quartz, but it wasn t nearly as good from the point of view of
producing hot sparks.
And I learned, of course, the way in which, I suppose in the
past, but certainly at that time, they used their two heels to
hold the piece of stone that they were working, so you have two
free hands. Remarkable. I don t think anybody had really thought
of that until I published an article about this.
Troy: And you worked with this fellow up there, this gun flint maker?
Clark: Yes, we worked with him on two or three separate occasions. He
was excellent, and I first saw these gun flints about two hours
before I was due to leave the first time I was there, I think.
They looked to me as if they d been made by pressure flaking,
because they were beautiful little squares, lenticular in cross
section, and I thought, I must find out about those when I come
159
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
back next year, which I did.
in which he produced these.
We met the man, and we saw the way
In the collections, in the lab, Room 18, there is a whole
series showing the range that it goes through, from the raw piece
through to the finished gun flint. Those were excellent.
African or Portuguese fellow?
Oh, African,
called them.
He was a Chokwe, or Quiocos, as the Portuguese
Delightful.
I remember seeing pictures, I don t know whether they were
pictures you took somewhere- -was it in New Guinea?--pictures of a
fellow holding a stone with his heels. Maybe it was San people.
I can t remember what it was.
No, I don t think the New Guinea people,
their hands.
They held everything in
I could show you. It s in the first of those volumes that I
did for the company. But then we did more with them, and
collecting what it was and so on. That was in a festschrift for
Gertrude Caton-Thompson that was put out by the National Museum
and Monuments people in Zimbabwe- -Southern Rhodesia as it then
was, or the federation. I ve got that over there. But that was
distinctly interesting. We showed him Lupempan Middle Stone Age
artifacts and said, "Could you reproduce these?" And he said yes,
of course. So he did. We ve also got some of those. And we have
a film showing all of this. It was excellent.
The guns that they had there were smooth bore muzzle loaders
which were flintlocks, so you had to have the gun flints to
operate. The interesting thing about those gun flints was that
they re similar to the gun flints that were made in Portugal, and
they re similar to the gun flints that were made in Serbia, I
think it was. I think I found one also in Palmyra, in the Syrian
Desert. They are bifacially workedboth faces. They re not like
the western European gun flints, which are made on snapped pieces
of blades. These have been worked down, a very different kind of
gun flint. Extremely interesting. And of course, they weren t
made by pressure, they were made by a punch technique, the core
being held between the heels that formed the vise.
And they probably moved from flintlocks to AK-47s.
think about it.
One hates to
Well, the whole of that area now, of course, is controlled by
Savimbi, isn t it?
160
Troy: Absolutely impossible to get in there.
Clark: And they pay all their workers and everything in diamonds.
Troy: How did you get up there from Livingstone?
Clark: You flew from, I suppose it was Livingstone, to Luanda, and from
Luanda, which is the capital of Angola on the coast, you flew up
to Dundo. I think you came down once or twice, and then ended up
at Dundo. These were old DC-3s. Very reliable airplanes.
The Valley Tonga
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
In 1954, you and Geoffrey Bond worked in the Middle Zambezi.
I think that was 1950, before the [Kariba] dam was built, yes.
Was this an attempt at salvage archaeology? Did you realize that
a lot of that land would be flooded, and sites would be flooded?
I m not certain about that. It could be that there was a
suggestion that it was going to be flooded. There must have been,
I suppose. But when we went down, there was nothing, of course,
going on at all. These were isolated villages, and very nice
people. Mostly you d find that there would be almost a seasonal
famine, when the rains failed, because they depended, of course,
on their crops. These were the Valley Tonga people who Elizabeth
Colson had studied so well for fifteen, twenty years nowmust be
twenty years.
And that was the Gwembe area, is that right?
They
That s the Gwembe, yes. And they had two kinds of gardens,
had the river bank gardens, where they planted in the damp
alluvium, as the river went down. There they planted maize,
various vegetables, and tobacco. The problem with those was that
the hippos would come along and eat them. You could almost see a
hippo coming up, grunting, looking, sort of, "I ll leave that one
for another week." [laughter] And then the gardens back from the
river, the soil was not all that good, and that s where they
planted millet, both the finger millet, pennisetum, and the
ordinary sorghum.
You said the Valley Tonga were very nice people. What do you mean
by that? They were just friendly and open to your being there?
J. Desmond Clark and Louis Leakey at the 3rd Pan
African Congress, 1955.
Betty and Desmond Clark with Queen Consort
Elizabeth at the opening of the Rhodes Livingstone
Museum s new building, 1951.
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Several pages from Clark s 1956 Kalambo Falls field notebook
161
Clark: Yes, very much so, yes. They dressed in traditional African
costumes. Quite often old men in particular would wear loincloths
and a certain amount of beadwork and the rest of it, carry an axe
on one shoulder, et cetera. Later, the loincloth would become
cloth, mostly blue and white cloth, quite nice. And the women,
particularly the girls, extremely attractive: they wore a small
skirt with beads all over it, which covered the essential parts.
And I think they must have worn a back loincloth. But lots of
beadwork and so on. And they covered themselves with red ocher
producing the pigment from hematite, and mixing it with the oil
from a tree that grew along the Zambezi.
The dances they did down there were very delightful, dancing
at night with quite a lot of noise from drums, of course, various
kinds of drums, pedestal drums. The biggest would be around like
that [motions]. And there would be about maybe four others, going
down to little ones. Then side-blown whistles, hooo hooo hooo
hooo! Terrific noise. Hugh Tracey, the ethnomusicologist,
recorded all of that. Hugh was an African music man who had also
been at Monkton Combe.
Troy: Oh, at the same time you were there?
Clark: No, before me, in the twenties.
We had with us Nigel Watt, who was the Northern Rhodesian
information officer photographer, who was a very good
photographer. He made a very complete record of the Valley Tonga
at that time. I shall always remember at night, one of these
dances, the first time he used flash. Everything stopped
suddenly, for about, I don t know, ten seconds. And steadily, it
sort ofyou know, the music resumed. After a while, they got
used to it, of course. But that was remarkable.
Troy: They knew what cameras were, they just had never had a flash?
Clark: That was that, yes.
David Livingstone s Colleagues
Troy: There was one big time you went down there, is that right?
Clark: We went down again in 1954, I think it was, with Ray Inskeep, and
1 suppose that Clayton Holliday must have come down. Barrie
Reynolds came down and made a very good record of material culture
162
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
of the Valley Tonga
3
which was published in--I think it was the
Robins series, I m not certain. Could have been Manchester
University Press. The Robins series was very good.
That was University of California Press, wasn t it? Weren t some
of the Robins series published by the University of California?
I don t think so. Conceivably they might have been, but I don t
think so. I m not certain. No, I thought it was Chatto & Windus
who did that. And one of them, of course, uere the journals of
Richard Thornton, and that was done by a man who lived in West
Virginia. I enjoyed him. He died about two years ago, I think,
two or three years ago. What on earth was his name? I actually
visited him in West Virginia.
And who was Richard Thornton?
Richard Thornton was the young geologist who was with David
Livingstone on the Zambezi expedition in 1864 or 63, to I m not
certain when--was it four years? Must have been quite four years,
I think, they were out there. But David had brought his wife, of
course, and she stayed at Shupanga on the Zambezi. That s where
she diednot a very healthy place.
What was her name, David Livingstone s wife?
Mary, I think. She was the daughter of Robert Moffat, who started
the Kuruman Mission for the Scottishwhatever it s called
Presbyterian mission. He also brought out his brother Charles,
and Charles was a mischief-maker. I think he made up all sorts of
nonsenses and so on. At any rate, David sacked Richard Thornton,
and I m not so certain he didn t sack Baines, the artist. I think
he did.
Why did he sack Thornton?
Oh, I don t know, some trumped-up charge that Charles Livingstone
put over.
Thornton went and joined Baron [Carl Glaus] von der Decken on
an expedition to the Chagga on Mount Kilimanjaro. Remarkable
expedition. We have those journals, in Livingstone. God knows
what they ve done with them now. Later David Livingstone sort of
repented and asked Thornton to come back, and he did. He died on
3
Barrie Reynolds, The material culture of the peoples of the Gwembe
Valley, published on behalf of the National Museums of Zambia by Manchester
U.P., 1968. Kariba studies, v. 3.
163
the Zambezi. Malaria, I think it wasmost of them suffered from
tropical ailments.
Troy: What happened to David Livingstone s brother, Charles?
Clark: Charles went as consul, British consul, to Fernando Po and the
Bonny CoastFernando Po, of course, is Spanish now, and the Bonny
Coast is the delta area of the Niger in Nigeriaand made various
treaties there. We have all that material in Livingstone. I
managed to get hold of that.
Troy: Earlier you mentioned Livingstone coming up the Zambezi. And was
there a set of rapids down there that he had to go around?
Clark: Well, he went across to Luanda, the capital of what is now called
Angola, and sort of recovered there. He gave his journal that
he d written up to a sea captain going back to England. I think
the boat was sunk or something in a storm. At any rate, his
journal never got there. So he had to rewrite it, and he did
rewrite it from his small notebooks. You see, he kept all his
small notebooks. Little notebooks about that long-
Troy: Couple of inches.
Clark: --about that wide, hard covers, and flipped them over. We had
several of those.
Then he went straight across and went down the Zambezi, but
skippednot knowing, I think, but I don t know the Kebbra Basa
Rapids.
Troy: He just happened to get around them.
Clark: Maybe somebody said maybe his Africans. They were Makololo, most
of them that he took down. Some of them stayed there and
established little sort of kingdoms, more or less, as it were,
down in southern Malawi, I think it was. Near the Shire River.
He didn t know. He expected to be able to sail right up-
well, I suppose, almost to the falls. But the Kebbra Basa Rapids
are pretty impressive, and there had to be a portage over that.
Troy: But not on the Luangwa River.
Clark: No, the Luangwa comes down into the Zambezi to the east of Kariba
and before you get to Kebbra Basa. Comes in at a place called
Zumbo on the Portuguese side, and Feira, which simply means a
market, on the Zambian side. The Portuguese had established a
station there I think in the 17th century. It was certainly there
164
in the 18th century, and had quite interesting historical records
about various people, one of them being one of the priests who was
in charge of the church in Zumbo, who must have been a real
character. He s become a sort of cult hero and so on.
Troy: He was Portuguese or African?
Clark: He was Portuguese.
One of the last pieces of work 1 did before I left Zambia to
come over here was to go to Feira, which I had always wanted to go
and see, and I went with my son John, and we traced the wall that
the Portuguese had built around the whole thing to keep out the
local people who from time to time would sort of rise up. It was
successful except on one occasion when it was sacked, overrun,
because it was raining and the rain put out the flints--! don t
know whether they were flintlocks or matchlocks, but at any rate,
they couldn t use the guns.
I don t think the walls were very high; the maximum, I
suppose, was maybe about five feet or something like that. But we
were able to trace the foundations all the way around.
Troy: Did you write that up?
Clark: I wrote that up for the Northern Rhodesia Journal, yes.
Fourth Pan-African Congress. Leopoldville. 1959. and Zinianthropus
Troy: And just keeping track of the period before you left for Berkeley,
in 1959 the Fourth Pan-African Congress was in Leopoldville. Do
you remember something about that?
Clark: Yes. I well remember quite a bit of that. My first time to
Leopoldville. And of course, it was well attended, mostly by
people south of the Sahara. Very well attended. That is where
Louis Leakey presented and announced his discovery of
Zinjanthropus, or rather, Mary Leakey s discovery of Zinjanthropus
at Olduvai Gorge.
I well remember going out--I had arrived in the hotel
beforehandgoing out to see them arrive in the hotel van from the
airport. There was Louis and Mary sitting in a seat together,
Louis had a little square box on his knees with a very broad grin
on his face. Some of us were privileged to actually see the
Zinjanthropus skull, which was brought out, and we were allowed to
165
look at it, and even to handle it. But it was not put on public
display or anything until later, after the first announcement was
made in Nature.
It was a well-attended conference. Clark Howell and two
graduate students of his gave papers on the important Acheulean
site that they had been examining at Isimila, in south-central
Tanzania, which I had visited in 1954 with Ray Inskeep, meeting
Louis Leakey there, and others.
I well remember that visit, and talking well into the night
about what was there, and in particular the amount of natural
stone rubble that was associated with the stone artifacts on these
old buried surfaces. Louis thought that these were probably
stones that were collected by the hominids so that they could
throw themwhen they were sleeping at night on the ground, of
course, throw them at hyenas and jackals and so on that might come
around to frighten them away. Now, of course, we know that in
point of fact it is nothing more than a fluviatile concentration
which incorporates artifacts, fossil bones, and natural stones in
what is generally called an assemblage of secondary context. At
any rate, that was well presented.
Merrick Posnansky talked about his work in the Kenya Rift, the
lakes area, Naivasha, Nakuru, and particularly at a site called
Old Nakuru, which was a bank and ditch settlement, which in point
of fact turned out to be Iron Age, but it was a site that Mary
Leakey did her first major excavation at in East Africa. A
superbly done excavation. She found Neolithic burial mounds
together with various grave goods such as bowls, stone bowls,
pestles, various other stone artifacts.
Troy: And Merrick had been back there after Mary s initial excavation?
Clark: Yes, this was after Mary s initial excavations. And those
excavations, a very full report on them was published in the
Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa. A fine piece
of work. It showed very clearly the meticulous nature of her
excavation, the recording and presentation of the evidence, plans
of where everything was on the horizon, and so on. It was very
interesting indeed.
There was also an Iron Age small village within this area
which she excavated very competently. And then, of course, she
went on to excavate at Olduvai. Well, Olorgesailie was next, yes.
Well, not only next, becausewe might just as well talk about
this now, I think. She and Louis Leakey excavated a rock shelter,
a small sort of cave, at a place called Njoro, which is on the
166
eastern side of the rift, where in point of fact Elspeth Huxley s
mother, Nellie Grant, had a farm.
Nioro. Bodies and Beads
Troy: And you were there during the war. You did a little work near
Njoro.
Clark: Yes indeed. And I went, of course, to see that excavation. A
remarkable series of finds found there. This was a burial cave,
actually. It wasn t occupied. But bodies were buried there, I
suppose over a period of time. That was well reported inwhat
was it? a good monograph on what was found there, both so far as
the skeletal remains were concerned, done by Louis Leakey, and all
the cultural material, mostly by Mary.
The fascinating thing was that these bodies had been partially
burned, intentionally, of course. You might say sort of cremated,
but of course, it was a rather inferior form of cremation, and
much survived, including perishable remains of the grave goods.
There were some beautiful things, and two particularly important
finds were a carbonized, partially burnt, gourd with decoration on
it, which did show that the lagenaria gourd almost certainly was
in the Old World by about 900 B.C., which is the date subsequently
found for Njoro rock shelter. Previously it was thought that they
all came from the New World. But nice in size, decoration such as
the kind of thing that you find on gourds used today, of course,
in East Africa.
And the other thing was a beautifully engraved wooden pot,
deep kind of pot, very well preserved, the part that had survived.
And lots of broken string and that kind of thing, together with a
remarkable collection of semiprecious stone beads and pendants.
Very extraordinary. It almost looks as if they must have been
traded in, which seems unlikely, because virtually all those
stones did occur within a reasonable distance of Njoro, agates and
carnelians and various other things, tourmalines and so on. I
think there may even have been some amazonite, I m not certain.
But obviously it must have been a real problem in boring
these. Nobody has ever done any more work on that, I think,
because they were exhibited in the Nairobi Museum, in the Coryndon
Museum as it then was, and somebody stole them, of course. You
know.
167
Troy: This sounds like the kind of thing you d be very interested in;
the process of boring stones is something that comes up throughout
your career.
Clark: They were mostly cylinder beads; others were flattish pendants.
Some of them are illustrated in the Leakeys report. But there
were also, I think, some very small beads made from an extremely
hard shell, I suppose, an ordinary seed shell, but extremely hard.
Mary Leakey and Predecessors
Troy:
Clark:
Now, Merrick got there, and reported out at Leopoldville. What
was he particularly interested in, following up on Mary s work?
Troy:
Clark:
He was interested in the
in. At that time, Louis
warden at Olorgesailie.
didn t get on. It can t
around and saying, "What
museum in Uganda and did
Iron Age, and that s what he specialized
Leakey was employing Merrick as his
And I m not certain what it was, but they
have been easy having Louis Leakey coming
are you doing?" So Merrick went to the
very fine work there.
In his place, Richard Wright was appointed. Merrick Posnansky
was from University of Nottingham, I think it was, and Richard
Wright was from Cambridge. But he fell by the wayside, in some
form or another, and left, and he went to Australia and was
chairman at University of Sydney, the anthropology department.
And then Glynn Isaac was appointed, and Glynn, of course, stayed.
The other- -well, we could talk about Mary s contribution and
so on.
She would have been the preeminent and essentially the first woman
paleoarchaeologist .
No, by no means. I think two of the most important, of course,
were Dorothy Garrod, who didn t work in Africa, but worked in
Europe and the Near East, particularly in what is now Israelused
to be Palestine, of course excavating at the Tabun caves. But
she also excavated in both western and eastern Europe, and also
inwas it Iran? I think it was Iran, yes. And did remarkably
fine work, unbelievably so.
There was a one-day symposium in Cambridge earlier this year,
which unfortunately I couldn t go to, but the proceedings of that,
which were papers in honor of Dorothy Garrod, were published by, I
think it s the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,
168
which is the main institute that Colin Renfrew, Lord Renfrew, was
able to found with funding provided by a philanthropist, a
Scottish financier, McDonald.
The other very important one was, of course, Gertrude Caton-
Thompson, who worked not only with Petrie s people at Badari but
in other locations as well. These were early predynastic Badarian
sites in the Nile Valley, but she also excavated one of the most
classic sites. Still very important today, the work that she did
at Kharga Oasis is in the western desert of Cgypt, excavating
mound springs and looking to see what there was around the
escarpment. She was chiefly known, of course, initially for the
work she did at Zimbabwe, Great Zimbabwe as it s now called, in
1928-29.*
*For further discussion, see the Dialogue with Desmond Clark and
Garniss Curtis.
169
VII RESEARCH WORK OF THE 1960S
Iron and Copper Smelting Research
Clark: Shortly before I left Zambia, some time in 60 I think it was, we
were able to find by writing to the district commissioner in
Solwezi--we probably tried other places as well on the Copper
Beltbut in Solwezi, the district commissioner there said he d
found seven old men who remembered how to build a copper smelting
furnace, because they had smelted copper, of course, there. This
was one of the very important areas in the Katanga, which at that
time I suppose would have spread into what s now Zambia, as well
as the main area in the Belgian Congo, as it then was. This was a
trans-African trade that was very, very important, based on the
Lunda and Luba kingdoms down in the southern part of the Congo
Basin.
We went up there, and two of the men were too old to move, but
five of them came, and they went up to- -what was the name of the
important iron smelting area [Kansanshi Mine]? They went up, and
they collected their sort of walnut-sized pieces of malachite or
impure malachite, and brought them down to some place which wasn t
too far away, where there was water, and where there was clay
soil, so that they could build a kiln. They then argued away
between themselves as to how to do it, which was really quite fun.
At any rate, with biggish hammers they broke up the ore a
little more, and they built a furnace which had a slight
depression in the ground at the bottom, very slight. The furnace
was not much higher than a couple of feet. The width of it across
was probably about that [indicates several feet], something like
that. They filled it up with charcoal, and then on the top, they
put the ore. They watched it, you see, watched it and watched it.
Then they would put more ore on, and more ore on.
Troy: They had bellows?
170
Clark: Yes, one set of bellows. There would be two nozzles and two
little bags made out of goat skin. The top end of the bellows
would be open like this, with two strips, one strip on one side of
the skin, one on the other. So that you could open the top, let
in air, close it, and push the air through. That s one of the
typical kinds of bellows. There are different kinds, but this was
the kind that was more commonly used. That worked very well.
One man operating these like that, sweat pouring off his face
and body, because it was pretty hot. It took, oh, not all that
long, about a couple of hours, I think it was. May have been a
little more. And then they broke down the furnace, broke it down
like that, and scooped out the irregular block of copper.
Troy: And the copper had just gone down through the charcoal?
Clark: Yes, that s right. And collected down at the bottom. I was very
pleased to have been able to do that. I mean, what we did is we
reestablished the process, and quite often at agricultural shows,
these people, or their assistants and so on, would go around and
demonstrate all of this. We did it in Livingstone in our village.
Now, that was written up, a shortish report, by Jim Chaplin in
the South African Archaeological Bulletin. I suppose it would be
1961 or 62, something like that. I made a complete set of
slides, color slides, of course, showing the various processes
involved, and I let the Lowie Museum here, or Phoebe Hearst Museum
here, copy them.
Troy: Could you do the same thing with a small kiln with iron ore, do
you think?
Clark: No, that was different. No, my recollection was that the copper-
actually, I can t remember whether they hammered it into an ingot,
I don t think they did. I think the copper was formed into a
shortish ingot. They must have made a clay mold for it down at
the bottom.
But the iron was different,
shortish kiln.
We had them do iron as well in a
Troy: The men who did the copper demonstrated iron smelting too?
Clark: No, I don t think so, I think they were different people. But the
same group. Some of them supervising, I think that was it, yes,
with several young chaps. Again, it was only one kiln, the men
working like mad, and it took about, oh, six or more hours at
least.
171
What happened is the iron gradually sank down. Opposite the
tuyeres where the man was pumping like mad, was a kind of
collecting area. With copper they could tell by the color of the
flame, a certain blue, that it was time to break down the kiln.
With the iron, what happened was, they took big sticks, lengths of
thickish poles, pushed them in, broke down, and raked out the
bloom, which was a mass of slag and iron, all matted and sort of
oddly shaped. It depended on the size of the kiln as to how big
the whole thing was. Raked it out, and of course, in doing that,
you got superb points on the ends of these poles, which was
impressive, I thought. I didn t realize they would be pointed so
well.
Troy: Did they then utilize those as spears in earlier times?
Clark: I have no idea. You could have used them as stakes in a pit trap
or something like that. But charring and scraping is one of the
quickest ways of producing a good point. In earlier times they
used stone hammers, of course, heavy stone hammers in a leather
sleeve. I think they probably use ordinary metal hammers for this
now. Hammer and hammer the thing. You got rid of the slag that
way, and what you had left was iron. That was it. That had, I
think, to be resmelted again. Was that right? Yes.
At any rate, Jim Chaplin wrote that process up as well. The
poor man. He was doing very well, back working on a Ph.D.
somewhere, I think he was doing it at Makerere in Uganda. And he
was standing on the curb in Uganda and some chap in a vehicle came
along, hit him, killed him immediately, just drove off. Quite
dreadful. Must have been in the seventies. Well, it could have
been the late sixties, yes.
Troy: Where was Chaplin?
Clark: He was from England, and he was something to do with the airport,
I think it was. And then he came to us as Inspector of Monuments.
I think he was the last Inspector of Monuments who was there when
I was there. That s right. He was good.
Troy: Somewhere early on, somebody would have had to have discovered,
probably by accident, that certain rocks that may have been near
their fires evolved into this iron.
Clark: Well, iron was said to have been developed by the Hittites in,
what, Anatolia? In Mitanni, I think. What would it have been?
1500 B.C. or something. The first evidence that we have in
Africa, I think, other than, of course, in the North African
Mediterranean areas, is in Meroe, where there is extensive
evidence for iron smelting. That s on the Nile, the upper Nile,
172
in the Sudan. And the Meroitic civilization was something that
lasted for a number of centuries, and was superseded by Aksum in
Ethiopia.
Troy: And once in Africa, on the upper Nile, you could see how it could
quite easily begin to move south?
Clark: It moves slowly south, yes. And of course, iron over bronze,
being much harder, was a much more efficient weapon, and also
tool, agricultural tool, as well, for plowing, that kind of thing.
Hoeing. But it wasn t uncil, so far as we know, round about 500
B.C. that we got the first evidence for iron smelting kilns, and
this was in Nigeria. I think it was the Jos. Taruga was the name
of the place, just south of the Jos Plateau, I think. That was
written up in one of the very early Journal of World Archaeology
volumes. It s very important, that. And then it spread south
with the Bantu-speaking, Bantu and perhaps other-speaking peoples,
moving into sub-Saharan Africa.
Copper was smelted by the Namaqua at one time. I suppose the
melting point of copper is much less than it is for iron. I think
it s about 400 degrees Centigrade, something like that. And then
you just basically sort of hammer it. And of course, if you find
native copper, copper as was in the Lake Superior basin and so on,
they simply hammered that and made it into very interesting
looking artifacts. I think they were almost sockets, I think, as
well, a wrapped socket, you see. That was one of the things that
interested me very much.
There were different kinds of kilns that were used for
smelting iron. There were some people at a place called Siringe,
where we had a demonstration of this for the Pan-African Congress
excursion people, 1955. Got that on film as well, of course.
Troy: Siringe is in Zambia?
Clark: Siringe, yes. It s in the southern part of the Muchinga
Escarpment, yes.
This was an excursion at various sites through Zambia. We
went to Twin Rivers, of course, and various other places en route.
Kalambo Falls, Nachikufu, and so on. And then we went across on
the Luapula, there were some rock engravings, interesting
engravings, one or two other things, across the Luapula into the
Katanga. That s where the Katanga excursion took over. I used to
have a copy of the handbook of the excursion guide, but God knows
what s happened to it. Absolutely magnificent guide, the 55 one,
absolutely terrific, yes.
173
An Aside on the Current Situation in Zimbabwe
Troy: Desmond, you and I talked before we began here about the bad
situation in Zimbabwe, where a farmer has been killed and a number
of others, five or more, beaten severely by protesting veterans of
the independence movement. And there doesn t seem to be a lot of
effort on the part of the government to do anything about it, or
to protect the white farmers and their families. I saw a report
that a number of them are now leaving the country, which is, of
course, what the veterans, I m sure, want.
Clark: I don t know whether they re actually leaving the country. It
said a number of them are leaving their farms, I think.
Apparently, they seem to be congregating at a place called
Marandellas, which is on the railway line, actually, and which
seems to be safer. But the main problem is, of course, that the
high court made a ruling that the so-called veterans must leave
the farms, and instructed the police to ensure that they did.
This was followed up by the vice president of Zimbabwe when Mugabe
was over in Cuba on some conference or something. When he got
back, he took no notice of the legal situation and continued to
back the veterans. So how much longer Mugabe will be there, or
how much longer there will be any legal system in Zimbabwe, one
does not know.
Everything is run down. There is no money. Mugabe has ruined
the economy. And the best troops, army troops, of course, are in
the Congo, apparently looking after Mugabe s interests there,
whatever there is that s why they re there. Otherwise, they
wouldn t be there. Fighting something. I think fighting for
[Laurent] Kabila, isn t it Kabila? The chap there.
Troy: And these are friends and relatives of yours.
Clark: No--yes. Peter, who died two years ago, was my cousin. His widow
is still there, and two sons with their families run the farm,
very successfully.
Troy: This is east or west of Lusaka?
Clark: It s east of Harare. Not in Zambia, it s in Zimbabwe.
Troy: And that s very rich farming country?
Clark: It s good farming country, but of course, these farms have all
been built up by essentially white farmers. They wouldn t be
productive, at least no more so than most other parts of Zimbabwe,
if they hadn t been nursed along in the way they have.
174
Troy: Is there a similar situation in Zambia, in former Northern
Rhodesia, Desmond? Or is it less so up there?
Clark: A number of farmers in Zambia left, of course. They were mostly
along the railway, or adjacent to the railway line between
Livingstone and Lusakawell, Livingstone and Ndola, I should say.
Ndola is at the extreme eastern end of the copper belt. But some
remained, and they have had a very difficult time of it, because
the government never pays them for the maize and other produce and
so on that they grow. Some of them must turn to game farming,
which does enable them to get a little foreign exchange for
medical services and the opportunity of getting out of the country
for a time.
Troy: Is there still an infrastructure that s mixed, Indian, white, and
so on? Or have Zimbabwe and Zambia done what Idi Amin did in
Uganda, which was essentially expel all of the Indians?
Clark: Yes, Amin threw out the Indians. The Indians were all essentially
commercial people, fairly small commercial people, and there are
still quite a number of them there in the towns, and to some
extent in some of the major villages. I think that they have
survived all right.
Troy: Are there any whites at all in the government, in either of those
two countries?
Clark: I don t really know whether Ian Smith is--I don t think he s in
the government in Zimbabwe, and I would say there probably weren t
any in either of these two countries.
Earlier Meetings with Americans. Sherwood Washburn
Troy: Well, it s interesting that today, we ll probably move to a point
just before or at 1961, when you came on to Berkeley. I want to
talk at that time about your feelings about leaving Africa. Of
course, you were still a young man, and some of the feelings you
have now about it are not the feelings you had when you were
leaving then. But overall, what has your sense of independence
been?
Clark: Well, I was about forty-five, and my wife much the same age. The
children were in England. Our son John was at Durham University,
and Elizabeth, I think, was doing her articles, becoming a lawyer.
175
The question was, round about that time of course, one always
gets a bit of itchy feet as to are you going to stay in the same
job all the time, or should one move on? And there came this
invitation from Berkeley, due, essentially, I would say, in the
first instance to Sherry [Sherwood] Washburn. The first time I
met Americans in Africa was at the 1955 Pan-African Congress. To
that there came Sherry and Henrietta Washburn, and Bill Howells
and his wife, Muriel, Carl [Carleton S.] Coon and his wife. Who
else? One or two others. Oh, yes, George Barber was the
geologist.
Troy: He was from where in the United States, George?
Clark: He was from Cincinnati. I visited him there after I came over
here. At least I think it was then; it could have been in 1955.
Troy: Bob Brain, who was at that meeting, was not an American, right?
Clark: No, Bob was a South African.
Troy: And a lot of the other folks at that meet ing --Kenneth Oakley,
Raymond Dart, Basil Cooke.
Clark: Well, Kenneth Oakley was British, of course. Basil Cooke was
South African. Raymond Dart, of course, was Australian, working
in South Africa.
Troy: Yes. And of course, Louis Leakey was there, and Le Gros Clark,
but they were Africans, essentially.
Clark: They were what?
Troy: Africans. I mean, they were working in Africa.
Clark: Well, Le Gros Clark, of course, worked out of Oxford, and he
didn t really work in Africa. He visited sites in Africa,
particularly the Australopithecine sites, and the site out at
Rusinga Island from which Proconsul came, and one or two other
sites in Kenya. Rusinga is on the west side of Lake Victoria, on
what s now called the Winam Gulf. Used to be called the Kavirondo
Gulf. Quite why they changed it, I don t know.
Troy: This wonderful conference in Livingstone in 1955 was the first
time you d really had some prolonged contacts with Americans.
Clark: That s right, yes.
Troy: Sherry Washburn--had he been there doing some baboon research?
176
Clark: Shortly after that, I think it was. He may have started in 55, I
can t remember. But he started looking at the baboon troops at
the Victoria Falls for quite a time.
Troy: It s funny, I have a hard time imagining baboon troops at Victoria
Falls.
Clark: [laughs] Oh well, he got a lot of information out of them. And
of course, they would cross the bridge. You could see them on the
bridge.
Troy: Like pedestrians.
Clark: But they mostly stuck to their own sides.
Then he went to work down at the--in those days it was called
Wankie, now it s called Hwankie, with an "h" in front of the "w",
National Park, Game Reserve, whatever it s called. Did more work
down there. And he was based at the Livingstone Museum, so we saw
quite a lot of him. When baboons were shot, they would be brought
along to him, and he would sort of de-flesh them in a forty-four
gallon drum with various chemicals and things in it. Then the
skeleton would get hung up to dry, so to speak, in a little shed
that there was at the back side of the museum. Rather gruesome
looking things, but still with many ligaments attached to them.
That s probably the way in which you would ensure that they were
safely packed before they went off and presumably came back to
California here, where he was based.
He was about to start a major program in primate behavior and
human origins and study of fossil man and related faunal and
cultural associations. That s why he suggested he would like me
to come and join him. And after a while, we decided yes, we
would. So that s how we came here.
New Acquaintances. Trip to America. Chicago
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
I met George Foster in 1958, I think it was, at the Washington
meeting of the American Anthropological Association. He was
chairman of the department here.
When was your first trip to the United States? Do you remember?
In 1958. I was asked to come over by Clark Howell, who at that
time was at Chicago, together with Bob Braidwood who worked, of
course, in the Near East on the origins of agriculture and so on.
177
They invited me to come over to lecture for a term. So that s
what I did, a term or semester in the fall. And that was great
fun, greatly enjoyed that.
When that was over we saw some of the countryside with some of
the faculty members and so on, in Illinois, and then went to the
SAA meetings in Washington. And there various people said, "You
can t leave the United States without seeing the Southwest." So
we went for about a week down to New Mexico, Albuquerque and
places like that, where I met Fred Wendorf and a number of other
people.
Troy: Did you get to Tucson? Did you get to the University of Arizona
on that trip?
Clark: No.
Troy: I think Edward Spicer would have been there, and some of those
Sonoran Desert people--Emil Haury.
Clark: Emil Haury I had met earlier on. That s right, at a Wenner-Gren
conference, symposium, in the castle at Wartenstein in Austria.
That was organized by Emil Haury and--no, it was by Bob Braidwood
and Gordon Willey, that s right. I went to about six of those
Wenner-Gren conferences of various kinds. Courses Towards Urban
Life is what the volume was called that came out of the conference
in 1961. And that was good, I enjoyed that.
Troy: I interviewed Emil Haury back in 1990, so I knew him quite well.
Clark: Did you? Yes, he was a great man, I greatly enjoyed him. He
taught me how to drink tequila.
Troy: [laughs] In Austria?
Clark: In Austria, yes. Because they brought some over.
Troy: Was there anything like tequila in Northern Rhodesia?
Clark: No, nothing at all. I suppose the equivalent was cognac.
Troy: But you didn t have a maize corn liquor.
Clark: The liquor made by the Africans, which was called African beer,
was made from bullrush millet, pennisetum, and that s commonly
what pennisetum is used for when it s grown today. Mostly now
grown for beer. It s a drought-resistant crop, and very
successful in many parts of Africa still.
178
But I quite enjoyed Chicago in 1958. It was the fall. And
the winter had just started before we left. Yes. And we
certainly appreciated what it could be like with a really strong
wind and cold temperature in Chicago, blowing off the Lake
Michigan.
Troy: Braidwood would have been with the Oriental Institute, I guess.
Clark: That s right, yes, that s where he was based. But he must have
had a joint appointment with the Department of Anthropology, I
think,, at the University of Chicago.
Troy: What was Howell teaching at that time in Chicago?
Clark: He was teaching physical anthropology. He was one of Washburn s
students, the most successful of them all, I suppose, with Irven
DeVore.
You knew that Sherry [Sherwood Washburn] died, did you? Died
on Saturday. I went along with George Foster to see him, but we
arrived too late. Yes. [becomes quite emotional at this point]
Troy: Did you come out to Berkeley on that 1958 trip?
Clark: No, we didn t. We went on several occasions, of course.
My good friend in Illinois, remained so until he diedand
indeed his widow we still keep up withwas Al Dahlberg, Albert
Dahlberg. He was a dentist, actually, working on fossil teeth-
well, ethnographic and fossil teeth. Awfully nice man. They had
a farm out on the Fox River, I think it was, somewhere west of
Chicago. We used to go out there for weekends. It was my
introduction to popcorn. Also to searching for clams in ice-cold
water. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Great fun.
Troy: And you met him through various folks at the University of
Chicago?
Clark: He was an adjunct to the faculty, and then he lived just a few
houses away from the Department of Anthropology. Yes, those were
good days. We were all full of enthusiasm.
179
The Story of Louis Leakey Skinning the Duiker
Troy: At the 55 meeting in Livingstone there s the story that comes up
a number of places about Leakey skinning the buck. Do you
remember that?
Clark: Yes, of course.
Troy: It was said that he was able to do it in some very short period of
time. I m sure you ve done that a lot since, but was that the
first timeno, you d been working with stone tools by then.
Clark: Oh, yes, of course. We started off experimental work with flaking
stone as soon as I got to Livingstone. And I had asked Louis
Leakey if he would give a demonstration during the congress, which
of course he did. He sent down some blocks of flint, probably
Brandon flint, which he d acquired from somewhere. Certainly they
weren t from Kenya.
Troy: That s European flint?
Clark: Yes. Brandon, of course, is in East Anglia, a very famous place
for the making of gun flints. That flintlock up there [points to
a flintlock gun above the fireplace] has a Brandon flint in it.
He sent out half a dozen blocks of flint, and we soaked them
in the lily pond, the fountain, in the middle of the courtyard in
the new museum in Livingstone, so that they absorbed a certain
amount of moisture. The trouble is, if you try and flake stone if
it s been sitting out in the sun on, say, a gravel bed, exposed to
the sun, everything seems to tighten up. It s much less easy to
flake the stone than it is if the temperature is much cooler, and
the easiest of all is if you pick up a piece of stone, flakable
stone, that is, out of a riverbed. You can flake it comparatively
easily. I suppose a certain amount of moisture is absorbed
nonetheless, even by something like flint and chert.
Yes, he demonstrated the making of so-called choppers and
flakes, and a hand axe I think he must have made, which everybody
was much enthused with. We got the local sort of tourist man who
was organizing the cars for our excursion through Northern
Rhodesia to see if he could get a guard and shoot a duiker, which
he did, and brought it in, and that is what he did. We had to pay
for it. [laughter] And Louis Leakey skinned it very nicely with
a flake, possibly more than one flake, I can t remember.
I ve got quite a nice photograph showing Peter Van Riet Lowe,
Gertrude Caton-Thompson, Miles Burkitt, and I think myself but I m
180
not certain, watching Louis Leakey, who was kneeling down,
skinning the duiker. And of course, a sharp flake, simply the
intersection of two flake scars, is the sharpest knife that you
can have for cutting under those kind of circumstances. After a
while, they get a bit blunt, because fibers of the meat will cling
to the edge. So as Louis Leakey said, you simply just suck them
off and start again with it. Or if it really becomes blunt, then
you use another one.
And every time you make a so-called chopper, which is often
nothing more or less thai, a core, you will find you may have a
dozen flakes, of which usually half of them will be sufficiently
suitable for skinning, scraping meat off bones, and that kind of
thing, cutting through sinews, separating limbs and so on. Yes.
Wenner-Gren Conference in 1961
Troy: In July of 1961 there was the big Wenner-Gren Foundation
conference that Clark Howell was involved with. Did you go there
before you came on to Berkeley? Do you remember?
Clark: I must have been to that, just before coming to Berkeley. I
think, yes.
Troy: [Francois] Bourliere was there.
Clark: Bourliere, yes. Yes, he was a delightful man.
Troy: That was quite a meeting, I understand. Something like twenty
scientists were there?
Clark: That s right. That was a fine one. There was--was it John Emlen,
who initially did work with gorillas. And at that as well was
George Schaller.
Troy: Who did a lot of work on snow leopards and everything else.
Clark: Oh, lots of things.
Troy: And Betty did a lot of the recording for that?
Clark: It s possible she did. Yes, I think she did. But she and Barbara
Isaac and I think Sonia Cole all did the recording for the 1965
big one of three weeks, three groups, with a core group that went
right through. One of the most exhausting times I ever had. And
181
that led to Background to Evolution in Africa that Bill Bishop and
I edited [University of Chicago Press, 1967].
Friendship with Glynn Isaac
Troy: When did you first meet Glynn Isaac? He d been out to
Livingstone, hadn t he?
Clark: Oh, yes.
I met him when he was a teenager, smallish, with his twin
brother, Reese, down with John Goodwin at the Cape in the
Atheneum. Big building, a big house, with grounds, where the
Blakes lived. Dorothea Blake was the last one. When she died,
she left it to I think the Royal Society of South Africa as its
headquarters. They had to have somebody living there as well, and
the first person, of course, was John Goodwin. When John died, or
retired--! don t remember- -Glynn Isaac s father, he and his
family, his mother and the two small children, boys, and then
there was a girl, lived in the Atheneum. That s where I met them,
first of all.
Then after that, when I was in Livingstone, 1956 I think it
was, the professor of anthropology in the University of Cape Town
was Monica Wilson. She was the widow of Godfrey Wilson, and they
had both been up here in Livingstone, you remember, in 1938 to
found the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. She taught Glynn, and of
course we kept in touch. Glynn came up. I think he hitchhiked up
to Livingstone to come and work with me for part of his long
vacation, which he did, and he actually measured, I think, a
number of artifacts, probably from Twin Rivers, come to think of
it. Would that have been right? Yes, could easily have been.
Troy: And you could see that this was a young man with a lot of interest
and potential.
Clark: Very much so. Glynn was trained at the University of Cape Town in
biology. He did some geology, and he did his archaeology as well.
When he had finished there, he went to Cambridge to do his
doctorate. Louis Leakey appointed him, after two others had
fallen by the wayside, as the warden or whatever it was of the
site of Olorgesailie.
After I came here to Berkeley, we needed to get somebody else
on the prehistory side, and I said we should get Glynn Isaac. And
that s what we did. Glynn came here, I think, about 1967, 68,
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something like that after finishing up the work at Olorgesailie,
yes.
Troy: So he had passed muster with Louis.
Clark: Oh, yes. Glynn was very diplomatic.
Troy: He could manage this strong Louis Leakey personality.
Clark: I think that was it, yes.
Troy: I know you were very, very close.
Clark: Yes, we were indeed. We had seventeen years here. We used to
mostly share the advising of our graduate students.
Troy: Did Betty get along with Mary Leakey pretty well?
Clark: Yes, I think so.
Troy: I sense your personality is quite a little bit different from what
Louis Leakey s must have been. And I was wondering how you all
got along.
Clark: Yes. We got along all right, yes.
Troy: Because you certainly knew each other for a long, long time.
Clark: Yes.
Driving Across Country to Berkeley
Troy: When you decided to come to Berkeley, did you take a flight over
here initially to check it out, or did you come sight unseen?
Clark: No, I came unseen, actually. I had not been here before.
Troy: Do you remember what the trip and arrival were like?
Clark: Yes, we took a ship from England. Landed in New York with a
station wagon that we it was an Austin station wagon that we
brought over. We drove across the northern route, via the Dakotas
and Nebraska and so on. Went to Yellowstone.
We d brought a few bottles of an excellent port that I was
given by the managing director of the diamond company in Angola,
183
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Julio de Valana, who sent them to me. And we had one or two of
those bottles left, which we brought over with us, with the car.
On the docks, of course, I discovered that you were not allowed to
import liquor. So we had to give it all up, which was rather sad.
We went to a hotel somewhere more or less opposite where the
United Nations now is, or perhaps it was there already, was it?
It would have been, yes. And it was incredibly hot, 1 remember.
We left, I think, about five in the morning or so to get out of
all the traffic. We started off down the wrong way of the Lincoln
Tunnel. Fortunately, we hadn t gone more than about, oh, not 100
yards, I don t think, backed out hastily. After that, it was all
right.
We stopped in Chicago and visited old friends there. Then we
stopped at various national parks, you know, Dinosaur National
[Monument] parks and things like that. And the Black Hills, where
the presidents are. We went on to Yellowstone. Never been since,
actually.
How old were your kids? Let s see, 61, they d be teenagers.
John was still at school, I think. Liz had finished and came over
with us. She was on holiday. It would have been July or August.
She was driving, and we managed to hit some piece of metal in the
road somewhere around Nebraska or somewhere like that which
produced a gash in the tire. I think we changed it and went on.
"Oh, no, we haven t got those kind of tires, but you ll get one at
some larger place," and so on. So it went on until we got down
here. Certainly that size tire they did not make and use over
here. We were driving without a spare all the way down, with no
problem, thank God. Rather like the business of driving up the
boundary road between British Somaliland and Somalia, much the
same kind of thing, with a damaged spare. But that was all right.
What parts of the country reminded you of Africa? Maybe the
Dakotas a little bit?
Clark: A little, yes. Some parts I think of northern Utah. That s
right. Then getting down into California, yes. It was good. And
it was all new to us --virgin land. We came down the freeway, of
course, and visited the Tetons, which was lovely, and Salt Lake
City, that way.
And then I remember we were looking for a road that was called
The Alameda, and Marin. That would have taken us up to virtually
the house that we had rented, just over the other side of Grizzly
Peak. Well, when we were somewhere around Vallejo, we suddenly
saw one of these signs saying, "Alameda." Ah, so down we went,
184
"the Alameda," and sure enough, it said "Marin." And we went
along, and we ended up at a whole lot of pocket battleships in
mothballs in plastic on a quay, and we were very perplexed.
There was some chap standing around, and I said, "Where are
we?" "Oh,"
he said, "they re hard up for names in this part of
the world, so they use them again and again. This is not the
right place here."
So on we went, and we got to Berkeley, found The Alameda, went
up The Alameda to Marin, and went up Marin. We were heavily
loaded. [laughter] It got steeper and steeper and steeper.
Luggage on the roof, luggage piled up in the back and so on.
However, we made it all right. Yes, up Solano, that was it, and
then Marin. Yes, that s right. My God, that was steepish.
Troy: Still is.
Clark: Still is, yes, exactly. [laughter] So that was our introduction.
Early Years in Berkeley
Troy: In those early days here, though they were very busy, you must
have had quiet moments when you thought, "I ve left Africa."
Clark: No. Because I was told--and I think it was one of the reasons why
we decided that we would like to come here--I was told that it
would be possible to obtain funding to go back and continue field
work in Africa. And that was very true at that time. The
university itself, of course, did not provide the funding, the
funding came from various organizations like the National Science
Foundation. And of course there were other government agencies
that one could apply to, and private foundations like the Wenner-
Gren Foundation, the Leakey Foundation, and others.
I was never short of fundingyou write a proposal for what it
is that you want to do, and I always managed to secure the funds
that were necessary to go back to Africa, with a small number of
students, to continue working, or to work in different areas.
Over the years, for one reason or another, I was able to work in
or visit many parts of the African continent, which was quite
invaluable for producing a kind of broad overview of what the
prehistory was like, basically, of course, with the Paleolithic
through to the Later Stone Age. Also in later times as well,
particularly so far as the Iron Age, as it s called, is concerned,
south of the Sahara. That would be a time from sometime in the
185
first millennium B.C. through to--well, the beginning of historic
time.
Troy: So you felt that Africa was very much still a part of your life.
Clark: Oh, absolutely, very much so.
Troy: And of course, with Sherry being at the helm here, Sherry
Washburn. And who else was here? Ted McCown?
Clark: Ted McCown was here. Ted McCown had worked with Dorothy Garrod at
the Tabun Cave in Mount Carmel in Israel. One of the Mount Carmel
caves, very deep, deep sequence. I can t remember whether it was
the late twenties or the early thirties, some time around then.
So he was very interested in old world prehistory. He taught it
here successfully, and he also, of course, taught fossil man. He
and Sherry together sort of developed the biological study of
fossil man. Then I came in regard to the cultural evolution.
Troy: You probably had met Ted McCown at meetings?
Clark: No, I had never met him before.
He was a quiet, gentle man, nice man, very nice. He was also
very kind to me, to us, Betty and myself. We enjoyed--and of
course, his widow, a dear friend of ours. She married again, and
lives down in Carmel now. She worked fairly closely with Sherry
Washburn as well.
So there was nobody else here really interested in the old
world in the anthropology department, with the exception of Bob
[Robert] Heizer. Bob Heizer clearly was particularly interested
in understanding the economy of prehistoric cultures, and of
course, all his early work was done in the delta area of
California. Classic pioneer work which still holds. But he got
very interested in looking at shell mounds, of which a number
abounded around the bay, and working with a man called Cook,
Sherburne Cook, I think. I m not certain whether he was in
chemistrysomething like that [professor of physiology] . I
worked with him as well for a time.
Bob Heizer and Cook edited an extremely important volume in
the Wenner-Gren Viking Fund series shortly before I came, on how
you can understand what it was people were eating, and how much
they ate, and when they ate it, all that kind of situation.
Seasonal occupation of shell mounds and that kind of thing. And
something about the population density. So that got him more
interested in the old world, and also, of course, in the history
of--I was going to say the history of prehistoric research,
186
particularly that that started, of course, in France, first of all
along the Somme, with the Lower to Middle Pleistocene, and
continued right through the times of the Mousterian occupation
with Neanderthals into the Upper Paleolithic, and particularly
with the Upper Paleolithic, some very pioneer work done by people
like Lartet and Christy. Christy was a European banker who
supported Lartet, and it was at that time that some of the classic
French sites were excavated.
Developing the "Whole Picture" via a Team Approach
Troy: So you were seeing, when you got here, what you had begun to see
through the Pan-African Conferences, through the Wenner-Gren
retreats, a coming together of many disciplines, and putting the
efforts of many different disciplines to develop the whole
picture. You had always advocated that and were one of the very
first to do so.
Clark: Yes. Well, I certainly always advocated the need to look, to try
to determine what the environment or the context of archaeological
assemblages in sealed horizons was, because it s impossible to
tell--you know, if you can t tell whether somebody was living next
to an ice sheet or being scorched by the sun, you re not going to
be able to tell too much from the stone artifacts, or the fauna,
if it comes to that, I suppose, on what was going on. I would
omit the fauna at that stage. And that s why, and it was Louis
Leakey who first emphasized the need for geologists and
paleontologists to cooperate with archaeologists. Those three
together, that s why he brought people together in 1947 to the
first Pan-African Congress.
That was the first time that there was this meeting.
Normally, even in places like Algeria or Morocco, for example, the
archaeologists would work on their own, and the geologists would
work on their own, and I m afraid to some extent, that continues
today. The great importance of teamwork is, of course, that
everyone should work in the field with the specialist people most
concerned with what it was their speciality was investigating.
Troy: I was reading a piece last night, Desmond, that you had written,
that had been included in an anthology. It was essentially a
wonderfully stated appeal to some conference you were at to have
not only those three disciplines come together, but also
archaeologists and ethnographers.
187
Clark: That was something that I emphasized, and have always emphasized,
very, very strongly. Andy Smith, I think, mentioned that in the
course of that conversation we had, and I continue to think that
that is so important.
1
Troy: But your concern is that there is still a lack of communication in
certain quarters.
Clark: There s a tremendous amount of lack of communication, still goes
on. Geologists will go out, and then the archaeologists will go
out, or vice versa, and so on. They don t do it togetherwell,
they do in our operations, with Tim White in the Middle Awash, for
example, all go together, the geochronologists, environmentalists,
people working on isotopes, people working on pollens, people
working on organic hydrology, diatoms and the rest of it,
ostracods and so on. And fossil woods, specialists in fossil
woods.
For the first time, somebody is starting to work to collect
fossil wood samples from Oldovai Gorge. If you re dealing with
wood or roots of trees, of plants, you ve got a much better chance
of knowing what the immediate vegetation was like in any
particular area. And it certainly looks as if there was a good
deal more what are called gallery forests around at the time
Australopithecines were about.
Troy: At Oldovai?
Clark: Well, probably at Oldovai, yes, but certainly I think in South
Africa, because they have recently identified two woods down there
in association with the Beraba, which dated to about 2.4 million or
something like that. These were gallery forests, marginal gallery
forest species, two of them identified. Extremely interesting.
One of the species doesn t grow in South Africa any longer. It s
more tropical.
So that s the kind of evidence that is needed so badly, and
the collections need to be done in association with the other
specialists in the team. And discussed in the field. That s
something we ve always emphasized in our work.
Troy: In 1959 there was the discovery of Zinjanthropus, and there was a
flurry of activity, because the potassium argon dating method had
For further discussion, see the Dialogue with Desmond Clark and Andy
Smith.
188
Clark: Exactly.
Troy: Garniss Curtis and Jack Evernden, and Richard Hay?
Clark: That s right, yes. Richard Hay was involved in it later, I think,
a little later. No, that was excellent.
Troy: So you had a chance to meet these folks early on.
Clark: That was superb, it really was, yes. Garniss in particular we saw
a lot of. Jack was in and out, because he was doing something
with the military, I think, at that time. But they were great
people.
After I was here for one year, then I got a funding to go back
to Africa for quite a number of months. We worked, I think, back
in Livingstone, doing the analysis at Kalambo Falls. Yes. And so
it started, and for quite a long time in the summers, June and
July and so on, which was the cold season south of the Equator, we
would go back and work in the field, which was excellent, the
reverse from here.
Troy: Now, you were teaching two courses, and you d had some experience
certainly in Livingstone in teaching in the winter school
sessions. You were teaching Prehistory of Africa.
Clark: Well, not very much in Livingstone, of course. I had to really
develop teaching methods, curricula, and so on here. The teaching
in Livingstone had been more essentially local archaeology. But
there were some general descriptions of what it was when we were
talking about Paleolithic bifaces and that kind of thing. Where
you found them and so on, go out and have a look.
Tools, Foods, Hunting., Eating
Troy: You became quite famous, in your "Invention and Technology" class,
for demonstrating the making of stone tools.
Clark: Well, I think it was my very first lab, and for each lab following
on, until I retired, we would have a hands-on laboratory of
archaeology--! mean of the artifacts themselves that we were
talking about, of showing the various techniques and methods of
making stone tools, and experimental work that the students did
themselves. We had Francois Bordes here, and Don Crabtree, made
two interesting films with the University Information Film
Department here. And those films are still around.
189
Troy: Showing bloody hands!
Clark: Bloodied hands. From time to time, yes.
Troy: That makes the best archaeologist, that should be a part of the
training.
Clark: Yes, yes.
Troy: That, and as Louis Leakey said, sucking off the fibers from the
ends of stone blades.
Clark: That s right, exactly, yes.
Troy: Carnivorous behavior makes the best archaeologist.
Clark: Yes, yes. [laughing]
Troy: That s what I was going to ask you: what is the most exotic thing
you ve ever eaten? I suppose that s relative, but you must have
eaten some very interesting things.
Clark: Yes. I would have said that it was okapi. Not very many people,
unless they re Pygmies, I think have ever eaten okapi. It was
only discovered in the very beginning of the twentieth century, I
think.
Troy: Very small little antelope, is that the one that lives in the
forest?
Clark: Oh, no. This is biggish. It is a giraffe, of course, a short-
necked giraffe. Beautiful looking animal, with stripes down the
rump area, rufus-colored.
Troy: What was the meat like?
Clark: Well, this was a part of an okapi that had been killedshot with
a poisoned arrowby a Pygmy, I think perhaps a week or a few days
before. It had been cooked over a fire, it wasn t raw, it was
well-cooked, and I should say it was rather like overdone beef.
Troy: And this was where?
Clark: This was in the middle of the Ituri Forest, with Efe Pygmies, and
a few forest Negroes around.
Troy: When was that?
190
Clark: It was with Glynn Isaac and Barbara, his wife, with Jack Fisher
and his wife, who was one of our graduate students who was working
on the ethnography of the Efe, with the Harvard program which had
established a camp just outside the forest there. It was probably
about 1968, perhaps. No, wait a minute, what am I talking about?
It was just before Glynn died. Glynn died about 84 or 85, I
think, so it would have been somewhere in the early eighties,
earlier part of the 1980s.
This okapi had been killed by this Pygmy because the Pygmies
enjoy eating okapi, although it s one of the endangered species
and very, very carefully preserved. They go around and they note
the tree or the trees which have the fruits that the okapi like to
eat. When they find one of these, they willand possibly there
may be some evidence and droppings or so that okapi were coming to
eat the fallen fruits. He would climb up into the tree and be up
there, he would make a little platform that he would simply just
sit on. I think he was probably there for about a week or so.
The okapi turned up, and he shot a poison arrow into it.
Those poisoned arrows, they were splints of bamboo, about two,
two-and-a-half feet. The bows were relatively small. I ve got a
bow, and the other kinds of arrows here, but I don t have one of
the poison ones. The poison is put on carefully, of course, and
has to be carefully preserved so that children don t get at it.
Then they just follow the animal until it dies, or is near to
dyingit could take a while, I don t know, so far as the okapi is
concerned. But there it was. They were eating the meat, and so I
needless to say ate a chunk of it. Really quite interesting. But
that, I think, is the most exotic thing that I have ever eaten.
Troy: The idea, I guess, would be to stay away from the immediate meat
where the arrow entered.
Clark: Oh, yes. Usually so far as the use of poison in Zambia was
concerned, what you did was you cut away the small area around
where the arrow had gone in, but all the rest of the meat was
perfectly good. This is probably the same with the Efe Pygmy
poison.
Troy: And how about hippo, crocodile? Other things?
Clark: I ve eaten crocodile. I didn t care for it all that much.
Slightly fishy. If you go to Victoria Falls, they will serve you
crocodile. Rather a novelty, if you see what I mean.
Troy: Snake?
Clark: I don t think I ve ever eaten a snake. I don t think so.
191
Troy: And during the war, you probably would have just been eating the
army rations.
Clark: Oh, yes. Every so often, I would kill something for my elalos,
personal servant--! had two personal servants and for myself, to
eat. Usually it was an oryx or a duiker. One time I m afraid I
even shot a dikdik, which was rather sad.
Troy: And fruits and vegetables, I suppose.
Clark: There are lots and lots of African wild vegetables that are
absolutely the most important staple for producing vegetable
protein to prevent starvation in places where animal protein is
very, very rare, like the whole of the Congo Basin, where they
didn t eat each other. You see, the vegetable protein just kept
people above the starvation level.
Troy: I think the worry is that people are losing their ability to know
how to gather those wild vegetables.
Clark: Well, that s a major problem, and that may be one of the reasons
why there is so much starvation on the increase. Apart from the
fact, of course, that the population has increased tremendously.
But the women regularly go out and collect these wild vegetables,
cook them up, and serve them, you see, as the relish with the main
food, as it s called, which is a porridge, a stiff porridge, made
out of--could be millets, maize, possibly even casava, or in
places where bananas are so important, made out of banana.
Troy: So you can really do a tremendous variety on just maize, with all
these relishes, and the accompaniment of these other vegetables
and nuts and fruits and things .
Clark: Yes. There s a small amount, you see, put in a small dish and so
on. You take a little of that, take a pinch of the whatever it
is, the main food. Africans will come to tell you and say, "I
have no food," which sounds as if he s going to starve. What he
means is, he hasn t got any of his porridge. But where there s
plenty of animal protein, as there is, or was, in much of the more
open woodland and grass savannas, still lots and lots of it in the
grass savannas, of course, then it was animal protein that was of
prime importance.
192
Going Back, the Independence Movement, Revisiting the Exhibits
Troy: After you got here, Desmond, the independence movement had begun,
and you must have kept an eye on that .
Clark: Yes, and I went back there from time to time, you see. At the
time of the natural history wing, probably in the very early
seventies, the government invited me to go hack. I don t remember
exactly. I never seem to keep note of that kind of thing. And as
I say, my copies of the annual reports, which I had here, and
wrote indeed, they all went adrift, and I think Francis Musonda
absconded with them. I haven t seen them since. The only other
set that I know of are owned by Barrie Reynolds, who I went to see
in the early part of January. Barrie lives in Australia, went as
professor of ethnography, actually, at the James Cook University,
that place in northern Queensland- -Cairns.
Troy: The fact that the government after independence had remembered you
and invited you I think boded well for some continuity.
Clark: Yes. At that time, they also invited Hubert Wilson, who was David
Livingstone s grandson, but at the last moment, he unfortunately,
very unfortunately, couldn t come. I think he had some kind of
infection or something. So I never saw him again. I saw a lot of
him when we were with the museum.
And then at different times, I would go back. We went back, I
don t know, when on earth would it have been? Oh, 88, yes,
that s right. I remember I gave a lecture there [Livingstone],
and enormous numbers of people came, I think to sort of look at
me, something from the past, if you see what I mean. [laughs] So
many people, they couldn t get into the building, and all piled
up, faces poking through the windows. Great fun, that.
And on other occasions the very last time I was in the museum
was four years ago, after the Pan-African Congress in Harare.
There was an excursion to the Victoria Falls and Livingstone, and
Betty and I went on that, of course. And the museum looked very
nice indeed. Very well looked after. Vincent Katanekwa was the
energetic curator, I was very impressed. And Nicholas Katanekwa,
who had looked carefully after the various sites in the Zambezi
Valley, and indeed, we took the excursion along, he asked me to
explain all these sites, which indeed I did.
Troy: And you had put into place mechanisms to maintain the sites. That
had been a big concern of yours in the fifties, certainly.
193
Clark: Well, some we had to fence for some reason or another. Sometimes
we put exhibition cases into these places. Sometimes they were
broken into. But I think that Nicholas Katanekwa has looked after
the heritage side, the preservation of the sites, extremely well.
He also is responsible, fortunately now, for the Victoria Falls
Trust and the preservation of the area around the falls. That was
something that I was able to get underway, because when I was out
in 88, I was appalled to see how dreadful the Zambian side was
compared with the Zimbabwe side, which was very, very carefully
looked after. A lot of paper and tins and things strewn all over
the place. There was a little village for the power station, and
that was spreading stuff all over the place and so on, bringing in
exotic plants which were self -seeding themselves, et cetera.
I had the opportunity of having breakfast with the president
[of Zambia], who was Kenneth Kaunda at that time, and I remember
telling him about this. It was disgraceful. And he said to one
of his people, "Make a note of that, we must do something about
this," and indeed they did, they put it under the National
Monuments Commission, or whatever it s called now, and run by
Nicholas Katanekwa.
Troy: So the Victoria Falls Trust was concerned with the totality of the
falls and its reality, not just the archaeology near the falls.
Clark: Oh, no, it was mainly concerned with the conservation, the
preservation of the natural environment. It was also concerned
with access for tourists to look at various sites and so on,
provision of some tourist houses for people, little rondavels that
people could hire for a night, week, or something like that.
Troy: Well, it s fascinating. You must have been overwhelmed to see all
those people coming to hear you lecture. Somehow the word got out
that this was a major figure back in town.
Clark: I don t know whether they expected that I would probably have four
hands or four ears or something like that. It was great fun.
One thing that disappointed me--in 1961 a new man, a Czech who
later went to Belfast and taught social anthropology there, and
died about two years ago, I think it was, he got help from a
couple of Danes, may have been just one Dane who came over. By
that time, we had cases which showed the material culture, the
ethnography, of the main tribal groups in the country. There were
quite a lot of these, with languages that went with them. These
cases probably had much too much crammed into them, but there was
some very good stuff there, and of course, there were all these
labels. It did look rather as if somebody had a paper chase and
194
threw in too much, I suppose, but if you were interested, you
could get a lot of stuff out of those exhibits.
At any rate, by that time, somebody had decided, "We don t
want to emphasize the individual tribal differences between
peoples. We need to emphasize the fact that they re all Zambian."
So a lot of those cases were broken down. We had one very good
one, a Bushman one actually; excellent ones of the Bemba, the
Lozi, the Tonga, and so on.
Troy: What were they trying to get at with their exhibition revamping?
Clark: They were trying to capture the uniformity of--the need to
emphasize the fact that everybody was now Zambian.
Troy: What does that mean, Zambian? What does Zambia mean?
Clark: It just means the country of the Zambezi, I think that s all.
Troy: So they wanted to deemphasize the tribalness.
Clark: That s right, so they did away with all of those. They emphasized
hunting and fishing and cultivation, that kind of thing. Okay,
that was fair enough. We had cases like that as well. Divining,
witchcraft, that kind of thing.
But then the whole final part of the ethnographic gathering,
where we had a series of Nkishi masks and costumes and so on, had
been dismantled. There s a book in the anthro library written by
a couple of Germans not so long ago on the Nkishi from
Barotseland. I looked at it and didn t think it was frightfully
good, but it s not too bad.
195
VIII WORKING IN AFRICA AND BERKELEY
Work at Latamne, Syria. 1963-1965
Troy: Tell me about the Syrian approach to you. By this time, you d
become really internationally well known. I think your initial
work at Latamne was maybe in 1963, and then I think you did 64
and 65 there, at the site.
Clark: Yes, I think that s right. I was asked to go there by a Dutchman,
who was with WHO [World Health Organization] , I think. He was
interested in prehistory and had found a whole lot of sites, both
in Lebanon, I think, and in Syria, where he was based. He
discovered the Latamne site, which was about twenty miles north of
Kama, one of the more fundamentalist Islamic areas. We looked at
sites in Lebanon, various sites that he had found, and then up
into Syria, and then from Damascus I flew back down to Africa, I
suppose, starting Malawi work again, I think that s what it was.
Troy: The Malawi work and the field work in Syria were in overlapping
seasons .
Clark: I think that was it, yes.
Troy: Was it hot up there in the Syrian desert?
Clark: Oh, it was hottish, very hot, because we were there in the summer,
and one of the great things that kept us going were the
watermelons from the fields just by the site, and the farmer said,
"Yes, you can take them." So that kept us going. We had one tent
there, which we would get into when we weren t working, eat some
watermelon. We didn t have too much else.
The hotel we were living in in Kama had been a very nice
French hotel, of course, but now there was nobody there, no cook
or anything. It was used regularly by the local people who would
come in and play chess or halma or something like that, and drink
196
when they ought not to be drinking,
downhill.
[laughs] It had really gone
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Deep desert, right?
the watermelons.
Well, no, there was agriculture, obviously,
Oh, there s lots of agriculture around, yes. And of course, the
old irrigation system, the sort of Greco-Roman irrigation system,
which in some places still worked, but in others did not. Didn t
work around Latamne.
You found what may have been a shelter there?
No, it was an open site. It was on the edge of the Paleo Orontes.
The Orontes River was down below in the valley, and up on the
ridge was this site, a series of old sand banks. A particularly
interesting site. All the material was fresh, hadn t been moved
very much, if at all. There wasn t a great deal of bone, but
there were bivalve shells, mussel-like shells, you knowthe unia
is the name of the shell. These were still closed, so the
movement of water was minimal, absolutely minimal. But there they
were, which was more evidence that these people had just sat on
this particular sand bank.
With the artifacts, there were also blocks of stone which
were, I suppose, about like that [demonstrating], sort of square,
if you see what I mean. You could carry them, but it was
impossible that the stream could ever have moved anything like
that.
Were they shaped at all, Desmond?
No, they weren t shaped. But they were sort of sub-rectangular
and so ondepended how they came off the outcrop. This is
limestone, of course. And the outcrop was about, oh, fifty yards
away, something like that. So they had to have been brought in,
and they were in what appeared to be a rough- -we plotted it all,
of course a rough sort of U-shape. Then opposite that, there
were three stones together like that. They could have been put
there, of course, in order to hold a pole in position. The best
publication to look at is the article in Quaternaria. You see, we
gave it to the antiquities people in Syria who publish a journal.
But the number of mistakes in the text, spellings and all that
kind of thing, was so bad that we published it again in
Quaternaria. So that s the one to look at.
Troy: And this was Acheulean?
197
Clark: This was Acheulean. And it s not a very early Acheulean, but it s
not a late Acheulean. It s sort of somewhere in the middle. And,
I suppose, you could say that probably the age of that is probably
somewhere between about 5 and 800,000, something like that.
Troy: And right there on the surface.
Clark: No, it wasn t on the surface. Oh, good heavens, no. We had to
take out about, I don t know, probably six feet or something like
that. It depended slightly more at one end, slightly less at the
other.
Troy: And it was the overlay from river inundation?
Clark: Yes, it was. The river had risen, covered it, sealed it. The
reason that it was found was the material was eroding out. A
Dane, an archaeologist who was out there the year before I was
there, or two years before I was there, wrote this stuff up. Then
I looked at the site again with Van Liere--that s what the
Dutchman s name was, Van Liere--and he said, "Why don t you come
out and dig it?" I said, "Yes, okay, we will."
So we were there for one year when it was very hot, and the
next year we came out in the winter, and it was also very cold.
That s when I saw a wolf. Wolves come down from the Lebanon
mountains to the villages scrounging what it is that they can find
in the winter. Beautiful looking wolf. Lovely animal. Grayish,
silvery grey. Quite a big animal as well.
And that s where as well the local headman was building a new
house, new headquarters and so on, and there was a sort of
housewarming ceremony I remember that we had to go to. We had to
eat and drink various things. The mutton, of course, which wasn t
too bad, with a certain amount of rice, I think. But there was
also sour ewe s milk that we had to drink, which was very trying.
You held your breath and drank it.
Troy: And hoped that it stayed down.
Clark: Yes, it did stay down, actually, yes.
I do remember the student we had, and I was grateful to him.
A perpetual student, actually. Had been a student of Ted McCown s
when he came out. He was right through my time and everything.
Oh, God, what was his name [George Schkurkin] ? Latterly he worked
with Gregory, because he knew a whole lot of obscure languages,
from the Balkans and places like that. He was Russian, of Russian
descent. Anyway, he said to the chief after the second cup had
been poured, "No, in our part of the world, milk is reserved only
198
for children." So we didn t have to have more than a couple of
mugs full. Ugh! So that was good.
We saw various interesting things. For example, the building
or the excavation, I suppose, of houses into the rather soft
sediments in that area. They would excavate a room, possibly two
rooms. And of course, it was much cooler. They would build up
the front after they had excavated. And what they excavated would
form a little terrace outside the house. Those were very
interesting. That must be something that goes back quite a long
way.
The local villagers, when they weren t working the fields in
the winter, for example, and they didn t have too much to do, they
would go around with metal probes probing the earth to find Greco-
Roman tombs, or Bronze Age tombs. Some of them were indeed Bronze
Age. If they found them, then they d dig them up, they d sell
whatever there was, pots, ceramic pots, beads, and that kind of
thing. But they did have an arrangement, and some chap would come
from the Damascus Museum.
If there was something important, then they would first offer
it to the Damascus Museum. For example, the discovery of--I think
when I was there, there were about twenty-five silver drachma, I
suppose they would have been, with Athena stamped on them. They
were these thick, beautiful looking things, Greek.
Troy: It seems to me that was a good way of facing reality, which would
be that locals negotiated their finds with an official museum.
Clark: That was the best way, I think, under the circumstances, because
they could not control it. There s nothing like that that I know
of in Africa. Mali, for example, is quite dreadful, the amount of
looting that goes on. Nigeria as well, even worse, I think,
because there are more beautiful things in Nigeria. The way in
which--! don t think that anything has been stolen from the Efe
Museum with the Efe heads, both terracotta and also bronze, of
course. But I wouldn t be at all surprised in due course if we
find that those have gone somewhere. A lot of the Benin bronzes
that were in the Jos Museum were all stolen. Some of them may
have got back, I think.
Troy: Where was the Jos Museum?
Clark: The Jos Museum is in the central part of Nigeria,
Not in the extreme north, which is Muslim.
high country.
199
Nvasaland Field Work, and Livingstonia
Troy:
Clark:
You were invited to go to Malawi, to Nyasaland.
area. Tell me a little bit about that trip.
Another whole
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
I went over to meet a man called Rodney Wood, and also to see
again, because he d come to Livingstone once or twice, Bill
Rangely. He was district commissioner, later provincial
commissioner. Extremely nice man. Extremely knowledgeable. Fine
fly fisher as well. Son of a man who had been in the South Africa
Company police, something like that, in the early days, as a
native commissioner in the Luangwa Valley. He had a farm out
there, actually, a little isolated farm. Harry Rangely was the
father.
I went over to see them, and to see some archaeological sites.
There were also said to be rock paintings over there. I went up
to Hora Mountain, an isolated mountain in the northern province of
Nyasaland. One of these isolated granite inselbergs sticking up
out of the countryside. This was a famous one, because it was
where the Tumbuka, which was the local tribe, had taken refuge
from the invading Zulus. They all had different kinds of names,
and these were Ngoni, a group of Zulu people who had come up and
crossed the Zambezi with Zwangendaba at the time of a total
eclipse of the sun, so it was known precisely when they crossed
the Zambezi. Went over, got into Nyasaland. Zwangendaba I think
died there, and then his successor took the group up to somewhere
near the south shore of Lake Victoria, had a big quarrel there,
and whether some of them stayed there or not I don t know, but--
That s a pretty good hike.
Yes, indeed. The main group moved back and settled mostly in what
is now Zambia, on the east side of the Luangwa Valley.
But getting close to Nyasaland.
Yes, I think they moved into Nyasaland. They re now in Nyasaland
as well as Zambia, across that border. And they had raided, you
see, stole the cattle, stole the women, killed the men, and the
last lot of the Tumbuka, including the chief and his family, had
taken refuge up in this very steep-sided granite inselberg. The
Zulus, they didn t try to follow them.
What was the name of that again?
Hora Mountain. There was one area--I don t think there was any
one area where you could get up. Maybe the Zulu did try, but they
200
didn t get very far. They simply just sat down at the bottom and
waited for the Tumbuka to die, when their water ran out and their
food ran out, you see. But the son of the Tumbuka chief, with
someone else, maybe his mother, climbed down the almost
precipitous edge of the thing, which of course the Zulu did not
expect anybody to come down, so there was nobody there to stop
them, and they got off, went away, and it was from this small boy
that the Tumbuka chiefs are all descended now. Quite a famous
place.
We excavated one rock shelter there. There were several
others with paintings. Found a burial in this one. Nothing
frightfully exciting in there, I think. We excavated several
other sites, copied several rock paintings, visited Livingstonia
Mission, and Rodney Wood, with his collection of artifacts from
the Lake Malawi shore area.
Troy: Do you think that collection is still there?
Clark: It could be in the Livingstone Museum. I don t know. But I
certainly saw it. I think he must have sent it to us in
Livingstone, so therefore it should still be there, unless he
asked for it back and we sent it back.
Troy: I picture that as being quite a beautiful shoreline area. Is that
right?
Clark: Lake Malawi?
Troy: Yes, where Livingstonia is.
Clark: Yes, it is. Livingstonia is on an isolated plateau about 6,000
feet high, could be a little more, up 6,000 feet, overlooking Lake
Malawi, towards, but not at, the northern end, and it s on the
west side, of course. It is a precipitous descent from this down
to the lake shore, and it is on the Livingstonia plateau that the
Scottish Mission founded its headquarters. Can t remember the
name of the man now who did it. But they had an engineer with
them who built a road from the lake shore up to Livingstonia, up
which, of course, all the building material and all the equipment
and everything and so on had to travel. Came from the south end
of Lake Malawi all the way up to Cape Maclear, as it was called,
where it was offloaded and taken up to Livingstonia.
This was a one-lane road, beautifully graded, with twenty- two
hairpin bends in it. We found that with the Land Rovers, the
bends were fairly tight, and sometimes, on one or two of these
bends, you had to stop and reverse a bit in order to get round.
201
And of course, on the opposite edge, there was a whopping great
drop. Quite an impressive road.
Troy: Why was Nyasaland created in the first place?
Clark: Well, David Livingstone singled that area, all of that country,
out because he d seen quite a lot of it, and the people were
friendly people, very industrious, fine economy- -farming, of
course. About all there is. And he thought that this was the
finest place to start European colonization and enterprises,
converting the Africans, educating them, and so on. So he gave
his now famous address in Oxford, I think it was to the British
Association, and following that the Universities Mission to
Central Africa was founded by Oxford and Cambridge jointly, and
the first bishop and at least a couple of priests and so on were
sent out to start missions.
One of these, the bishop and the missionaries went to a place
called Cape Maclear at the southern end of Lake Malawi. Of
course, it was full of malaria and everything. Nobody knew too
much about it. Most of them died, I think. Eventually, the UMCA
moved its headquarters to a rather isolated island, not all that
far off the Portuguese coast of Lake Malawi, where I think it
still is, a huge great cathedral there. This was Episcopalian, of
course.
And then the Scottish Presbyterian mission came in as well and
started at the north end, founding Livingstonia. They had to deal
with slave traders who were still trading regularly across Lake
Malawi from the Congo.
I think that had been stopped, I m not certain, by the time
Livingstone died in 1873, and it was that year or the year after
that the slave market in Bagamoyo a little north of Dar Es Salaam,
was closed. The sultans and people presumably no longer collected
slaves, but that was not the case, I think. It continued on and
off for a few more years. It was within that area, now known as
Malawi, formerly Nyasaland, that small, sort of military plus
civil groups would be sent. This must have been before Cecil
Rhodes, and some kind of a civil administration was formed there.
From there it moved off into northeastern Rhodesia, which is the
northern part of the bulge of Zambia. That mostly was a peaceful
occupation. Every so often, there would be a chief that would not
capitulate or acknowledge the colonial presence.
Troy: You mentioned the other day the Kuruman mission. Where is that?
Clark: Kuruman is in the southern Kalahari. It s in, I think, still the
northern part of the Cape Province.
202
Troy: Right. But it may be in that kind of complex Bechuanaland you
mentioned?
Clark: Somewhere up there. *
Troy: Now, about this time, before you left for Berkeley, you were
recommended for the QBE, Officer of the British Empire. Tell me a
little bit about that.
Clark: Well, that was because of the building up of the museum, the
forming of the National Monuments Commission. I was the secretary
of that right through until I left. Then I took over the Victoria
Falls Trust, which had the game park and various things. Then we
built all these various things up. We, with Vernon Brelsford, who
was the editor of the Northern Rhodesian Journal , which was filled
with lots of historical information and other interesting
articles.
Troy: Did you go to England to get the award?
Clark: No, it was presented to me by the governor in Northern Rhodesia.
And then shortly before I left, I was given the CBE, which is one
step up.
Troy: What s the CBE?
Clark: Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
Troy: So the first was the Officer of the British Empire, and then you
became the Commander.
Clark: And then the top one the KBE, which is a Knight.
Troy: That would have been a trip to England.
Clark: I think that would have been a trip to England, yes. [laughter]
Troy: Well, there s still time.
Clark: No, not as an American. It might well have been, if I hadn t
become an American citizen. Yes, but there it is.
Troy: Did you ever meet Albert Schweitzer?
Clark: No. I was never in that area [Lambarene] either.
203
Chiwondo Beds. Malawi. 1963
Troy: Tell me about the work at the Chiwondo Beds in Malawi. That was,
I think, with Vance Haynes and Glen Cole.
Clark: That s right, yes.
Troy: You took some graduate students over there, didn t you? Was that
the first time you had graduate students with you in Africa?
Clark: Oh, no. Kalambo, I suppose, was probably the first, and there we
had Maxine Kleindienst who was a postgraduate student, I think, in
1959. I can t remember so far as 1956 was concerned. But 59,
David Phillipson was there, my son was there. David was
Cambridge, my son was Durham. Francis Van Noten was there, and he
was from Ghent, Belgium.
Troy: Paleoarchaeologist?
Clark: He was doing Later Stone Age, actually. Yes. And there were
others, oh yes. There was Barbara Anthony. She was a
granddaughter of Susan B. Anthony.
Troy: Where was she studying?
Clark: Harvard. There was Sue Bucklin, and I m not quite certain where
she was from. She shortly afterwards married an Italian
geologist, and I ve lost touch. There was a man called Bick, I
think it was. They re all mentioned in the introduction to
Kalambo volume 3 .
Troy: How did you gather all of those people to go out there?
Clark: I suppose I wrote and said, "Who wants to come?" and so on. Or
they wrote to me and said, "Is there room for me?" See what I
mean? And indeed, there was.
Also, there were volunteers, of course, from the Rhodesias.
But the Malawi work, we started in 1963, I think it was, and
Maxine Kleindienst and I, and possibly David Phillipson, I m not
certain, took a very quick visit over to the Karonga area in the
northwestern part of Lake Malawi and northern part of Malawi
itself, to look at the Chiwondo Beds, which were fine grain
sediments which had fauna with them. So far as we knew, there
were no stone artifacts associated, and the work there had been
done by Frank Dixey, who was the geologist appointed, I think
probably in 1919, as perhaps the first geologist in Nyasaland, as
it then was.
204
Dixey spent, oh, about a year, I think, may have been one
season, may have been two seasons, mapping the whole of that area
of the Chiwondo and Chitimwe Beds. There was the Sungwa,
Chiwondo, and Chitimwe Beds that he identified, besides the
dinosaur beds as well, in a series of volcanic troughs back from
the lake, going west back from the lake. He surveyed the whole of
that area with a straightforward, ordinary dumpy level, and chains
and so on. It wasn t a theodolite, but it was the way in which
you measured height. And horizontal distance and so on. And it s
remarkably accurate.
When we got out there, we may have known that he was going to
be there already. We met I think it was Frank Stevens, who was
from the U.S., or the international, or colonial, or whatever it
was called, Geological Service. He came out with air photographs
that they had taken. He produced a map from these. But there was
very, very little difference between that map and what Frank Dixey
had done in the 1920s, which was pretty remarkable. Stevens maps
were the basis of the work that we did there, and while there,
we d checked out certain areas.
It appeared as if artifacts, paleolithic artifacts, were
indeed associated with the Chiwondo Beds, so we put in a proposal,
I and Sterton, who was head of paleontology here at UC Berkeley,
we put in a proposal to work there for two years. And then almost
immediately, Sterton died, unfortunately, so we had to try and
find somebody else to do the paleontology. We got one of his
graduate students to do that.
We had two years out there, two sort of full seasons, which I
suppose were about two months altogether. The whole thing would
be two and a half months. And Vance Haynes was our geologist, and
John Mawby was the paleontolgist, a graduate student of Sterton 1
s.
Troy: Glen Cole?
Clark: Glen Cole was one of Clark Howell s students. He must have been
postgraduate at that time. And then we had Laurel Phillipson, Ed
Lofgren s daughter, Laurel Lofgren she then was, now married to
David Phillipson. And Beatrice Sandilowski from Namibia. We keep
on corresponding.
Troy: Had she studied here with you?
Clark: Yes, indeed. She got her degree here. Who else did we have?
John Yellen, and it was his introduction to working in Africa.
Troy: Achille Gautier?
205
Clark: Gautier did not come out. We sent him the shells, and he worked
on the shells from the Chiwondo Beds, and published that some time
later. And I think there were a couple of other students. Can t
remember off hand.
Oh, yes, there was Van Eggers. He was my student. He never
finished, unfortunately. He had too much money, I think was the
trouble. Apparently an old Dutch name, I think, from the East.
And then there was Sonia Rigera, as well, from Berkeley. She s
now at City University of New York, I think that s it, or Queens,
one or the other. Yes. We had two very good years there.
Mounting the Expedition. Staffing the Expedition, and Time Off
Troy: Just mounting that kind of an expedition with all those people,
most of whom hadn t been to Africa, was a colossal task.
Clark: Well, yes. We bought a two-ton truck, with an open back, and we
had two Land Rovers. That s how we did it.
Troy: Did you have some help on that end of the trip, from Frank Dixey
and others?
Clark: No, Frank by that time was back in England. From Nyasaland, he
went to Northern Rhodesia to start the Geological Survey there.
Zambia, that is. And then he went back. He was head of the
Colonial Geological Survey somewhere in Surrey, I think it was.
He was knighted at the end.
Troy: But you couldn t just show up with all these people and Land
Rovers and a big truck, you had to have some help on that end, is
that right?
Clark: Well, we corresponded, of course, with people out there. We
corresponded with G. D. Hayes, who was a farmer, planted tung oil.
Troy: What is tung oil?
Clark: Tung oil is what is used to mix with paint, I think, in connection
with producing good oil paint. It s a tree. And we corresponded
with, I suppose, Bill Rangely, who may have been there, or
previously, but he died, he had a heart attack, which was very sad
indeed. Yes, we corresponded with people, and got a permit, and
that kind of thing.
206
Troy:
Clark:
Was most of it near Hayes s farm?
was the farmer.
You mentioned this fellow who
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
No, no, his farm was south of Blantyre. Blantyre was really I
suppose you d say the working capital, the commercial capital. It
was where the railway ended, the Trans-Zambezi Railway, which
connected up and went down to Beira in Portuguese East [Africa]--
Mozambique that is now. We drove all our vehicles back through
that country, collected them, I think, in Bulawayo, plus
equipment, which we had to go and get, of course.
All our survey equipment and everything we bought down there,
easiest place and best place to get it as well. And we drove them
on through and up to Lusaka, and then due east across the Luangwa
Valley to Lilongwe, which is now the capital of Malawi. And then
down to Blantyre, where we made ourselves known and so on. Got a
few more supplies and everything.
And then we drove up the road going due north to Karonga.
Made ourselves known to the district commissioner there,
established ourselves in a camp on the escarpment not far from a
Catholic mission school called Chaminade. We had excellent
relationships with the people who were teaching there, and
regularly keep in touch with the man who was the priest there. I
had a long letter from him this last Christmas, for example. How
things go.
It was all tents, of course, we lived in. Got our water from
springs, or from the central watering place in Blantyre. Our
water we kept in one of these water truckswell, not trucks, a
trailer, which of course went behind one of the Land Rovers.
You must have had to calculate where you would get petrol and all
of that.
Yes, indeed. We could be fairly certain that we would find petrol
in most places, most of the main centers, and we could get it in
Karonga as well. But you had to check. There weren t the
shortages that there later were, which were major problems. Yes,
and much of that, of course, Betty organized.
No major disasters?
No. We used to go off for a weekend, when people needed a little
bit of a restmaybe once in the course of a seasongo up to
Livingstonia and up to the Nyika Plateau for a long weekend.
That s the northern part of the country, north of Livingstonia,
about 8,000 feet, I suppose, something like that. Grassland, and
little clumps of forest. Beautiful country, masses of game.
207
Lovely. Wildf lowers and so on. It s still a national park, of
course. I should think well looked after. Malawi has not, as far
as I know, gone the way that Zambia and Tanzania have gone, when
it comes to that kind of thing, although Tanzania is much better
now than it was .
Yes, it was a successful season. The logistics needed a bit
of working out and so on. And as I say, Betty was a major
organizer of commissariat, doing the accounts, all that kind of
thing. Totally invaluable.
The one problem that we had was that the truck had a governor
on it. I think that was after Nyasaland became independent,
became Malawi. Hastings Bander, who was the president, had said
trucks must only travel at a certain speed, so every truck had
automatically a governor put on it, which meant that you couldn t
rev it up. We did have real worries as to whether we were going
to get the truck with all the loaded equipment and everything back
out of the rift, and it just got out, I m glad to say. It just
got out.
At any rate, that was okay. That was the main concern, I
think. Other concerns were, of course, that there was a rather
scruffy dirt road all the way along the lake shore and parallel to
the escarpment, which went up like that. So we would travel down
with the maps that we had, knowing that there would be Chiwondo
sediments in there, for example, stop the car, and then a small
group of us would walk in and walk over the top of this ridge of
basically granites and schists and so on, early, until you got
into the next trough, where you got the fine grain sediments,
Chiwondo overlying dinosaur beds. Then walk over the surface, see
what you could find.
That was often tough going, because you had to walk on a
compass bearing, you see, and then when you came back, you weren t
quite certain whether you would hit the road precisely where you d
left the vehicles. Are the vehicles up that way, or are they down
that way? You had to toss up, more or less. I don t think we
made a mistake, actually.
Troy: Pretty dry country right there? Not a lot of vegetation in that
area, right?
Clark: Quite a bit of vegetation, yes. Kind of brachystegia, stunted
brachystegia woodland, terminalia, not much of it, on the scruffy
sort of stuff. And then over the exposures, very little in the
way of vegetation at all.
208
Troy: How far were you from the lake, as you were doing that north-south
survey?
Clark: It varied. Probably not much more than a mile on the average, I
think. Yes, about that. And on Sundays, we used to go down to
one place where you could bathe in the lake, which was fun. There
were crocodiles, of course, in the lake, but they didn t worry us.
Plenty of fish there, and that s what the crocodiles basically
lived on, until they got too big, and then they lived on baboons
and goats and the occasional human and so on.
Troy: When they became too big, they were too big to be able to fish
effectively, is that the idea?
Clark: They needed more solid food, yes. That s when, of course, they
became man-eaters. But it was very good. Brian Fagan came out.
Brian must have been there, that s right.
Troy: Oh, Brian was in Livingstone still.
Clark: Yes, that s right, he was. He was the keeper of prehistory there.
Troy: And Gervas Clay was there too, wasn t he?
Clark: Yes. At that time, Gervas was a trustee of the museum, and he was
also the provincial commissioner of the Southern Province, based
in Livingstone.
Troy: Did people have to be inoculated prior to going out?
Clark: We had to have inoculation against typhoid. What else? I don t
think yellow fever. But we did have yellow fever in various
places that we went to. The main thing, of course, was to really
check that people weren t, say, bathing in water which was
contaminated with schistosomiasis, that kind of thing. That they
wore shoes on their feet and so on, that they didn t get chiggers
or hookworms, that they had their heads covered for the sun.
Occasionally somebody would get a bit of dysentery. But that was
all right, always cleared it up with- -I can t remember what we
used at that time.
That was a very pleasant camping area. Sonia Cole was with us
the second season, and she found one of the important sites where
we had fauna. Sonia was trained as a geologist, in London, I
think it was. She died some time in the 1980s.
Our work was published in Quaternaria, quite a long report
written by Vance Haynes, Mawby, and myself, I think that was it.
209
Lake Rukwa and the Ufipa Highland
Clark: During that time, we went up to the southern part of Tanzania, in
the Nyakyusa country, and saw the long houses. They built long
houses rather like those that you find in New Guinea as well,
where everything was and very like the Neolithic long houses, the
early Neolithic Bancaramic of Europe. People lived in one part,
the animals were in another, storage was another, and so on, et
cetera. Very interesting, of course, but I think that lifestyle
has probably all died out now.
Troy: Now, this would be up and out of the rift, across the border into
Tanzania?
Clark: What we did was, we didn t so much go north, other than in the
Nyakyusa country, which was overlooking the rift. Again fine
country, banana country. But we went up the Songwe River. There
were two Songwe Rivers, actually. One running into Lake Malawi,
and the other one running the other way from the watershed into
Lake Rukwa, which is a bit trying.
What we wanted to try to find were volcanic sediments that had
come out of Rungwe Mountain. Rungwe was a volcano in southern
Tanzania. It had erupted in 1833 or something like that, I think
it was, and we thought that there must be earlier sediments there
which we could use for dating, from volcanic tuffs and perhaps
lavas, and to some extent, we did find this. We didn t find the
valuable date range that we really needed.
Troy: That Garniss Curtis would have needed for radiocarbon dating in
the geochronology.
Clark: That s right, and we would have sent them back to the Geochron
Lab. That s where they would have been, in its earlier days. But
we went right up through to Mbeya, which was the capital of the
Southern Province of Tanzania at that time, and worked down the
Northern Songwe to Lake Rukwa. We got down to Lake Rukwa. We
found fine sediments down there, but very little time to work. We
worked on the sediments and dated them, and these were published
in our volume in Quaternaria.
We did also find deepish sediments which appeared to be Middle
Pleistocene down in Lake Rukwa, because over the top, there was a
shell bed. These must have been about, oh, I should think quite
thirty feet high, these sediments. Nothing of interest in any
other layer other than the shell bed at the top, which appeared to
have rolled Middle Stone Age in it. We did get a date from the
shells. I forget what the date was. That also is published.
210
Troy: What was Lake Rukwa like? It s not as high as some of these other
lakes we re talking about in the rift, right?
Clark: I m not certain. Certainly both Lake Tanganyika and Lake Malawi
are much deeper lakes than Rukwa. Insofar as one knows --nobody
has actually penetrated the bottom sediments. But what I mean by
deeper in that there s water all the way down. Tanganyika is one
of the deepest lakes in the world.
Troy: Five, six thousand feet, I think, some places there.
Clark: I think it s being deepened. And what is happening, of course,
this is where the next split is going to be, Madagascar being the
remains of the much earlier one, in the Miocene. Which is really
very interesting.
So Lake Rukwa is a shallow lake, saline for the most part, but
not entirely. The records have shown that salinity varies
throughout. I was looking at a report on the coring of Lake
Rukwa, done sometime in the 1980s by Duke University people.
Troy: Fishing out there?
Clark: Fish, yes, and lots of game down there as well. And this was the
nuclear center for the red locust, the locusts that brought havoc
in the farming areas of Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa as well.
Troy: There was an article in the museum newsletter in 1988 on locusts.
Clark: I should think that there was probably very little control. This
was an international effortthe desert locust were being
controlled up in the southern Sahara or somewhere in that region,
and this was the red locust. The international team had their
headquarters in Abercorn, not far from Kalambo Falls, twenty- two
miles. Desmond Vesey-Fitzgerald was the man who was the main
scientist there. They were an Irish family. His brother is well
known as well. He left there when the red locust were more or
less brought under control with annual spraying and such.
But it was an enormous force of people there, Europeans and
Africans, doing all sorts of stuff down in the Rukwa. Building
roads, actually, as well, apart from everything else, so that they
could get to these various places to spray, I suppose.
Troy: Any town of any significance on Rukwa?
Clark: No town whatever on it. It s remote. Surrounded by steep
escarpments, yes.
211
I remember the last time I was down there, I flew down in a
single engine plane piloted by a man called Cross-Upcott. Nice
man, very nice man, who later got an anthropology degree in Cape
Town. But we went down, landed on the grass around there, close
to a herd of buffalo. Amazing: the buffalo, elephant, and masses
of antelopes of one kind or another all over the place. Then we
[the plane] had to climb out, and in order to get up and over the
Ufipa, the top of the escarpment into the Ufipa Highlands--!
really remember wondering whether we were going to be able to get
up. Fortunately, we did, but it was quite a thing.
Troy: Where did you fly in from? Abercorn?
Clark: Abercorn, yes. Abercorn was to the south of the Ufipa Highlands.
And the Ufipa Highlands were grassland.
Interesting, the people there were fine iron workers at one
time, of course, building these large kilns with these tuyeres,
various pipes, probably about three or four little holes like that
in each one. But once they got it going, then it would burn
itself out. What they did was they constructed the kiln, which
would be about as high as that, with clay, and they put in a layer
of wood, and a layer of greenish twigs and things, a layer of iron
ore, which was basically laterite from around the edges of swampy
areas and so on. Alternatively way up to the top.
Troy: What would have happened to all of those people now?
Clark: They re still around as farmers. I suppose there s been a lot of
movement going on. There was at one time in the- -what was it
called? There was a raised, elevated area between the Tanganyika
rift and the Rukwa rift which was the Mbande Horst. A horst is
one of these upblocks that s being shoved up.
And this was where there were coffee plantations. A number of
Europeans were growing coffee there, so that would have taken a
certain amount of the labor as well. I suppose they were called
Ufipa. There s good record of these people in German volumes.
Very hard to find, extremely hard. I managed to get hold of one
of these, and we republished some one or two of the photographs of
the iron workers. This was in volume 2 of Kalambo Falls, because
it was very relevant to what we had in the Kalambo Basin. Some of
these large furnaces, worked out, of course. Nobody was doing it
at that time. Although, of course, you still had blacksmiths
around.
212
Thoughts on Training African Students
Troy: You were noted for bringing African nationals over to the program.
Were there already some Africans here at Berkeley in 61 when you
came, or was that something that you began to do in the sixties?
Clark: There was one here from Kenya, nice man. Can t remember his name.
He was a graduate student. Oh, so far as the faculty was
concerned, in regard to Africa, of course, Glynn Isaac, who we
were fortunately able to get in about 1967 or 68, something like
that.
Troy: But over the years, then, there were African nationals who came,
got through the doctoral program and so on?
Clark: There was one here, and I m afraid he wasn t all that good. We
decided that we would give him a terminal M.A. , but we remained
good friends for a long time. He taught for a very long time at
Kenyata University--! think it s just outside or in the suburbs of
Nairobihe s retired now.
But then we brought others, and of course, we were able to
obtain some funding for them through the Leakey Foundation, which
had a Baldwin Fellowship program for Africans, just developed
after I got here, I think. That was extremely valuable.
Troy: Some of these folks didn t fare that well, but others went on to
become pretty prominent?
Clark: Some have done extremely well. Some fell by the wayside. And
some continue for some reason or other low key, back in their
country. When I say some fell by the wayside, I mean more often
than not, they did not go back to their own country but they
decided to stay over here, or maybe somewhere in Europe, something
like that, and follow their own inclination. On the whole, it
works very well. But it is much better to, as we try to do now,
to train Africans in Africa, rather than to bring them over here.
Certainly, where they come into contact with a totally different
culture, the emotional upset is very considerable.
So now, Kenyans are being trained in South Africa, University
of Cape Town, Witwatersrand University, and they re working, of
course, in an Africa media, they re working with African material,
African sites, and so on. And they re with people of their own
kind, and it works much better.
213
Museum Infrastructure and Wankie Bricks
Troy: Of course, I think that the sad thing is that some of the neglect
we see in Livingstone is the result of not the greatest education,
of course, and then also not enough people being well trained.
Clark: Well, I don t know where Vincent Katanekwa was trained, but I do
know that Nicholas Katanekwa was trained in England by David
Phillipson and his people there. I think it was at Cambridge.
Francis Musonda was my student in Berkeley, right through, four
years or so, I think. He has his Ph.D. We ve continued to keep
in touch. I see him rarely, of course. I don t go to too many
conferences. He gets the opportunity of going because UNESCO,
whatever it is, sends out invitations to people from African
countries to go and attend, so he goes and attends. That broadens
the field quite a bit for him.
But it s a real problem, you see. We ran the museum with
about four Europeans and about, it may have been eight Africans.
Now there must be with the staff in the natural history wing,
people doing ornithology and mammals and all that kind of thing, I
suppose they must have a staff of probably quite fifteen so-called
trained people, and then the African staff could be as much as
about thirty or more, if you include carpenters and people like
that.
Troy: So are there some Europeans and Americans at the museum now?
Clark: No, not at all any longer. There was Con [Conrad] Benson, who is
a superb African ornithologist. He started off as a district
officer in Malawi. I think that s when I first met him, 1950 it
would have been. And then after they started the natural history
side of the museumyou see, when I was there, we didn t have
funds to spread it so thinly. We concentrated our funds on the
human side of the thing, which meant the prehistory and the
history and ethnography and so on. Then later on, it was possible
to build a natural history wing. They very kindly asked me to lay
the foundation stone for that, which indeed I did. It s the only
foundation stone that I ve ever laid, and it was certainly the
only one I ever shall lay. [laughter]
Troy: Most of your life you ve been engaged in breaking up stones,
breaking stones, and creating things from stones, versus laying
stones.
Clark: Yes, that s right. Well, creating things from stones or bricks
generally. That was another thing: there was a whole lot that one
had to do outside the normal run of business, so to speak, with
214
Troy:
Clark:
contractors. Okay, it sounds great: you get your contractor and
contractors and so on to build the museum, and that s great.
Then, of course, there comes the problem that in Livingstone, it s
impossible to make a decent brick. There is so much sand and so
little clay that the bricks are really pretty friable. Somewhere
I have a photograph of a pile of bricks which were rained on. You
could see how they dripped down the sides of the pile.
So the answer was, particularly for all the bricks above the
concrete foundations and so on, up to the floor level, and the
whole of the tower, to build with bricks from Wankie, which was
the coal mining area about eighty-odd miles south of Livingstone,
in Southern Rhodesia, as it then was, Zimbabwe now. Those were
magnificent bricks. But to get the bricks--many people wanted
bricks from Wankie, and it wasn t easy to get them. So you had to
operate on all of that. And so it went on, one after the other.
Oh, I imagine. We glossed over that, the fact that you built the
new museum, and then we kind of passed into other things. But
just the sheer energy expended in finding bricks and getting the
contractors to do what they were supposed to do. Endless numbers
of administrative things.
Those kind of things, yes. But it was very enjoyable, and we
worked on it, with my wife, who did a lot of all this secretarial
work. She and Carol Suckling was the assistant secretary. She s
still alive, lives in Kent, northern Kent now.
Surrey, I m not certain.
Or it could be
Fallout of People s Park EventsProtecting the Collections
Troy: Just a question here, Desmond. I know that you and others camped
out at Piedmont [Avenue] to protect the collections there from the
events of People s Park. Of course, that was not from looters,
necessarily, but from the possibility of some of the unrest
overflowing into that building.
Clark: Yes, in the next-door building was where Demography was, and a man
there who was outspoken against so much that was going on, the
students not going to classes and all that kind of nonsense over
the Vietnam War--can t remember his name now.
Troy: And he was a professor?
Clark: He was a faculty member, professor, yes.
215
Troy: So he was supporting the People s Park movement?
Clark: No, he was anti-all of that. They set fire to his trash can,
which was adjacent to the building, which was covered by cedar
shingles--! think that had started to catch fire when somebody
found it.
That was right next door to us, and we had no idea what was
next, so to protect what we had in our lab, which was in the
basement next door, and what was in our offices, the whole
building, 2251 Piedmont Avenue, we took turns, Glynn Isaac, Rob
Rodin, and myself, sleeping in the lab for about a week, until
things had died down a bit and we found it was okay. We of course
moved out some essential stuff back to our houses. Because we had
no other labs at that time.
It was shortly after that, I think, Glynn Isaac was able to
move his office to have lab space down in the next-door building.
I can t remember what that was called. That s adjacent on the
other side from where Demography was. He was in the basement of
that building.
I remember the demand that we had year after year for proper
lab space, and eventually we had a meeting with Rod Park, who was
the vice chancellor at that time, and one or two other people, in
Glynn s office, I remember, in the basement. And I do remember
saying--! think I told you this before that Mussolini, when he
was given a rather nasty continuous part of southern Somalia,
which had previously been in Kenya, said, "I am not a collector of
deserts." So I said, "We are not a collector of basements. We d
like to have a decent lab." Instead of which, we got another
basement! It had been the rifle range of the ROTC, or may not
even have been the ROTC, may have been just a rifle range where
people went. And that s where the labs are now.
The Omo. and Clark Howell
Troy: When did you folks begin to think about Omo? When did that begin?
Clark: I suppose it was Louis Leakey wanting to go up there, following
the more regular reports from the district commissioner somewhere
up there about fossil bones lying around, and also, of course,
[Camille] Arambourg had been there in the 1930s, working there. I
can t remember what the expedition was that he was with.
216
It was first discovered by the Bourg de Bozas expedition,
which was in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and they
reported fossil bones and so on there. That s what that was. You
can check it all out without too much trouble. Bones from there.
And Arambourg was keen to go back. Leakey wanted him to come.
Leakey wanted to go up therethat s Louis Leakey. And around
about that time as well, Clark Howell came into it. So that group
was formed, includingwhether it was the first season or not, I
don t knowbut certainly Richard Leakey was in it also, and
Richard then decided that he wanted to split: off and went to look
at the east side of Lake Rudolph--or Lake Turkana, whatever you
like to call it, Lake Rudolph at that time- -whereas the main group
of the Omo was on the west side.
Troy: So you folks here at Berkeley obviously wanted to get involved.
You had your connections, and things began to move.
Clark: Yes, well, Clark had it well organized, and he had his own
students out there with various people. Jean de Heinzelein did a
lot of the geology there. Frank Brown did a lot of dating, or
rather, the collection of the samples for dating. That is an
extremely well-dated long sequence, invaluable. But I was never
involved in the Omo. That was essentially Clark.
217
IX RESEARCH AND EVENTS OF THE SEVENTIES
Meeting Haile Selassie
Troy: Did you ever meet Haile Selassie?
Clark: Yes, I did indeed. I was introduced to him in 1971 in a party, I
suppose you would call it, an audience, perhaps, or something.
Troy: Reception of some sort.
Clark: Reception, that s right, that he had given for the delegates to
the Pan-African Congress. It was extremely interesting. We were
invited to the palacethis was the new palace, actually, after
the last revolt. There was a revolt, you know, the old palace was
besieged and so on. Haile Selassie would never go back to it
again, so he built a new palace. Fine place.
We went in, largish sort of foyer. We were all put into a
relatively small waiting room. Then, after about a quarter of an
hour, the doors of the big reception room were opened, and we all
trooped in. This was a fine audience hall, I suppose you would
call it, with pillars on either side going down. There were
various people with their trays of little things to eat, and also
small glasses, sherry glasses, of tej .
Tej is a drink, it s a
honey drink. This is the only tej that I have ever seen that was
absolutely clear and sparkling. Magnificent tej.
Troy: Alcoholic?
Clark: Alcoholic, yes. You could drink quite a lot of it and it didn t
seem to worry you at all, but then it later hit you rather
suddenly.
At any rate, we all stood around in groups. Then Haile
Selassie appeared. At that time, I think his wife had died. He
was by himself, and at the end of the hall, on a slightly raised
218
dais, there were two thrones. He was sitting in one, and from
time to time, some of us were led up to talk to him. It reminded
me very much of a sort of medieval audience, except in a medieval
one, you would have to have paid whoever the official was in order
to get as far as that. But that was not the case here.
Troy: But he didn t get off of his throne?
Clark: No, he didn t get off the throne. He was pretty elderly, and he
sat there. I was introduced to him. He had a very small dog,
probably a Pekinese or something like that that, he was fondling.
He was very, very attached to it. And he said, "Have you been
here before?" and so on, and I told him about the war, and he said
that was interesting, but had I been with Sanford, and I said no,
I hadn t been with Sanford, I d come in the other way. Et cetera.
And we chatted for a little. Then one went, and somebody else
came on.
Troy: What was your sense of him? A soft-spoken fellow?
Clark: Yes, very soft-spoken.
Troy: And quite a small fellow, as I remember?
Clark: And quite small, yes. He was elderly then, you see. I don t know
how old he was when he died. Was he in his seventies or even
eighties?
Troy: And he had quite a nice royal outfit on, I suppose?
Clark: He had--yes, he had the kind of robes and so on that Ethiopian men
wore, which was rather like a toga. And I think probably
jodhpurs, what they later used to cover their legs, instead of the
kind of rather baggy things that were there before.
Troy: Was he interested in what you folks were doing in the seventies?
Clark: Not all that much, I don t think, no.
Troy: He was aware of this conference.
Clark: He was, yes, but he was too old, you know. I think that s
probably what it was. And he probably by that time had quite a
lot of things on his mind. But it was very interesting, having
the opportunity of meeting him and talking to him. He certainly
did a remarkable amount for Ethiopia. And of course, he was let
down extremely badly by Britain and France over the war with
Italy. The terrible Hoare-Laval pact, where they both said, "We
won t do anything if the Italians attack."
219
Troy: Where was he during the war, Desmond?
Clark: He was in Britain, and he lived in Bath. I m not certain where
his sons went. They didn t go to Monkton Combe, but Ras Kassa s
son went to Monkton Combe, where I was.
Troy: And Ras Kassas was an Ethiopian?
Clark: Ras Kassa was one of the most important rases or whatever you like
to call them, chieftains--that s not a good wordwho really
controlled what went on in much of the Tigre, and later, of
course, after he died, the one who d been at Monkton succeeded
him. He became the chairman of the advisory committee, of Haile
Selassie s council.
Troy: Did you overlap with him at Monkton Combe?
Clark: No. My brother did, I think. One year. I just missed him. I
tried to see him when I was back in 1971, but it was impossible,
not speaking Ethiopian, Amharic. I managed to get through, I
think, to the house in Addis, or just outside Addis, but that was
that. He, poor man, suffered badly from arthritis, apparently, in
later years, was in a wheelchair, and after the Derg took over the
job, he was one of the people that was wheeled out and shot by
Mengistu or one of the earlier ones, I can t remember.
Troy: Haile Selassie in many ways was Ethiopia s greatest leader.
Clark: Yes, he skillfully managed to steer Ethiopia as an independent
country right through until the Italians took over forwas it as
much as five years? Probably was. And then afterwards, when it
was overthrown, the empire the kingdom, whatever you like to call
it was overthrown by the Communists.
Troy: Is access a little bit better now for Tim White and his group?
And others who want to get in?
Clark: Yes, it s easier. It s not all that easy, however. In Haile
Selassie s day, there was a fine scholar, historian, who was the
minister. There was no problem about having permits to do this or
that and the other. Under the Derg, to a great extent, that
continued as well. But now corruption has set in, and I think you
more or less have to pay. That s what happened the other day when
some Austrians obviously paid a fairly large sum, I think, to try,
and indeed succeeded, in getting a permit to an area in which one
of Tim s students had been working for the last two years, which
was not so good.
220
Troy: How is that worked out ethically? I would think with the
Austrians, there would be good communication.
Clark: It cannot be worked out ethically.
Troy: They could go in and work his sites.
Clark: That s what they seem to have done, yes. Whether they re back
there, I don t know. I doubt they re back there again.
Sudan
Troy: When the Omo was going on, what were you doing? You went to Adrar
Bous, and you were working at Shabona in the central Sudan?
Clark: That s right, we were doing a lot of that workthe transition
between hunting-gathering and domestication. They were, I suppose
you might say, partially sedentary hunter-gatherers. They would
regularly come back to the main area on the Nile, and then at
other times, they moved out away in the flood plain.
Troy: Now, you hadn t been up there before, had you?
Clark: No, I hadn t been there, but Martin Williams, the geologist, had
been there, and that s how we got interested in going to Jebel et
Tomat. Jebel et Toraat, we thought, might well be something that
was similar to early Khartoum, which was the initial discovery by
Tony Arkell, within Khartoum itself. But Jebel et Tomat was much
later. We did find Shabona, which was one of these early Khartoum
sites.
Troy: And Jebel Moya, too. There were a number of sites.
Clark: Oh, Jebel Moya, of course. That is again an inselberg sticking
out of the plain some distance from the river. This is where
Henry Welcome took out a large team in order to work sites there
within the massif. That was most remarkable. You should read,
there s one volume or two volumes? One maybe a volume of
photographs, one maybe a volume of text.
Troy: Wellcome s work?
Clark: Wellcome s work, but written up by a man called Adison, because
Welcome never actually wrote it all up. It was remarkable
stories, of course, there. He had them build a road right up to
the top of the massif that he could drive his--must have been a
221
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Ford, I supposeup, probably with a bit of assistance. It now
looks rather like a gully rather than anything else. But up at
the top, he built a huge house, a sort of monolithic house, huge
blocks of granite and so on. Amazing sort of place.
This was in the twenties?
It was in the twenties certainly, yes.
Sudanese group of workers there.
And he had a large
One interesting thing was that he would give a peacock feather
to any worker who would remain sober for a month. [laughs]
Called it the Order of the Peacock.
Interesting approach to archaeology, wasn t it?
It was indeed. Dug an enormous amount of stuff out--really very
difficult to find out what it all meant. We went there to try and
tie it all together, and we dug a small exploratory trench. I
think it was one meter or something like that, two meters, may
have been, which one was allowed to do. We collected samples, and
these were dated. I forget what the date turned out to be now, I
have to check it.
But there was a little bit of work that could be done. He hadn t
destroyed the entire site at Jebel Moya?
Not completely destroyed, no, much of it had gone.
Sounds a little bit like Broken Hill, but for different reasons.
Broken Hill was problematic because it was a mine.
Well, Broken Hill is completely gone now. Unless there s stuff
still around the edges. I don t know, maybe they ve even filled
that hole in now. It was a pretty big hole, went down ninety feet
or more.
Jebel Moya and Jebel et Tomat were fairly close together, down
south from Shabona?
Jebel Moya was due south of Jebel et Tomat. Shabona was south of
Jebel et Tomat, on the Nile, and I think it was about 250 miles
south of Khartoum.
How long were you up in there? Was that several seasons?
No, we only had one season- -we must have been there for quite two
months , I think it was .
222
Troy: Hot? Crocodiles?
Clark: Very hot, very hot. Yes, there were crocodiles in the Nile, but
they didn t worry us, because it was as much as your life was
worth to put a hand into the Nile although we did. It was full
of all sorts of pollutants of one kind or another, everything went
into the Nile.
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
But we did make a liquor out ofcan t remember what that it
was a sort of Zabeb, I think, which of course we had to take with
water. Anisette, I think it is. Powerful sort of stuff. It was
all right, but we had to add a certain amount of water, of course.
We had to boil the water, and we also had to drain it. We drained
the water through toilet paper to get all the macro bits of stuff
that were floating in the water out, so that we got reasonably
pure-ish water that came through the other end, and boiled that.
It sounds like a fairly full time job for somebody, to keep enough
water for how many people were in that group, Desmond?
Oh, that wasn tnow, how did we do it? The water we had was
water that was contained in big jars, and they were filled up.
How the hell did we do that? The drinking water we had in water
bags, but the washing water, I think that s probably what it was.
And then in these big jars, we would take water out of it and boil
it. It was all boiled and put into the canvas water bags, which
would hang up on a branch, could be in the sun or not, and of
course, it evaporated, you see, and kept it cool. That was very
satisfactory.
Did you have students from here out there for that season?
Yes. Andy Smith, Ken Williamson was there, Dan Stiles was there.
Khartoum would have been your base. What is that like, Khartoum?
Pretty awful. It had very recently, I think, become independent.
We must have had two seasons there, I think, or part of it, at any
rate. We had very little money for living. We lived in some
dreadful place that Martin Williams had found or knew of at one
time, where at night the whole of the inner courtyard and so on
would be filled with people sleeping on ordinary sort of
mattresses down below. The loos were absolutely terrible, both to
look at and very seldom did they work. It was called El no, I
can t remember what that one was called.
Martin Williams managed to get the loo to work, the actual
plug thing. So they didn t charge him anything for his
accommodation, which was excellent. But that was a real problem.
223
We went out to eat when we were in Khartoum. Our food supplies
were for when we were in the field. Latterly, we were in a place
called El Shark, which was a little more expensive, but not very
much.
One of the really good things about Khartoum was that you
could go to one of these sort of cafes where you could get things
to eat and so on, but you could get drinks that were made in
blenders, lemon juice, a lemon drink, or a mango drink. I
remember mangos were doing at that time. What they did was they
put it all in with a lot of sugar as well, and it came out, you
had a tall big glass of this, and this was absolutely invaluable
from the point of view of keeping you cool. It also was on ice,
of course. God knows about the ice!
Concentrating on Ethiopia
Troy: When did you begin to have a sense that you wanted to concentrate
in Ethiopia?
Clark: I think it was at the time of the Pan-African Congress that had
met in Addis Ababa, which was organized very well by the general
secretary, Berhanou Abebe. He was the general secretary of the
congress. Did it very well, and I ve kept up with him ever since.
He had several positions in the University of Addis Ababa, but
he s now just retired about two years ago, I think it was.
Troy: And is he a paleoarchaeologist?
Clark: No, no. I think you might almost call him an economic historian
or something like that. He was trained in France.
Troy: So at Addis in 1971, which was the Seventh, things began to really
open up relative to Ethiopia. And was that because you guys had
visits to sites and things?
Clark: Well, we were able to visit Melka Kontoure, which had initially
been discovered by a friend of mine there, actually, a man called
Jerry [Gerard] Dekker, who was with water development there. He
was a Dutchman.
Troy: And how far is that site from Addis?
Clark: Oh, I suppose it s probably maybe forty-five miles, less than
that, I think. Southwest of Addis, I think. On the Awash River
in its young stages. And that was an important Lower Paleolithic
224
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
site with lots and lots of Acheulean there. And incidentally, it
was in the country of the Gurage people, who were studied by
William Shack, who of course was here on the faculty. He was an
anthropologist-ethnographer. Did a fine study of the Gurage, who
had never been studied before. Died last month, I think it was.
Sounds like you had some good field trips during that conference.
During that time we went to Melka Kontoure, and we looked at
artifacts from various other places. I d previously, of course,
seen the collections from Pore Epic Cave near Dire Dawa in Paris.
Betty and 1 also went with two of our graduate students on the
tourist route, looking at historic sites like Lalebela, Aksum,
Gondar, very interesting indeed. It brought back my memories of
the war and Ethiopia, and so I was keen to go back and do some
more work there.
How had Gondar changed since the war?
It was still the same, insofar as I could see it. The castles
were still there and everything.
Had you been to Aksum before?
I d only passed through Aksum on the way for the final battle of
the war in 1941, so I was very keen to see Aksum as it then was.
Subsequently it has been excavated extremely well by David
Phillipson, at that terrace with the obelisks.
High, beautiful country there, isn t it?
headwaters of the Blue Nile up there.
Lake Tana. The
Clark: Beautiful lake. It waslet me see, was it that time?
No, it was just after the war, that s right, that I was able
to get down to Gorgora, which was a little sort of village. It
was the place to which Italian officials and so on went from
Gondar down to the lake, which wasn t too far away, and there they
had a little boat club. I took a little sculling boat out from
there, which leaked rather badly, because they hadn t been scraped
and varnished, of course, for a little while. I took that back
very soon, and also I tried one of those rafts made out of--I
suppose it was papyrus, basically. They of course leaked, if you
see what I mean, but they floated. They may have had ambash wood
as the basis of it as well.
Troy: Underneath the reeds, there would be the ambash?
225
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Yes. And on one of these occasions, when I was with the little
rowing boat, I went off to a nearby island, where I emptied out
the water from the boat. And then I was greeted by a couple of
Ethiopians who indicated that they wanted me to go further into
the island, which I did. There I found a small group of
Ethiopians and two Catholic priests. The only way in which we
were able to converse was in Latin. My Latin was pretty rusty at
that time, but they wanted to know whether the war was over. I
was able to tell them, fortunately, that yes, indeed it was, which
made them very happy.
And had they been on this island in Lake Tana all that time?
I don t know how long they d been there, but when they knew that
the attack on Gondar was going to take place, I think they
somewhat wisely retreated down there. So that s where they were.
And they must have wondered who you were.
Well, they saw who I was, because I was probably wearing some kind
of military uniform.
Some time we have to sit down and actually make a list of every
place you ve rowed. I had no idea that you d rowed on Lake Tana.
Oh, I don t know that there were all that number of different
places, actually. Yes, it was fun, it really was. Water is so
very different from one place to another. At school where I
learnt all my rowing and so on, of course, it was on the Avon,
which we used to call it the Mile of Treacle, because there wasn t
very much current in it at all at that time. Very smooth.
But at any rate, what were we talking about?
We were talking about going back up to Lake Tana.
Betty the lake when you went back?
Did you show
Yes, we flew over the lake, and flew over the Tisisat Falls as
well. That s where the Nile comes out of Lake Tana. Of course,
it rises in a couple of springs somewhere slightly to the north of
Lake Tana, and flows into it, and then out at the Tisisat Falls,
which are not all that high, but really very beautiful, with a
spray much like the Victoria Falls coming out. And of course,
there are islands in Lake Tana which were occupied from medieval
times with monasteries on them, a number of them.
The records, of course, were destroyed by Mohammed Gran, the
Muslim leader who welded a whole lot of Muslim groups together
during that time, up to--oh, I suppose it was probably some time
226
early part of 1500 and something that Mohammed Gran wasprobably
1540-something, I thinkafter a Portuguese expedition of, I think
there were 200 Portuguese soldiers. I can t remember the precise
details, with matchlock guns led by Christopher da Gama, the son,
I think he was, of Vasco. He was killed at a battle with Muslims,
and it was a kind of drawn battle. The Muslims withdrew. Sounds
a little like Gettysburg or something.
Then not long afterwards, Mohammed Gran was killed in some
skirmish, and so the Christian empire survived. Otherwise, the
emperor was being hounded and living in caves and so on. So many
of the priceless documents were destroyed, burned by the Muslims.
Troy: Mohammed Gran?
Clark: Gran. It means Mohammed the left-handed. So much is estimated in
time by the Ethiopians that we talked to as either before Mohammed
Gran or after Mohammed Gran.
Lake Besaka
Clark: So we decided to put in a proposal to the National Science
Foundation to work in the eastern part of the rift, going towards
the Awash National Park, in that area. We started our work at a
saline lake there a little to the west of the Awash Stationor,
rather, to the west of the Awash National Park itself. I think it
must have been 1973. We had two seasons there.
Troy: Who was working there then? Anyone there?
Clark: Jon Kalb was working in the Middle Awash, actually was working in
Hadar at that time. I think that was before he went into the
Middle Awash. Must have gone into the Middle Awash just about the
same time that we started in Lake Besaka. And Lake Besaka
produced an interesting Upper Paleolithic blade industry based on
obsidian, and that was written up by Steve Brandt, a student of
mine, now at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Later,
there was very interesting Neolithic, Later Stone Age Microlithic
and Neolithic, which we did.
Troy: Lake Besaka. Is that a dry lake there in the Awash?
Clark: It was, I think, a relatively shallow saline lake, and there were
fresh water springs, at least two on our side of the lake, which
was the northwest side. And the local Karriyu used to come and
fill their water bags there.
227
Troy: Friendly people? Were they interested in what you were doing?
Clark: Nomadic pastoralists, essentially. We employed some of them, of
course, to help us. And on one occasion, we were watching I
suppose an oldish woman filling a goat skin with water at one of
these springs, and I don t know if you ve ever tried to hold or to
carry, to lift and carry a filled goat skin of water, but it was
damned heavy. It looked to be heavy after she had got it on her
back.
Martin Williams, I think, said, "Why
don t you get your
husband to do that for you?" And she dropped the thing and roared
with laughter. She said, "What! Good heavens. He d never be
able to carry it!" [laughter]
Troy: You had a bunch of kids there from Berkeley?
Clark: Yes. Steve Brandt was there, of course. Hiro Kurashina was
there. Alison Galloway was there, who s now teaching in Santa
Cruz. Hiro is teaching in Guam, of course. Ken Williamson was
there. There may have been a couple of others, I m not certain.
Troy: And for some this was their first time over, wasn t it?
Clark: Oh, yes. It was exciting, yes.
Troy: Logistics worked out pretty well? Let s see, you weren t too far
from Addis.
Clark: We normally would spend the night in Awash Station, that s right,
where there was a hotel on the railway, the station hotel.
Baboons used to come all around it, and a short distance away, you
could walk to the edge of the Awash Gorge where the baboons lived.
They of course would scrounge all sorts of food and everything
that was thrown out there. It wasn t a frightfully good hotel,
I m afraid.
But we may have been there probably one night going, one night
coming, that kind of thing. One wanted to get away as soon as one
possibly could. We always camped, of course. And that was a
problem, because where we camped, there wasn t any water. Lake
Besaka, the water there, you couldn t really camp close to the
lake, and we didn t try to do that, because of mosquitoes. There
were a lot of mosquitoes. When we had finished working the sites
and so on, we would spend maybe a few days in one of the hotels at
Metahara, a village on the main road going towards Dire Dawa.
Troy: Would you go down there to get the water? Did you have a little
tank truck?
228
Clark: No, we got it in drums. Latterly, we got our water when we were
camped up high on the ridge, in an area which used to be called
the Garibaldi Pass, named after the name of the engineer, I think,
who built his house therethe ruin of the house was still there
overlooking the pass, which came out of the rift going towards
Addis, that way.
And at this place, which waswhat did we call it? Kone--there
were volcanic craters around, and in one of these oldish volcanic
craters we found important Middle Stone Age sites, not all that
far from the outcrops of the obsidian on the slopes over another
early volcanic crater. Volcanic activity had been going on there
for quite a time, and the latest, of course, it looked as if the
lava had more or less come out yesterday. Very little vegetation
on it, nasty things to walk around.
We did this on one occasion when we climbed Mount Fantale,
which was a dormant volcano. It erupted in 1830-odd, and it is
said to have buried the old Metahara village. We were able to
drive almost all the way up to the top of that, because somebody
had built a road in connection with the Awash National Park. It
was inside the Awash National Park.
We got our water, when we were digging Fantale and these
Middle Stone Age sites, the craters, from the Dutch sugar
plantation at Metahara, or some little distance from the village.
But the trouble was that it was very deep water, and it had all
sorts of chemicals in it which weren t too good for one, and one
certainly had loose bowels for quite a little while. Sometimes it
made people feel a bit sort of sick, and vomiting. On the whole,
it wasn t too bad.
So those were very nice sites. And the interesting thing
about Lake Besaka was that when we left, it was starting to rise.
It continued to rise, and at later times that I was back in
Ethiopia, it rose and it rose over the road. They had to raise
the road and raise the railway track which is by the side of it.
What the situation is now, I don t know.
Troy: It was probably due to the waters from the Awash.
Clark: Yes, the Awash River, which wasn t too far away, possibly rising
and opening new channels, or seepage at any rate.
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229
Serkama and Laga Oda
Troy: You must have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of sites in
that Lake Besaka area.
Clark: We had two seasons there, certainly. We also, I think at that
time, went down to Dire Dawa, and we visitedwe were trying to
find some rock paintings that were said to be there. About ten
kilometers or miles can t remember towards Addis from Dire Dawa,
you turned off going south on a rough road to an area that was
sort of agricultural, to some extent. Lots of pastoralists. And
Martin Williams and I tried to explore various caves, which the
speleological group, led I think by Bill Morton, had visited.
Besides rock paintings, we were also looking for caves that had
archaeological deposits in them.
These were absolutely hopeless caves, no evidence of anything.
But we were sitting down having lunch, somewhat disconsolately,
and we were looking across at some outcrop from a ridge, which
looked as if it had a cave in it, and we thought, Well, perhaps we
should go and have a look at that. And indeed, we did, and this
was Serkama, and this had a superb group of paintings in it in a
little cave off the main cave.
The main cave appeared to have been used, or to be still used,
by nomadic, I suppose probably Gala they were Gala around there,
or possibly Karriyu people storing, so we were told, mats for
making the houses, the gurgi, they were called, and sleeping mats
and so on, the poles and all that kind of thing. This was dowry
for the girl at the time when she got married. Very interesting.
There it was all stored up on a platform at the back of the cave.
And the cave obviously had a deposit in it; we never examined it.
These paintings were we photographed them all, and later the
tracing of them was done by Patricia Vinnicombe and her husband,
Pat Carter. We have those here, of course.
Troy: Was Patricia Vinnicombe here at Berkeley with you?
Clark: No. She visited from time to time, but not very often. Once, I
think it was. But we asked her and her husband to come out and
study the rock art of Ethiopia that we had found, and look for
more sites in our second season there. That must have been 1974,
I think.
Troy: When you looked across and you saw this cave possibility, how far
across was it that you had to hike to get to the cave?
230
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Oh, about a mile, something like that.
The rock art hadn t been disturbed by the current people?
No, fortunately not at all. There was nothing in the floor. The
rock art was on one main wall. And what it showed were groups of
cattle. There were cows; the udders were shown, and sometimes the
calf was there as well. Occasionally a little man, more like a
capital H, who had a staff, not a spear or anything, but a staff
in his hand. There were fat-tailed sheep, which was extremely
interesting. The first time we recorded fat-tailed sheep.
Now, what s a fat-tailed sheep?
A fat-tailed sheep is the Ormuz breed, and it is Arabian, of
course. Must I think have beenwell, it was introduced from
Arabia by the peoples coming over, and the age- -we don t quite
know when they came in. We thought, of course, that they would
have come in with the pre-Axumite peoples, about 500 B.C., but
they certainly came in before then.
Another site that we had discovered and traced all the
paintings, I ve recently written something coming out in one of
the journals, the archaeological journals from the University of
Florence, on one of the two rock shelters at a place called Laga
Oda. I think we mentioned that before.
Where is that in relationship to Dire Dawa?
Yes, north,
think
think that s
Laga Oda would be south southwest of Dire Dawa, and it would be
west of Harar, on the escarpment country. A little north of the
main road between Harar and Addis. Is that right?
that s right. And the date that we got there was I
somewhere around 1500 B.C., something like that. I
what it was. That sounds, I should think, about right. It s the
onlysurprisingly enoughit is the only date that we have for an
attempt to date the rock art. We did it on the basis of the
cattle bones that we found in the little excavation that we did in
the lower cave at Laga Oda. Previous to that date, there were no
cattle bones, and then the cattle bones appeared. That was
important.
That was radio carbon on the cattle bones?
Radio carbon, of course, yes. On charcoals.
And cattle were pictured on the walls.
231
Clark: The cattle were pictured on the walls, the cattle with the people,
one or two enigmatic symbols and so on, which could be cattle
brand marks, that kind of thing.
Troy: But the reason you were able to date that was because of this
wonderful coming together of the bones plus the rock art?
Clark: That s right, exactly. Well, of course, if anybody did an
excavation of a cave which had rock art in it, depending on what
the rock art showed, presumably there would have been cattle
around certainly, and sheep and perhaps goats as well. You could
tell when they appeared at that particular site, but nobody else
has ever done that. Yet.
One of Steve Brandt s students, a man called Agazi Negash, a
very good man, an Ethiopian, he was with us in the Middle Awash
one season, and so was Girma Hundie. But he did some excellent
work excavating in one or two rock shelters in northern Ethiopia,
where there was rock art, and he should certainly be getting dates
that would either confirm or change the dates we found.
Troy: The lab that you folks set up in Addis, is that capable of doing
the geochronological dating, or not?
Clark: Oh, no. The Ethiopians had no laboratory facilities at all. The
French built a small lab down in one area. I think the Ethiopians
said, "You know, it would be good to get the other various
expeditions to build their own labs." So Clark Howell and I put
in a proposal to NSF for a lab to be built in the National Museum
grounds. It would house all the collections, both paleontological
and archaeological and so on, made by U.S. -based expeditions.
That money went through.
Pore Epic Cave
Clark: But then in those first two years that we had, we went to Pore
Epic cave, and that again was a question of trying to find where
Pore Epic was. Nobody seemed to know. But there was this cave
overlookingit was about 700 feet or so, I think, above the wadi
floor. You stood in the wadi and you looked up to this cave.
Troy: Pore Epic: somebody had been there in the twenties, was it?
Clark: Yes, in the twenties. I can t remember precisely, was it 27--the
very person to go there, who probably dug a bit of a hole or
something, was Henri de Monfried, the curious French adventurer
232
who also wrote a whole lot of books about his adventures.
Extremely popular books. I remember reading one or two of them, I
think it was, several years ago. He also for a time was smuggling
slaves over to Arabia, even. [laughs] But he was a curious,
enigmatic person. His books were quite exciting books.
At any rate, he suggested that the French should send out some
people to excavate at Pore Epic, and they did. A little
expedition came out to work around Dire Dawa and the areas to the
north and west of that, important areas where the Abbe Breuil was
one of them. Teilhard oe Chardin was another, and Paul Wernet was
another. Both of them were priests--all of them were priests,
that s right. Paul Wernet and Teilhard de Chardin excavated a
longish trench down the middle of Pore Epic. The Abbe Breuil
traced the rock art that was on one main wall. The excavation
produced a lot of very beautiful Middle Stone Age points of one
kind or another, but it appeared to be mixed up with Later Stone
Age material, and this was a major kind of problem.
We went in order to see what we could do, and find whether we
could sort out what had really gone on.
Troy: So Pore Epic wasn t something the local people knew this cave by.
They had some other name for it.
Clark: Presumably they had another name for it. They must have.
Troy: So you finally re- found the cave, and how did you know that in
fact it was Pore Epic once you got there?
Clark: Because we could see the excavation trench through the thing. But
we had quite an adventure in getting to it. Looking at the cave
from the wadi floor which was the main migration route for game
and cattle and other stock between the lowlands, the southern part
of the Afar plains, and the highlands at Harer, and must have been
the migration route right through a lot of the Pleistocene. At
any rate, it looked, rather than having to climb up the very steep
slope it really was a very steep slope, it was probably, I don t
know, certainly 60 degrees, if not a little more, angle of slope-
it looked to be much easier to walk around, and the whole ridge of
limestone sloped gradually down like that. Get onto the lower
part, walk up there, and just drop down to the bottom.
We probably reconnoitred it, first of all, and found that
there was a sort of fissure a little to the north of where the
cave was that we could angle ourselves down to get to the bottom
of the cliff, which was about thirty feet high or so, and then
walk along to the cave. Martin Williams and I did this.
233
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
This was just you and he on this reconnoitre?
Yes, it was. We had brought an axe, not a very sharp axe either,
with us, but nothing very much else, except for a walking stick I
think probably. Or maybe a geological hammer or two. And we got
down this fissure to the bottom of the thing, and that s where we
found, of course, that prickly pear had grown right up to the base
of the cliff. This prickly pear covered about the top quarter of
this very steep ascent from the wadi itself.
We had to cut our way through prickly pear, and also the top
of the cave, the little cliff, castle kop type of thing, had been
a regular sleeping place of baboons. And of course, all the
baboon droppings all went down, so that we were walking in a deep
pile of baboon droppings with prickly pear on either side. I can
assure you, it was not at all a pleasant--we probably had to walk
a quarter of a mile, something like that I think it was, to get to
the cave.
For about a week afterwards, we used to de-prickle ourselves,
our backsides and so on would get covered with these very fine
sort of hairs from the prickly pear would get in--oh, it was
dreadful business.
At any rate, we got into the cave, and that was excellent.
And I think we must have had to go back the same way.
You would have been the first people in there in quite some time.
Oh, yes, since the twenties. Insofar as we know.
And how far is that from Dire Dawa?
Oh, it s just up the wadi from Dire Dawa.
half, something like that, probably.
About a mile and a
In a way, the prickly pear had kept people out, probably, which
was good in some ways.
Well, it could well have, and of course, I think it escaped, had
somehow been introduced. I don t think there was any prickly pear
there when the French excavated certainly. They made no mention
of it.
At any rate, after that we ascended from the wadi, and we had
to cut a zig-zag path up. We also had to carry a jerry-can of
water up, because we had no water up there. I would think almost
certainly that when it was occupied in Middle Stone Age and Later
Stone Age times, they would have had pegs hammered into crevices
234
in the thirty-foot cliff face so they would get down that way.
They wouldn t walk up from the wadi.
But it was a magnificent place from which to view the stock
moving back and forth, and of course, in the old days, the wild
game as well. So this must have been a hunting place, which is
what we think also on the basis of the artifacts found and the
numbers of fine points that we found there.
Troy: Did you see the old trench, the initial ticnch they d put in?
Clark: Oh, yes. It was still there. I don t know to what extent it had
been filled in. It might have. At any rate, we did see it.
Troy: Deep, deep cave? Or more of a rock shelter?
Clark: I suppose the cave probably went in thirty to forty feet,
something like that. And from the back of it, there had come at
times a spring of water. What had happened, because we dug a
trench at right angles from one wall to the other wall of the
cave, at right angles to the entrance and the excavation that the
French had made. So that we got on the one hand--I should say on
both handswe got original undisturbed brecciated Middle Stone
Age deposit with artifacts. And in the middle, you could see
where this stream, presumably subsequent to the occupation, had
washedhad removed all the brecciated deposit, or rather had de-
brecciated it, and to some extent had disturbed the whole deposit
so it was boule vasse, and that was the explanation for the
confusion.
Troy: Of the mixing of the Middle and Later Stone Age materials.
Clark: Exactly, yes. And we were able to establish from our finds, which
were all from the brecciated parts and so on, we got a good cross-
section of what the assemblage looked like, which was published,
of course, in I think the African Archaeological Review, with Ken
Williamson.
Troy: Now, was there any evidence of water still coming through from the
back of the cave?
Clark: No. Well, no water still coming through, no.
Troy: And it would have been more of a seep than a stream in some ways?
Or maybe a stream.
Clark: No, I think to some extent, there may have been water falling
through, yes. But that was what it was.
235
We had constructed of course, to get into the cave from
walking the zig-zag path, about the top, oh, twenty feet or so,
something like that, there was nothing but prickly pear. What we
did was we could never cut the prickly pear quite away, so we
built a staircase of limestone blocks on this, resting on the
prickly pear, to get into the cave. That was the toughest part of
the trail. That was pretty good. Cramped it down.
Troy: So this would have been a wonderful cave for the observation of
the game, and also protection. It would have been a safe place.
Clark: It would have been a safe place, and also a magnificent game-
viewing place. And this is where, because of the highly
comminuted bone that we found, much of it burned as well, it
looked as if this is where the hunters also had a meal of some of
the meat and where they could also probably have dried meat as
well.
Troy: What was that dated to?
Clark: We dated it to around about 70,000, I think it was. This was
dated by obsidian hydration, if I remember rightly. Could well
have been materials older than that.
Troy: Any evidence of more recent occupation?
Clark: Later Stone Age. But nothing other than the French. They must
have filled in to some extent the excavation, because down in it,
we found a coin, a Menelik coin, I think it was, of some time in
the very early part of the twentieth century. But also a French
newspaper of the time that they were there, parts of a French
newspaper. There may have been one or two other things of that
kind.
Troy: You were to go into the higher country there,
little bit.
Describe that a
Clark: We went in to visit the walled city of Harer, and that s where we
did actually see one night, we saw the Hyena Man feeding the
hyenas with a piece of meat, which he put in his mouth and the
hyena would come along and take the meat.
Troy: No kidding?
Clark: Yes, he had a remarkable relationship with the hyenas. And of
course, he died, and I don t know whether anyone s taken over.
Troy: This Hyena Man was quite a famous person?
236
Clark: He was quite, yes. He was famous also with tourists, I suppose,
if you see what I mean. It was one of the attractions of going to
the Harer.
Very interesting. Not very much in the way of deposit
aggredation in the walled city itself, but there certainly was
some. It was underneath houses and that kind of thing. Very
interesting. There was a Frenchwhat would you call it?--I
suppose it may have been a school, but also a church with a priest
in charge of it. To what extent he had any converts I m not
certain. But at any rate, there it was, and the famous one was a
man called Pere Azeis [spells], and he wrote a very interesting
volume. He discovered a lot of rock paintings in that [Harer]
area as well.
We also looked at the people using these digging sticks with
the bored stone weights on the end for digging new deposit,
getting rid of turf and so on, for making fields for probably teff
and maybe sorghum, one or two other things. And looking at the
irrigation system, remarkable kinds of deep holes that they used
there for these systems. And we looked at one or two of the caves
and so on that there were. Mostly concentrated on Laga Oda. That
was one thing.
Gadeb and the Webi Shebele
Clark: Another thing that we did was a quick visit in the second year
that we were at Lake Besaka to Gadeb to look at that site.
Troy: How would you get up there?
Clark: We went up via NazrDt. Up into the highlands, throughoh, that
place in the lake, what s that called? Lake Awasa, I think.
Troy: [looking at atlas] Yes, there s Nazret, and there s a town in
there called Sire, and on up to Lake Langeno.
Clark: Yes, beyond Langeno to Awasa, and then the road went up due east
through two places, and I can t remember the names, three places.
Troy: There s something here, Arusi?
Clark: Arusi. That is the country. That s all on the north side of the
Awash River, and Bale is on the south side. We were actually
based on the south side, but we did come through Arusi, we came
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through that way first of all, had to cross the Awash. It was
low, of course.
Troy: What is the nearest town up in the Gadeb?
Clark: Adaba. That, I think, was the nearest town. Then if you go due
west, there s another one that s name begins with a D--Dodola.
And if you go due west again, I think it is, there s another one
whose name begins with a K--Kofele. And we had to go to Goba to
present our letter from the central government to tell the
governor of Bale province that we were here and we d been given
permission to do this.
Troy: So you were getting fairly down towards Yavelo and places you d
been during the war. Did it seem familiar to you?
Clark: Not too much, no. We were particularly interested in getting
there as quickly as we could, and as quickly as we could out
again. We wanted to start work, and we wanted to try to find the
area where we thought we might find artifacts and fauna.
So back we went to Adaba--or no, it wasn t Adaba, it was a
place that began with a B, more to the west of Adaba. From there,
we had to go throughwell, fields, if you see what 1 mean. There
was no road at all. That was quite a business, it really was. At
any rate, it was late afternoon, beginning to rain, misting and so
on, and we camped up on the top of a cliff. We were in--I suppose
we must have had the two Land Rovers I think. We certainly had
one Land Rover with us, maybe only one. And it was bitterly cold.
Troy: When was this?
Clark: Perhaps April, March or April, probably 74. There was not a sign
of any bushes or trees or wood or anything around, grassland, of
course. But fortunately, there were a whole lot of cow pats,
dried cow dung, all over the place. So we collected this, made a
fire, and it produces an incredibly hot fire, only for a fairly
short time until you put more and more on it. That was
invaluable, and we were able to make some hot food.
Troy: How many people were up there with you on that?
Clark: It was Martin, myself, Frances Dakin I think was there, who later
married Martin. She was a geologist from Addis Ababa. There may
have been somebody else.
Then the following day, we went and explored the cliff, and we
did find actually coming out two, I think they were cleavers,
Acheulean cleavers, which were particularly interesting. There
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Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
was Late Stone Age material lying around on the surface, obsidian
microliths and things like that. This was the first time, that
was Gadeb Site C, the first one that we had found. It was quite
clear that this was the area, because there was quite a lot of
diatomite around. You know, the white and it had been discovered
by a man who was the geologist on the Duca d Abruzzi expedition to
explore the Webi Shebele.
How would this duke have gotten up in there?
looking.
That is very remote
I m not quite certain, but there were one or two volumes that
followed from his expedition. You should follow that. They
probably got up there, I should think, from Italian Somaliland or
Somalia. It may have been that they were exploring the Webi
Shebele, I can t remember.
But they may have just gone right up the Webi, up into that area.
Yes, it could have been that. Yes, past Sheikh Hussein, which I
never actually got to.
And where was that?
That s in Ethiopia. But it was quite clear that that was going to
be an important site, and we had found artifacts. I think we
probably found some fauna as well. So we started work there the
next year. We had two years there, I think it was. Or was it one
year? I can t remember.
Logistically, that must have been a nightmare.
Yes, that was--it was tricky getting there and back, yes.
How were the folks in Goba? Was the official cooperative?
Oh, yes, very. No problem at all. The local people, who are
Muslims, of course, around Adaba, around where we were camped on
the Webi, were some of the nicest people that I have ever worked
with. Really delightful people. We were there for two seasons,
76, and then we had a trying business, which I won t talk about
now, because there isn t time.
Seems to me, Desmond, that you would have had to logistically have
everything together when you left Addis, because essentially,
there s nothing up there. Quite high, remote.
We had to carry everything with us. The name of that place near
Lake Langana, I think, was Shashemene. That was the sub-
239
headquarters. And of course, we had to go back to Addis to
replenish supplies from time to time.
Troy: [looking at atlas] I count six, seven big lakes up in there.
Clark: That s the Ethiopian lakes area, as it s called. Forested on the
slopes. Colobus monkeys, black and white colobus monkeys you
regularly saw when we went up on the slopes. Beautiful country.
Grassland on the top.
240
X INDIA, AND FARTHER AFIELD
Poona Conference: Trips to the Vindhya Hills. Western Escarpment
Troy: Desmond, you went out to Narmada in the Narmada Valley in India,
and how did that come about? Had you been in India before, or was
this your first trip out, or what was that?
Clark: I was first in India in, I think it was 1979. There was the
Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences Congress held in New
Delhi, and I went out to that and gave two or three papers at
least a couple of papers. Immediately following it, there was a
conference or symposium, whatever it was called, that lasted for
about three days, I think, in Poona on prehistory. That was
extremely valuable. To that there came a large number of the
archaeologists working in India, as well as a number of people
from outside, like myself. From Australia, for example, as well.
With that, there was also an excursion to various sites, one
on the Narmada, which went to Hoshangabad, which was an important
site that had been known for a number of years. Frederick Zeuner
studied there. The main work there, of course, had been done by
Sankalia, as indeed it had mostly in the western India as well,
around the Maharashtra, that area. Lots of fossil fauna broken up
there, lots of Paleolithic Acheulean bifaces in the gravel in the
river, and that, of course, is gravel in which there s a site a
little further upstream where a cranium, a hominid cranium, was
found a few years later.
From Hoshangabad, we went to Bhimbetka, and Bhicbetka is in a
line of hills, the Vindhya Hills. I haven t thought of this for
about probably thirty-odd years or so- -not quite that.
Troy: It s wonderful it s all going to come back to you.
Clark: The Vindhya Hills were basically red sandstones, and some
limestone . There was one extremely interesting site that had been
241
excavated by Virendra Misra, which had Acheulean in the bottom,
quite a lot of the Acheulean, going through middle to a well
represented microlithic Late Stone Age. That s a very important
site, showing the stratigraphic relationship of the various
cultural stages in India, particularly with the Acheulean, because
the raw material was adjacent to the site, of course, and you had
a lot of flaking waste in association with the finished bifaces
and other small tools.
But the main fascination and what the Vindhyas are mostly
known for is of course the rock art that is there, and that is
incredibly fascinating. We went to see a number of these sites
which show the change from a more or less naturalistic style,
mostly wild animals. And then cattle come in, still I think in a
naturalistic way--of course, there s wild cattle, you see there,
in any case. And then essentially a whole lot of somewhat more
stylized representations of group behavior, extremely interesting.
All sorts of things connected with family life, with agriculture,
with warfare, and so on. These have all been very well recorded
and presented in volumes by Indian archaeologists and others over
the years.
I also went to see some sites around Aurangabad district,
north of Pune. Happened to be there on Christmas Day, I think it
was. In the course of that visit, I went to the caves at Ajanta,
extremely impressive. Extremely impressive. I visited a man
called Sali who had discovered and excavated a really important
Upper Paleolithic or Later Stone Age, moving into the Mesolithic,
site. The site name--I think it was Patne, something like that,
I ll have to check it.
Troy: Indian fellow.
Clark: An Indian, yes. He had discovered engraved ostrich egg shell
beads, some bone artifacts, in association with a typical back
blade lunate kind of culture, with dates, I think they went back
to about 20,000-odd. An important site. I saw all of that
material.
So that was a fascinating, really impressive visit. And I
didn t know very much about Indian archaeology, other than what I
had read about the Paleolithic and had gleaned from Miles Burkitt
and from Frederick Zeuner.
Troy: And Miles had worked in- -or had known about India?
Clark: Well, I don t think he d ever worked in India, actually, but
various people whom he knew had worked there. It was, I think,
from meeting Sankalia, who was over in the Institute of
242
Archaeology at the University of London very shortly after the
war, that I got interested in what there was in India,
particularly in the earlier stages of human culture.
Troy: Was there a point on this trip, Desmond, where you said, "My God,
why have I spent thirty-odd years in Africa when I could have been
in India," or did you just see it as another wonderful area that
you needed to learn about?
Clark: I think it s more like the latter. No, I have never regretted the
work that I have been able to do in Africa. My only regret is
that I wasn t able to do more. Looking back, of course, and
seeing the kind of things that you could have done if you had an
extra day or two at one particular site, notably, of course, when
we were in the Sahara at Adrar Bous, I ve always regrettedbut it
was not possible.
One particularly memorable visit at that time was a quick
trip, over a weekend, out to the edge of the western escarpment,
or the western ghats, as they were called, looking way out onto
the plain of Bombay, way down below. The view from there was
absolutely incredibly impressive. This was a place called
Mahabaleshwar, to which the governors of Bengal used to go when it
was hot in the summer. Of course, they came up to Poona in the
hot weather from Bombay, and there were sort of weekend cottages,
beautiful, in the forest there. You could drive or walk along
some of those tracks, little tracks or trails where horses could
go. One particular one was Lady Wilmington s Drive--! think
that s right. I suppose she went in a carriage.
But you went right to the edge there, looking over that,
incredibly impressive. Not far away, a few hundred yards away,
there was a cairn and a stone with an inscription on it. The
cairn was a survey cairn. This said that so-and-so climbed from
the bottom to the top up there about 1820-something, and I think
put in that cairn, that survey point. He, so far as one knows,
was the first European to climb up there. It was terribly
impressive, looking out over those plains. And, of course,
extremely interesting in the way in which environmentally they re
totally different ecosystems down below from the evergreen forests
and grasslands on the top.
Troy: Approximately how far was that place from Poona, would you say?
Clark: I should think it was probably eighty miles, something like that.
That s roughly the distance.
243
Taking Students Out. Working with G. R. Sharma, the Son Valley
Clark: In any event, the meeting was during the summer. It was a little
hot. And at the Poona conference, I met Professor G. R. Sharma,
who had a team operating from the University of Allahabad. He had
been excavating historic sites up to a year or two before, and
then he decided that there was a great deal to be found in
prehistoric sites, Paleolithic sites, and later, particularly
Early Neolithic. He had started with his people excavating
various sites in the Belan Valley, most important sites, very
well-excavated indeed, and published. But he was also working at
earlier Paleolithic sites, and he invited me to go and spend a
long weekend and look at some of them.
Troy: And this was during the same Poona meeting, or this was later?
Clark: That was the same Poona meeting where he gave a lecture on what he
had found in the Belan Valley, and I knew there was Acheulean and
Middle Stone Age material there, and Microlithic, Mesolithic, and
so on.
We went out to the Belan Valley, looked at one or two of these
sites, and he invited me to come out and work with him. I
suggested that we might work in the next valley south, which was
the Son Valley, over the Vindhya Hills.
Why did you suggest that?
Because we knew- -he had sent some people to do a survey there, and
we knew there was quite a lot of Paleolithic there. I think that
they d had a bit of Neolithic as well. So I thought it would be
appropriate to work there, and he certainly agreed. This was, of
course, a joint team operation with himself and his people from
the University of Allahabad. There was G. R. Sharma, V. N. Misra,
B. B. Misra, there was Pal [Prasanta Kumar] Mandal. Those were
his main people.
And from here, there came out some of my graduate students.
Rob Blumenschine, Carole Sussman, Steve Brandt, and Betty Goerke
from the College of Marin, who was interested in the Paleolithic
and looking at heat treatment of stone.
So you got the group out there, was it 80?
We applied for funding to NSF and got it, and Sharma, of course,
applied for the permit and got it. So we went out in 1980, the
following year, in other words. And 1980 was a very full year in
which we did quite an extensive amount of survey and excavation.
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
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Also, Martin Williams came out and brought one of his
colleagues from Macquarie University in Australia. Martin was
teaching there. And we had an excellent season. We also did
quite a bit of ethno-archaeology, looking at the remains of
temporary camps of nomadic shepherds who--their main area, of
course, was in the Ganga Valley. They spent quite half the year
with their flocks, wandering around all the countryside to the
south.
Troy: The Ganga Valley is where in relationship to the Son?
Clark: Due north- -well, the Ganges, Ganga. And Allahabad was more or
less due north of the middle reaches of the Son Valley where we
were working.
Troy: What were the people like who were there when you folks showed up?
Who was living in the Son Valley? Farmers?
Clark: I suppose basically I d say it was peasant farmers. Although some
of them were fairly rich and so on. They cultivated rice, of
course, and I think barley, possibly wheat. Vegetables of various
kinds. They had water buffaloes.
Troy: Were they quite interested in what you were doing?
Clark: Not all that much, no.
Troy: Well, your sites weren t right in the middle of their fields,
obviously.
Clark: The amazing thing was that you could see none of the--it was so
agricultural, and terraces and canals and things being dug all
over the place, almost all trees had been cut down for one reason
or another, and you couldn t really see what the indigenous
vegetation was. Part of our area included the southern part of
the Vindhya Hills overlooking the Son Valley, near a place called
Sihawal.
Up there lived a group of people they also lived down in the
valley as well, and they also cultivated that had been more
basically hunting-gathering peoples. They still did a lot of both
hunting and gathering of wild plants, and they were the Baiga.
It s in the volume that I worked on. These were people that had
been studied intensively. There was a book written by one of
India s greatest anthropologists, English, who was married to--I
think he had two Baiga wives, one after the other. Verrier Elwin
is his name. That was a very valuable book indeed. A biography
of him has just recently come out.
245
Troy: His work would have given you some background?
Clark: Exactly, yes. They were extremely interesting people. We got a
lot of data from them about the material culture and so on, their
bows, arrow, how they used them, all that kind of thing.
Troy: It s incredible that within India there are these indigenous
peoples who are so isolated.
Clark: Well, yes. And also, that area was said to be a game reserve, and
any kind of game reserve in India that wasn t some maharajah s
hunting lodge or something like a hunting preserve, is likely to
disappear eventually. What s happened to it now I don t know. It
may still be a fairly isolated area. But there were rock shelters
up there with paintings in them, very interesting. We excavated
one of the sites. This is all published in this volume by my
students and myself. It was great, we greatly enjoyed that
season.
Getting Around by Elephant
Clark: Getting up to the escarpment, you could either walk, which is what
we did do most times, but every so often we hired an elephant and
we would take it in turns riding on the back of this elephant.
You could get about four or five people on the back of the
elephant. They would put a cross between thinnish mattresses, and
blankets which were roped on, and you held on to the ropes when
the elephant was down on the ground, and then it would get up, of
course. And then there wasnot quite as bad as a camel. It was
very comfortable indeed.
Troy: More comfortable than a camel?
Clark: Oh, much more comfortable than a camel. Oh, yes. The only thing
that we did not do was to ride on the back of it when it was
climbing up the escarpment. It was a remarkable thingthe step
would sort of be about that high, between one block of this
sandstone and the next one, so on like that. The mahout would be
on top, of course, urging it on. Very impressive.
The elephant we had the first year had only one tusk. The
following year, I said, "Yes, we d like to hire the elephant
again." "Oh," he said, no, that would not be good, actually,
because I think it was after we left or some time after we left
this elephant ran amok. They didn t know what it was, toothache
or something like that. It was walking down the main street of
246
Sihawal, and it saw a jeep with some people in it, and this
elephant charged it. These people shot out of the sides. It
turned the jeep over. Absolutely incredible. Went onthere was
a truck behind that, and when it got to the truck, it just
stopped. Everything was all right after that. Amazing.
So they recommended, and I think we agreed, that it probably
wouldn t be a good thing to have that elephant again. But it must
have been a magnificent sight, seeing the people pouring out of
the jeep, and it knocking the jeep over.
Troy: Now, you d seen elephants in Africa, but you d never seen them
used in the way the Indian elephant is used.
Clark: No. They were, of course, used in Africa. The Belgians had a
program in the northern part of what was the Belgian Congo, and
there they were used to move logs and things around in the logging
areas. I m sure that s disappeared now, of course.
Troy: And these were African elephants.
Clark: African elephants, yes. And almost certainly they were used in
the Mediterranean areas of Africa, in classical historic times.
Of course, there were elephants, you see, being used by Alexander.
What was Alexander s date, 400 B.C. something?
Troy: Yes. I think.
Clark: Well, it could have been 1000 B.C. Yes, certainly, I should
think. And if you look at coins from places like Gyrene and those
other Greco-Roman sites in north Africa which depict elephants,
you can see at least onethere aren t all that number of coins
that show thisone certainly had the small ears of the Indian
elephant. On the other hand, others had large ears like the
African elephant, so it must have been a mixture of the elephants,
sort of elephant brigade or whatever you like to call it that
Hannibal had.
But the African elephant was never really domesticated. That
involves genetic changes essentially.
Troy: So when you got back the next season, did you get another
elephant?
Clark: Oh, yes, that was perfectly all right, yes.
Betty Goerke from the College of Marin, she attempted to do a
heat treatment of stone. There s not time to go into that, I
think, but if you heat silicious stone, like flint and chert,
247
something like that, fine grain sandstone, quartzite, you can
flake it much more readily, because it changes the crystal
structure, molecular structure, whatever you want, of the thing.
She was trying to do that. That didn t really come off, because I
think she buried the cherts too deeply.
The other experiment that she did was to take some flaked
material that we had done, spread it out on the ground, and get
the elephant to walk over it back and forth, to see what kind of
edge damage you would get. That produced a certain amount of
damage, but not all that much. Probably depends on how hard the
ground is. Those studies are all written up.
Troy: Interesting attempts to make some determination about what the
factors may have been that produced the rock that you were seeing.
Clark: Yes. We did, of course, actually findthe only ones, I think,
that have ever been describedheat treatment ovens in a Neolithic
site that we excavated the last year. The first year that we were
there we did a lot of survey work, walking and so on, finding
sites. We had to find them. Crossing back and forth over the
Son, which was quite fun.
Troy: You could walk across the Son at that point?
Clark: It depended on the time of year. Sometimes you had to get a
dugout, sometimes you walked across.
We had two Acheulean sites there- -one was good, the other was
somewhat disappointing. We found one good Middle Stone Age site,
a place called Patpara, which we excavated and did a whole lot of
gridding and so on. We did all the analysis, of course, of all of
this, in camp, so that we had it complete. We didn t take any of
the collections away. We analyzed all these and Betty drew the
artifacts we wanted drawn, so we had all that when we left. That
was the basis, of course, of the publications.
Baghor. and the Shiva Shrine
Clark: We also did some extremely interesting work at Upper Paleolithic
sites, two at a place called Baghor. Baghor I was Upper
Paleolithic, late Upper Paleolithic, and Baghor II was Mesolithic.
These were excavated two of the seasons. Mark Kenoyer actually
did Baghor I. Baghor II was excavated by Carol Sussman and Bill
MacCormack, who lives in Lafayette. You will meet him; they re
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coming to that cocktail party. Mark Kenoyer is at Madison,
Wisconsin, now.
One of the most interesting things we found there was what I
think almost certainly was a shrine dating to about 10,000 years
ago. The Paleolithic site looked rather like it was in northern
Iraq, an industry known as the Zarzian, and it looked a bit like
that. Rather refined. But what we found was a circle, I suppose
it was probably about nearly a meter across, of stones, natural
stones, all put down in the circle. In the middle, there was
lying flat, with one or two pieces broken from it, a curious
natural triangular piece of sandstone from on top of the
escarpment. The confirmation of the layers was sort of
triangular, and it would sort of split off like that. So that in
the middle, you d just get a hollow sort of triangle.
Troy: This was a surface site, or how far down was this?
Clark: It was probably maybe a meter below the surface, something like
that.
Well, it was a good primary context site. We probably
wouldn t have thought much more about it if we hadn t been to
visit a shrine that I think those peasant sheep herders visited
from time to time, and was a shrine that was kept up by some of
the local villagers, not all that far from Baghor I. We visited
that. Again stones had been put around like that, and there were
one or two of those triangular stones there. There was a little
sort of platform, if I remember rightly. And with it as well,
there were--I can t remember whether they were fired or unfired
clay figurines. I think they were animals, maybe humans, I don t
know. And then every so often, somebody would put flowers on the
thing. We went into all that; that s all published.
And the interesting thing is, that was the shrine of the earth
goddess associated with Shiva, I think. Then when we looked into
it a little more carefully, we found in point of fact several of
these villages had these kinds of shrines, and one in particular
looked very much like ours, in association with trees as well,
quite often put at the foot of a tree. The local people, workers
and so on, said, "Yes, this is obviously related. But why did you
break the stone?" Well, we never did break the stone. There it
was. We made a full photographic recording of all of that.
Troy: And you explained that the stone had broken itself, a natural
break, or had been broken for some time.
249
Troy:
Clark:
Clark: Exactly. I think when we left that the local villagers had put a
wall around it, and had started to preserve it again. They
recognized it as being a shrine, and that was 10,000 years old.
Troy: When you explained to them that it was that old, did they
comprehend that time?
Clark: Not really, I don t think. Very few of us can appreciate what
10,000 years represents. But that was extremely interesting. We
published it in Antiquity. We should publish a good deal more of
it, I think, really.
There s a lot that you did that was not published?
Well, the full second-year report wasn t published. And of
course, to photograph those sites, the only way you could get any
decent photograph was to climb up a ladder and photograph from
about thirty feet up. We got the local people to cut down a
couple of lengths of bamboo, and they made a ladder out of this.
We had ropes from it, and about half a dozen people on the end of
each rope, I think it was. Must have been--yes. I would climb up
it to photograph. It felt a little precarious on top, but you did
get good results from that.
Troy: Well, you re a hell of a camera man.
Clark: One had to do all that kind of thing in those days.
Troy: Hot and humid and jungly? What was it like there at those sites?
Clark: It was somewhat humid, yes.
There were crocodiles in the river. Muggers, as they re
called. That s I suppose the Hindi word for a crocodile. There
was also the gavial, you see. That was another kind of crocodile
that had the very narrow jaws. They were all right, the
crocodiles. You wanted to check that there weren t too many of
those around.
Logistics and Health Issues
Troy: Were the logistics on this difficult, Desmond?
Clark: In India? There were about 100 people on the payroll. Sharma did
all the logistics of moving everything and so on. Moving all the
tents, that kind of thing. You see, there would be at least one
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Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
large marquis that we would meet in and so on, and then we would
have other tents. Fine Indian tents, with the yellow inside, sort
of linedbeautiful cotton tents. All that was done by Sharma,
who employed the local people to do all sorts of things.
And that, of course, is interesting. You see, in India, and a
number of other places where there s terrific overpopulation, and
where there may be some kind of a caste system, people, workmen,
who are employed to do a particular job, they don t do anything
else, and I think that s one of the ways in which families managed
to get enough to live on. If you look and see various pieces of
earthwork going on, maybe in connection with building a huge thing
across a valley for a railway or a dam, it wasn t done with huge
great earth-moving equipment, not when I was there, certainly, it
was done by people. And many of the people who carried the head
pan, you see, which would have rocks or earth or whatever it was
in it, either up the hill or down the hill, were women. That s
the way in which families got by.
An odd, ironic security, I suppose in the caste system in the
sense that everybody knew their place. And everybody knew from
whence would come their livelihood.
Yes. I imagine, to some extent, it s broken down by now.
Good health on those two seasons, Desmond?
pretty healthy?
Everybody stayed
Yes. On the whole I think they did. There was a certain amount
of tummy upset, and the cook s idea of cleanliness was negligible.
You would go along and find him cutting up the vegetables on his
bed and that kind of thing. And of course they never had very
much idea of boiling water. Betty always used to go around--the
water that we drank would be in pots about that high [demonstrates
size with his hands] --they d be about sort of that wideso there
would be about four or five of these. And the first time she went
in, there was the water all tepid. It all came out again, so
they d have to reboil it. They finally got the idea of boiling
it.
Troy: Well, they would have no conception of microorganisms or anything,
I m sure.
Clark: No. Exactly. But that s something that we really insisted on.
251
The National Parks and the Animals
Troy: So you had two seasons.
Clark: Three seasons actually, 80, 81, 82. The second season was a
short one. I don t think we worked very much in the Son at that
time. We may have done some work on an Upper Paleolithic site
that was actually written up by Pal [Mandal] and B.B. [Misra] . I
think it was in the monograph.
But apart from that, the main interest was to go to what was I
think the biggest national park in India, in the northern part of
Madhya Pradesh, Kanha National Park. Because we wanted to see
what the indigenous vegetation was like. And we also wanted to
see some of the animals that were around. We did see some animals
up with the Baiga--pigs up there, and I think there were cheetah
there and antelope, I suppose they would have been chital. We may
even have seen a black buck, which is a beautiful looking
antelope. According to the rock art and so on, there were Indian
rhinoceros around there. Elephants, of course, as well.
But it was magnificent at Kanha. We saw everything. We saw
what the vegetation looked like. We saw the kinds of changes that
you got between river valleys and the rest of it. There were
different kinds of vegetation and the animals associated with
these. That was really superb, gave us an idea of what it was
like in the Son, in other words, what the habitat was like for
these various cultures that we d been looking at at different
climatic times.
Perhaps the most exciting thing was that there were tigers
there. And while we were there, there was a visit by some
minister or something, so they were going to try and find a tiger
for him. What they used to do was that they would get some old,
decrepit water buffalo and sort of tie it up somewhere. The
tigers would come along and kill it and eat it--eat a lot of it.
And then the next morning they d go along. Of course after the
tigers had eaten, they were then sleepy, they d eaten so much that
they d simply just lay around in the area.
You could go on the back of an elephant. There were three
people on one side and another three on the other side and the
mahout. You went down about five o clock, and you climbed up a
little step--I forget what you call those things and the elephant
came alongside and you just stepped onto it. And there it was.
And off you went to see the tigers. And you could get to within,
oh, I suppose the far side of that room. You were on the
elephant. The tigers didn t worry. The tigers were sort of
252
sittinglying there. Sometimes they were lying on their backs
with their feet sort of flopping like that. You could see them
panting as well, absolutely amazing. [laughter] I think they
were panting from the exertions of having eaten so much meat.
Incredible. I ve got some fine photographs of those.
Then one of the tigers got up and moved around. And the
mahout said, "It s gone down into the nula." So we went around.
Troy: The nula would be like a little gorge?
Clark: It s a little dry sort of gully. Mostly drythere may have been
a bit of water in it.
We came down into that and went towards where the nula
switched around like that. And the mahout said, "The tiger s in
that group of bamboo, down at the end there." And again we got to
about that range, thirty feet at the most. And you could just see
it, if you looked carefully. It was absolutely amazingthe
stripes blended in incredibly well. Absolutely amazing. I ve got
a photograph of that. And then this tiger decided he d had enough
and moved on. But that was fantastic. I ve never forgotten that.
We also visited Bandipur National Park, which also had a whole
lot of game, one or two sites in it and also tigers. I can
remember what we did see there which we hadn t seen very well
before was the gaur the wild buffalo, not the domesticated water
buffalo called the bos, but very impressive wild cattle. Very,
very impressive. And also tigers there. I think we probably saw
a tiger also. But that park also has had famous white tigers. I
suppose due to some genetic change, their background was white not
tawny colored. Again that had been some rajah s hunting area.
Those two are the best national parks, I think, in India.
They seem to be relatively well preserved, shall I say. There s
so much encroachment everywhere these days, of course, in Africa,
but also in India as well, by local villagers within the
peripheral areas coming in cutting trees, that kind of thing,
slaughtering tigers.
There was a particularly unfortunate one at Bandipur. There
was a famous female tiger there which had got used to tourists and
so on, and some damn chap came and shot it. I m not so certain
that he wasn t associated with the guards there or something like
that. It was in the paper some weeks ago.
Troy: Were there tigers in the area where you were working on the Son?
253
Clark: I don t think so any longer. There were leopards, of course. I
think we probably did once see a leopard, yes, when we were on the
escarpment, but I don t think leopards actually came down into the
farming areas. There was probably enough game for them up above,
in any case.
Troy: Leopards don t generally become man-eaters, do they?
Clark: Every so often, yes, they do indeed. One of the man-eaters of
Kumaon was a leopard, if I remember rightly. When we were at
Kanha you could watch, I think they were probably cheetah, but
they could have been leopards stalking the chital, these spotted,
delightful looking antelopes that went around in small groups.
But the leopards didn t worry us.
Part of that season was taken up with going higher up the Son,
looking for possible sites with good fauna in association that
were early biface sites, in Middle Stone Age. We found one or two
and others some had been found before. We visited one man who
had a private collection up there, and what we were really doing
was looking for a suitable area or sites that [Prakash] Sinha, who
was a graduate student, I suppose you would say at the University
of Allahabad, was going to work on for his dissertation, which is
what he actually did later on and published and finished his
dissertation and got his doctorate.
Kunjhun II
Clark: The last year, of course, we spent working. Mark Kenoyer worked
at Baghor I, Bill MacCormack worked at Baghor II, and I and
Gurcharan Khanna, who is a Sikh born in Canada and was a graduate
student here, now a computer expert at Dartmouth College, nice
man, we worked at a site called Kunjhun. We called it Kunjhun II,
because Kunjhun had been found probably about two years or more
earlier by Sharma s survey group which had worked in the Son.
That was particularly interesting, because we got a fine
stratified sequence with a large step trench, deep step trench
that we excavated, but we also found a surface at which the cherts
and chalcedonies collected in the form of cobbles from gravels in
the river adjacent had been heat treated. And these insofar as I
know, are the only prehistoric heat-treated ovens that I know of.
They were in the form of an elongated oval depression, fairly
shallow, a few centimeters deep with a mass of broken, burned clay
in it and around it.
254
We found two of these and in association with them we found a
large quantity of cobbles of chalcedony and chert, some of which
had cracked due to overheating. Others had been flaked and there
was a lot of flaking going on, a lot of debitage around, but we
also found some finely finished blade cores, fine neolithic blade
cores and we were able to refit one or two blades onto one or two
of these cores. That was a fine site.
Troy: That doesn t happen very often when you can refit the blades onto
the cores.
Clark: Not too often. And I think if we had had any opportunity when we
had got back to Allahabad to try refitting, we would have been
able to refit a great deal of material. But we just didn t. It
came to the end of the season, and we left that for one or another
of Sharma s people to do, which I don t think they ever did. But
that is something that certainly would well repay someone to work
on. These were beautifully fine blades, many of them retouched on
the reverse side, and they must have been used as some kind of
knives or sickle blades there is some reference to this kind of
thing, girls cutting grasses or somethingin one of the Vedas, I
think.
Troy: And these were dated to approximately what, Desmond?
Clark: The date of this was around about 2,000 something B.C. We got
carbon dates of this, there was of course a lot of charcoal around
as well, fine charcoal. They were living around there making
those, working the cherts and chalcedonies.
We were also able to go to Cambay in Gujurat which was well
known for the manufacture of those hexagonal, beautiful orange
colored beads, which were traded significantly all over the Indian
Ocean and made their way across Africa probably as the caravan
routes almost as far as Senegal. You could buy in the market
beads made almost certainly in Cambay when we were there in the
1960s for example.
Troy: That article situated me in India a bit better. I could see the
location of the Belan River in relationship to the Son River.
Clark: Two on either side. The Belan to the north and the Son to the
south of the Vindyha Mountains .
Troy: The interesting thing in reading about India, just the preliminary
articles and Sharma s articles, was what an extensive history
there is. So much more in some ways than in Africa.
255
Clark: Oh, vastly moreoutside the Nile Valley or the northern parts of
Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Plateau with the Axumite culture of
course.
Troy: Sharma s article on the shrine, which was published initially in
Antiquity, was published in Anthroquest, which is the publication
of the Leakey Foundation. You can just browse through
Anthroquest, and lo and behold what did I find, in I think the
same issue, was an article on Louis Leakey at the Calico Site.
Clark: Oh, really! [laughter] Yes. There were some very good issues.
They were done by the widow of a journalist, I think it was, and
she d been an editor for a number of years of something else.
They re written essentially for the lay people. Trying to tell
them what the Leakey Foundation is all about.
Holi
Clark: We were fortunate, of course, in being in Allahabad at the time of
an important ceremony that there was. It culminated in the Feast
of Holi, the equivalent, more or less, I suppose, of All Hallow s
Eve, or Mardi Gras or something like that, where all the evil
things come out, and in particular, of course, the underdogs have
the opportunity of more or less sort of telling the high and
mighty what they think of them.
The other ceremony, of course, was the bathing in the Ganges
or Ganga, from the point at Allahabad. An enormous tent was set
up on the whole of that area, all sorts of fakirs and holy men,
parades, ceremonies, and so quite remarkable. And then the
bathing, which I think culminated with the Holi celebration.
Holi is where more often than not the people will go around
and throw color at you. We were dressed in white smocks and so
on, white trousers. What Mark Kenoyer had organized to be thrown
at us was a kind of purple dye, absolutely remarkable, and we have
one or two photographs, I think of what we looked like both before
and after, absolutely covered in purple dye. All over one s hair
and everything. It was quite a joyous sort of ceremony, the whole
thing.
Across the river on the other side, I forget the name of the
town there, but it culminated on the river at a cliff. This cliff
was a magnificent stratified sequence of occupation material, so
pottery would come pouring out from it and so on, stuff coming out
on the little foreshore. We were down looking at this and also,
256
of course, there were parts of human bones there which was rather
fun. We collected one or two pieces of this, and then we suddenly
realized, in point of fact, what this is: those on the foreshore
were the remains of individuals who had died and been relegated
ceremonially to the river, which fixed that. But quite
interesting. At any rate, we left those alone.
Troy: When you realized what that site contained.
Clark: We collected old ones, fossil ones, but not modern ones.
Cambay. and Bead-making
Troy: You mentioned Cambay, is it? On the west coast, the beads.
Clark: Oh, Cambay. Oh, yes indeed. Cambay was an extremely important
center for the manufacture of chalcedony beads. And these were
heat treated. It was agates and chalcedonies that when they were
heat treatednot all of them werethe best kind were a beautiful
orange color. The beads usually were sort of hexagonal, worked
like that in various different ways. There are good descriptions
of this, and we saw the way they were working them when we went
there in the eighties.
We also went to the quarries, because we wanted to try to look
at the whole process. The quarries were within Miocene
conglomerates and softish rocks that were situated, probably 120
miles to the east, southeast or so of Cambay. And there they
mined. The shafts were probably the height of the ceiling here,
ten or twelve feet down to a layer of cobbles. They were quite
narrowish shafts with footholds, and a man would go down and be
working down there. Somebody would lower a leather bucket on a
rope and he d put the cobbles in, and up they would come to a man
on the surface.
The man on the surface, I can t remember whether he used a
stone as a hammer or whether he used a metal hammer, but he d
strike each one and look at it inside, and if it was rightfine
siliceous and so on, it would go into one pile if it was not it
was just thrown into another pile. That s the way they managed to
accumulate all the cobbles. These were dried out to some extent
if I remember rightly--! ve got all this written down in
notebooks --and then they would take them down to Cambay.
Troy: What color were they as he struck them?
257
Clark: Oh, they would be a sort of grayish or brownish mostly. Other
than the agates, of course, where you have banding.
They were sent down to Cambay. The old way of heat treating
was to put them in a biggish kind of oven. I think this was in a
series of layers if I remember rightly, with some finer grass and
wood, fine wood, and bark, in between and then all covered over
with earth. I think they were left for about two or three days,
something like that and cooled.
But they had more or less finished doing that when we visited,
and what they were using then were rectangular little troughs,
about one to two feet deepish with a little wall all the way
around filled up with charcoal, and nothing but ash after they
were finished. A series of pots were put inthere must have been
about twenty to thirty pots in each one of these and inside the
pots was where they would place the cobbles, and the whole thing
would be covered over.
Troy: How big were the cobbles when they broke them down?
Clark: Somewhere between the size of a golf ball and a tennis ball.
And then they would take them out after the heat treatment and
initially flake them. This was done very interestingly. A man
sat on the ground with a very substantial iron spike sticking up
in front of him, and he used a very whippy little hammer, the head
of which was made of buffalo horn if I remember rightlythis was
indirect percussionand he rested the cobble on the spike and hit
it, and sometimes he got the flakes coming off from the bottom end
where the spike was or sometimes from the top, and in that way
they roughly shaped out the hexagonal form or another shape if
they needed them spherical.
Troy: Very adept with that little hammer.
Clark: Exactly. Very good indeed.
And then if they were going to make some of these a beautiful
orange color, it would have to go through another heat treatment,
and then the beautiful orange color came out. But after they were
roughly flaked out then they had to go to be ground.
Troy: The rough flaking out was after that initial firing. They had
been heat treated at that point.
Clark: Yes, that s right. They had been heat treated already. Otherwise
it wouldn t have been possible to have really done it.
258
They used a grindstone--! think it was a foot pedal or
something that turned it around- -when we were there, but in the
old days, I think it was done, if I remember rightly, by putting
them inside a leather bag and throwing them up and down along a
rather polished rectangular floor in a rectangular building. And
there would be one chap at one end and one at the other. They
were all mixed up with a grinding medium, quartz probably, and
where there s corundum, of course, using that. In the bag and
back and forth, back and forth.
And then they were pierced, pierced from both ends. This was
remarkable, and these were extremely fine borings done with a
medium paste in order to produce a hole, and the actual drills
were made of stone, so you see they had to be extremely fine. Of
course that was no longer the case when we were there. But it was
just an absolutely super experience to see this, and these beads
must have gone to Africa, I should say from about ten hundred A.D.
if not before certainly.
Troy: Had you seen any comparable kind of beadwork in Africa?
Clark: Oh, yes there is indeed some of this, but not exactly similar to
the Indian beads. And of course, some of the beads one got in
classical times and late classical times in North Africa may well
have come up the Red Sea from Cambay, because Cambay was on an
estuary from the Indian Ocean.
The first reasonable evidence for the Indian Ocean trade, I
think, is that which we get in the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea,
which is said to have been written, probably by Romano-Greek-cum-
Indian perhaps, or Arab sea captain or merchant around about
either the first century B.C. or the first century A.D. They may
have revised some of those datesit was somewhere around that
time. And it dealt with the ports or little centers down the Red
Sea, and right down the African coast as far as Sofala, south of
where the Limpopo came inthe Limpopo or the Zambezi.
Troy: You mentioned that these beads made it all the way to West Africa
through trade.
Clark: That s the remarkable thing. I think it was fairly easy to move
east and west across the Sahel. It was much more difficult to
move north and south, because if you move north you moved into the
desert, and you had to have quite a lot of knowledge about where
water was and so on and the routes to travel. Otherwise you d
probably get attacked by some curious people. Going south you get
into the savanna where you also get a whole lot of diseases as
well, and so that I think was the reason.
259
But when they first moved straight across, I don t know
precisely. Probably one of the best estimates of time comes from
a very interesting site of shrines and the burial of an important
chief in South Central Nigeria or Central Nigeria. The place is
called Igboo Uku, excavated by Thurston Shaw. There were an
enormous quantity of these kinds of beads there, and the date for
that, I thought was 1400 and something, but it could be earlier.
I d have to look it up. Dates seem to escape me these days.
Troy: I suppose there s a point after which some of that could have
moved around the Cape, but it s more likely that it would have
come across country.
Clark: I think they were much more likely to have come across country. I
doubt they would ever have come around the Cape to deposit them
there. They come to the East African coast and then move across.
And of course you got them, as I say, down as far as Sofala.
South of that I m not certain, but you could also pick them up on
the beaches around Pemba, Zanzibar, Pemba Island, Kilwa--those
sort of Arab-Swahili settlements of the 17th and 18th centuries.
India was particularly interesting to me because of its
prehistoric and the Paleolithic history. There s excellent
Acheulean more or less all over the peninsula, followed by a
Middle Stone Age, which is not all that well known, we had one
very good site, Patapara in the Son Valley and then a superb
Microlithic--well there was Upper Paleolithic there as well, which
is getting a little better known, followed by a Microlithic in the
Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene. In some instances, of
course, it went much later as well.
Troy: And beads in the context of some pottery.
Clark: Yes. These are obviously hunter-gatherers, and the interesting
thing, I think was maybe they were making these beads at that
time, I forget the date. It was a Neolithic pottery, but not the
earliest Neolithic certainly. And it seemed to me very likely
that when the Indus Valley people wanted beads of the beautiful
kind that you find there, the orange hexagonal longish beads they
260
went to the people who were at that time most skilled in flaking
the stone, producing long blades from cores and that was the
hunting-gathering Mesolithic population. I would have thought
that they might well have been the people who worked in some of
these workshops that have been found in some of the Indus Valley
sites, sort of low-caste people who produced these excellent
beads. I wrote a paper about that in a festschrift--! think it
was for Professor Sankalia. I greatly enjoyed the Indian work.
Introduction to Korea and China
Troy: You went first to Korea, and then to China?
Clark: Yes, that s right. I had a Korean student, in fact, Kidong Bae.
We still communicate--! saw him last year, he came through here.
Excellent man, excavating sites up there, sites like Chongokni.
I have a complete album, if not two, of that site and other sites.
Chongokni. Its age is probably about 270,000. I think people try
to make it a little more now, but whether they re successful, I
don t know.
Troy: Did the Koreans have a good sense of archaeology? I know in China
some of the issues involve communication problems and not being
able to get to the sites, but also things having been taken out of
context and subsequently becoming very difficult to date.
Clark: There s quite a lot of that, of course. And also when we first
went there, as well, there was no clear understanding of how to
distinguish between naturally fractured cherts and humanly
fractured ones.
One of the most unfortunate things I remember was going out in
Yunnan with the man who was the paleontologist there who was
working a latish Pleiocene site with some very interesting
hominoid remains in it. He said that he had found a site with
artifacts in it, and fauna, so we went to see that site and indeed
yes, it had fauna, it had quite a bit of organic sedimentclays
and so on, absolutely fine. And there were a whole lot of cherts
and so on, smallish cherts, and every one that we looked at was
natural. We probably didn t find too many, but he said, "Oh, I
have a whole lot back in the lab .
"
Troy: In Yunnan.
Clark: In Kunming, which is that capital, of course.
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When we got back there, one after the other was brought out.
They were all natural. The greatest tragedy.
Troy: Was he in disbelief? Or did he accept this?
Clark: We told him. Nick Toth was there with us as well, and so was
Kathy, his wife. And we told him that we were afraid these are
all natural, but don t take our word for it--ask other people, and
so on. And that was the last we ever heard of it, which was very
tragic really, because we certainly were thinking that we would
find earlier Paleolithic sites in Yunnan, but we didn t. There s
one doubtful one in the southern part of Yunnan, an important site
[Yuanmou] known for a number of years. And it was said that there
were artifacts that came from there.
We saw two things that were thought to be choppers in a lab in
Beijing, which looked as if they might well be--well, cores that
could have been choppers. But we looked at the site [Yuanmou] and
they were all clays, I don t think there were any natural stones
lying around. So that one, as far as I am concerned, is
debatable, but the age of the hominid remains associated at two
million years--! think they are incisor teeth, not the most
exciting thing. They re said to be Homo erectus, and they date
from around about 1 point something I think.
Working with Wei Qi. and Professor Jia. 1989
Troy: I remember seeing a picture of you and Kathy and Nick in China- -it
looked cold as hell.
Clark: Oh, yes. That was in the Nihewan, northwest of Beijing. We went
up there in December, over Christmas, 89, after the Tiananmen
Square nonsense and so on. Things had got back to normal so far
as transportation was concerned, and we were allowed to go into
Yangyuan county and see the sites. That was what made us realize
that, yes, indeed, these are early Paleolithic sites, and
thereafter followed our seasons, three seasons, I think.
Troy: I think you had two or three, yes. You were in Korea just the one
time, is that right?
Clark: I went there on a visit a second time, yes. Again with Nick and
Kathy--probably 90 or 91. Could have been 92, I suppose. And
we saw another of these sites that Kidong Bae, who had been my
student was excavating.
262
Troy: Do you think the Chinese feel the need to be competitive? The
possibility of Paleolithic sites there remains doubt.
Clark: Two had been found already in the eighties, one of which had been
worked by Wei Qi. Wei Qi was our main colleague associated with
all the field work, organized initially, by Professor Jia Lanpo.
Troy: And they re at the same university?
Clark: They re at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and
Paleoanthropology in Beijing. That is one of the institutes of
the Academia Sinica. Wei Qi had excavated this site called
Donggutuo and found artifacts and these were the ones that we had
seen initially in June, 89 when I had got to Beijing just in time
for Tiananmen Square.
It all started at the conference we had here in July 1986,
when I retired, and we had a conference of African prehistorians,
archaeologists and so on, which was most exciting. It was
organized by Jack Harris, and quite a lot of the funding was
provided by Diana Holt, one of the heiresses of the Budweiser--and
that was terrific. To that there came Professor Jia Lanpo and two
of his colleagues, younger colleagues, and they came because he
was due to come on a visit the State Department had organized to
go to Albuquerque and work with Lewis Binford.
Binford had been over the summer before in Beijing at Chou
K ou Tien to study fauna from there and he had unfortunately made
himself so unpopular with Jia Lanpo and some of the other people
that Jia said, "No, I m not going to go to Albuquerque." So they
looked around quickly to see where they could send him, and they
found that this conference in Berkeley was on so they sent him
here. Jia came and addressed us, gave an interesting slide
lecture on his discoveries in China, what there was there, what
needs to be done and so on and it was a great success.
He was with us for about ten days, or so, I think it was and
when he left he said, "Why don t you come over and have a look at
our sites over there." And I said, "We d love to do that." And
so one or two of us did and he took us to both historic sites,
Buddhist sites and so on up in the north, sites down in the south
as well, both Paleolithic sites and historic sites. Of course the
fantastic depth of Chinese civilization was so completely
impressive for someone working in Africa, where you don t have
that kind of thing more often than not outside the Nile Valley and
the Mediterranean Basin. Where though, of course, you have the
idea of the timelessness of the human history based on the animals
and on the vegetation.
263
So in China we had the history. So at the end of that,
Professor Jia said would we like to come and work with them. And
I said, "Yes, of course, we would." And so we drew up a proposal,
Professor Clark Howell and myself, and we submitted it to the Luce
Foundation, which had just started a program in social science,
and we were successful in getting funding for it for three years.
And so that s how we went ahead, on the basis of that and worked
with Wei Qi at Donggutuo.
We found other sites there. We worked with Xia Fei, who was
running the prehistoric side of the Institute for National
Heritage and Antiquities in Hebei Province in Shij iazhuang . The
capital. And we got on extremely well with him and with the
people in the provincial capital Yangyuan, and we had a delightful
three years there. Nick and Kathy continued the program after our
funding came to an end, and they had one more year there, I think,
in the field with both Wei Qi and Xia Fei. We got excellent
results.
Frank Brown was the main geologist, geochronologist who worked
with us there, and the sites appear to date from around about 1
million years on the basis mainly of paleomagnetic reversal. Some
Chinese working at other sites reckon that they ve got earlier
ages. One of the problems of course is, you see, to decide when
you re within the main stage of reversal, and then you come across
a shorter period of normality in the magnetic axis. That is to
say, there is a sort of in-built desire to equate it with the
earliest evidence that you have, and I m afraid that is what one
or two people have done. It appears to be about a million, or
perhaps a little more than a million, and I think that s probably
the only, the oldest reasonably well-dated site that we have as
yet in China.
Troy: You had a few Chinese students here who went through the doctoral
program, is that right?
Clark: We had one here. I can t remember, some may have been here for a
time, but they had already got their, or most of them had got
their B.A. One had not. The one we had from Yunnanthat was
Pong Nan Kin. Is that right? Yes. So he took his B.A. here and
then went to Indiana. The others we had for a shortish time, and
we moved them off to various universities that said that they
would like to have them. Some went on, were successful. Others
dropped out for one reason or another.
Our main success, I think, besides the understanding we got
from the artifact assemblages and fauna in its climatic and
environmental context, of course, was the training that we gave in
paleolithic methodology in the field, and surveying, recording,
264
and analysis of assemblages. We did all of that back there. We
had a lab in, I can t remember the name of the place at the
moment. It was a little village center on the plateau overlooking
the sites and the valley.
Troy: What was the nearest town there, Desmond? Do you remember that?
Which province is that?
Clark: Offhand, no. It s in Hebei Province. It was the east end of the
Nihewan Valley, the Nihewan being the river going through the
middle of the thing. The nearest big town, or the town that we
worked through, as I say, was the provincial headquarters in
Yangyuan. But the nearest town, down at the bottom of thebut I
can t remember what it was called at the moment. It wasn t all
that--it was rather a scruffy town and of course, coal trucks
would regularly go back and forth on that road. It was quite a
dangerous road into it. So we didn t go down to it any more often
than we had to.
Troy: So Desmond, did you confront the tanks in Tiananmen Square?
Clark: No, I wasn t anything to do with the protests.
Troy: You were in Beijing, though.
Clark: We were in Beijing. We were in a hotel up more or less opposite
the IVPP--the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology and
Paleoanthropology. That s where we were until we worked in the
institute and we didn t go out very much as far as I can remember.
I was particularly interested ineverything was getting sort of
tense.
The time we did go out was to pick up Nick and Kathy at the
airport in Beijing, which is a long way away. Yes --when we went
in a taxi, of course, I think, or it may have been one of the IVPP
vehicles, it probably was, and en route we passed burnt out troop
carriers and a tank or two en route. But you could divert around
what appeared to be places where there was a whole lot of people
collected together and milling about. So we managed to get there
and back.
I stayed in the airport for quite a long time after everybody
had come by just in case they had been left behind or anything
like that. No sign of them at all. And so we had to go back, and
as I say everything got very, very tense. And so we got back to
the hotel and the last piece of communication that I got on the
telephone was from them. It was about ten o clock at night in
Beijing, and they said that they did not come on because they were
traveling on British Air. British Air said they strongly advised
265
people if they did not have to go to Beijing to stay behind in
Hong Kong. That s where they were going through because it was
very likely they would have to evacuate people, and they would
need the places on the airplane. So that s what happened.
And they said, "We re in the hotel in Hong Kong at the
airport. And we will wait here." I can t remember whether that
was the night before or two nights before. I think it was the
night before Tiananmen Square, probably, yes. And we wondered.
It was very difficult to get any kind of in f ormation. I didn t
have a radio. The only information, of course was in Chinese
coming over the television. It was impossible to find out what
was going on. We did know that all the transport had come to a
full stop. There were armiesone seemed to be pro, the other
seemed to be agin and so on, there might be a battle going on.
The American Embassy said, "Don t go to the airport." The
British Embassy said, "We advise you to go to the airport and take
some food and some water and wait until you can get an airplane
and get out." And that indeed is what we did. All the airline
offices were all closed, so we went to the airport. I had one of
Clark Howell s graduate students with his wife and one small child
I think it was, yes. They had come over with me. His wife was
Chinese, actually. So we had to get them out as well, so we all
went to the airport and sat there.
I thought we would have to wait for a long time, I remember we
were about seventy- fourth or something in the line. Then the wife
said, "I m going to see what Air China could produce," and she
went over. She said, "I think we may manage to get something
there," and we wormed our way through and finally got to the
ticket counter after it had been opened sometime the middle of the
morning, I think it was, and they said, "Yes, but you ll have to
pay in--"--we had to convert our dollars at the bank. Well, we
fought our way back into the bank, changed our dollars, fought our
way back and got tickets. And we left about four-thirty that
afternoon on Air China.
Troy: So you actually spent less than twenty- four hours in the airport.
Clark: Yes, we were extremely lucky. We had expected to be there
possibly up to three days. We d taken food and water.
Troy: Let s see, how many total seasons with the various programs?
Clark: We had three seasons of excavation and study. Also in 97 we went
out to Yunnan with Tim White, Clark Howell, and a studentmet up
with Professor Jia, and we went up to the Yunnan sites in
particular. And of course 89, that was when we started; 90,
266
that s right, we did that with Clark and Tim. And in 87 of
course, we d had the big tour with Professor Jia, which was
excellent.
267
XI COLLEAGUES AND STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Anthropology Department Faculty. Social Life
Troy: Who were some of the people when you first came to Berkeley?
Clark: There was Ted [Theodore Doney] McCown, as I say, who worked with
Dorothy [Annie Elizabeth] Garrod at Tabun and who described, with
Sir Arthur Keith, the Neanderthal population, the buried
population, from the Skhul cave. He also had, but never actually
completed the writeup of, the Natufian skeletal remains, which
later went back to Harvard. But he was there, teaching Old World
archaeology.
Bob [Robert Fleming] Heizer, of course, was there, teaching
New World, particularly Californian archaeology, and Mesoamerican.
A very good friend of ours. And John [Rowland] Rowe, who worked
in Peru and has done outstanding work there, of course. I don t
think there were any other archaeologists. Well, later, yes, we
had John [Allen] Graham.
But the main stimulus, of course, came from Sherry [Sherwood
Larned] Washburn [1911-2000], building this program of
primatology, hunting-gathering populations, and archaeology. This
was the leading program in the New World and, to a great extent,
in various other places for at least a couple of decades.
Troy: How did you find faculty life in the United States? Was it quite
a bit different from your experiences at Cambridge?
Clark: Yes, it was. It was more friendly, on the whole, I found. It was
less formal, of course, much less formal than life had been in
England before the war, and a little after it, of course. And
also in Northern Rhodesia, which was still in a kind of Edwardian
mindset. You know, you left calling cards on people and that kind
of thing still. So none of that here. People are much more
268
informal, and we enjoyed it. We had some excellent friends. Gene
[Eugene A.] Hammel, who had done some archaeology in Peru or
Ecuador, I think it was, and, of course, later went on to become a
leading demographer in this university and is still working on
that, in particular on the Balkans.
Sherry Washburn I ve talked about, I think, already, who was
absolutely outstanding. And then Bob Heizer. We were very good
friends.
Troy: Did you fellows get together at the Faculty Club and so on?
Clark: Yes, indeed.
Troy: Was that kind of a center of intellectual life in Berkeley?
Clark: Indeed, yes. And, of course, you see, we were closely associated
with people in other disciplines, other departments, particularly
in geology and paleontology, because if you re going to be a
prehistorian, you have to know something about bones, you have to
know something about rocks, you have to know something about
sedimentology, and you have to know something about volcanology
and tectonics. So it was essential that we led our students into
training with geologists, paleontologists, and so on.
We had an extremely fine friend who was not in the same field.
He dealt with crystals and bending crystals and so on. He was a
New Zealander, Frank Turner, who was a magnificent person. In the
Department of Geology. He had been chairman of geology for a
time. He died several years ago, alas. And of course, there was
Garniss Curtis and Richard Hay, two of them who in particular were
very good friends and essential. Provided essential training for
our graduate students. Field courses, identification of rocks,
all that kind of thing. And, of course, the dating that Garniss
and Jack Evernden did. We saw a great deal of them these early
days .
Then also there was Don [Donald E.] Savage, the
paleontologist, and I think in point of fact that Bill Clemens had
been one of Don s students, but the two of them there ran
magnificent courses for us, for our students, in recognition of
mammalian fossils in particular. Labs. And then, of course, we
had joint seminars with them and with the geologists.
Troy: When you came, was the anthropology department fairly insular, or
was this interdepartmental work going on?
Clark: I would have said so far as prehistory was concerned, yes, it
probably was rather insular. In other fields, for example, Bob
Heizer did a great deal of work with a man called Cook, Sherburne
269
Cook, on shell mounds, trying to identify the size of the
populations and all that by quantitative and chemical analysis,
crust sites, that kind of thing.
Troy: And he was on the faculty here?
Clark: Yes, he was on the faculty here, but I can t remember whether it
was in chemistry or what it was--some other field. So that it
wasn t really until we started dealing with Old World prehistory
that required some understanding of the paleolithic that we
started this more interdisciplinary approach. And, of course, it
was Glynn Isaac and myself who did it, basically.
Troy: Would you say that the social life was a little less formal than
it was in Africa, too?
Clark: Oh, yes, very much so. And we enjoyed it very much. We d go to
each other s houses or apartments and greatly enjoy eating
together, discussing together, music together, games together. I
remember Laura Nader was one of them. She taught us some game
[limbo] where you had to sort of on your back, I think, get
underneath some bar, which was pretty low, a short way above the
ground, without touching it.
Troy: So the social life at the University of California at Berkeley was
quite a little bit different than what you experienced at
Cambridge.
Clark: Oh, yes. Much less formal. It took a little getting used to,
but we greatly enjoyed it, of course, and we still, I m glad to
say, have some of those really good friends. They re still with
us.
Troy: You mentioned at one point, Desmond, and I think Betty concurred,
that your favorite place where you ve lived, apart from
Livingstone, has been Berkeley. What was it that you felt made
you feel so close to Berkeley?
Clark: Well, I suppose it was the academic life, which I greatly enjoyed,
and so, of course, did Betty as well. And the ability to build up
a library, a great deal of reading, of course, in those days. The
ability to take journals by joining various societies and so on,
and I still have a number of those around, though I can t read
them very well except by talking machine. Yes, it was great fun.
We greatly enjoyed the garden. We greatly enjoyed getting out
weekends. To begin with, we d go up to the Gold Rush country,
probably spend a night out, or sometimes we d go out in the early
morning and come back in the late afternoon on a Sunday or a
270
Saturday. We greatly enjoyed it. Went to a number of historic
places, of course.
And in particular, hiking, walking in the Point Reyes National
Seashore, that kind of thing. Then, of course, by obtaining this
bit of land in Inverness to build this funny little cabin on made
us a little less migratory, if you see what I mean, and kept us
within the Bay Area, or just outside it. I mean, we greatly
enjoyed that.
We enjoyed our time with our students, and we prepared for the
next field season.
Troy: You mentioned in our conversation with Steve Brandt that you
always felt really that Africa was your home. Talk a little bit
about how you chose to become a U.S. citizen--! believe, in 1993.
Clark: We d been here for a long time, of course, and America had been
very good to us. We d given them everything that we could give
them, and then there came a time when the law in connection with
joint ownership of property by resident aliens was changed, and
instead of having to pay death duty, tax, estate tax, I suppose it
may be called, after the second joint owner died, they changed it
and said, no, you d have to pay after the first one died and then
after the second one died.
Well, we didn t have a great deal of money, and we did not
want to leave such little as we had to hand on to our students, to
give it all to Uncle Sam. And that and, as I say, the fact that
we have lived here for a long time and America has been good to
us--we decided to apply for American citizenship. Did we get it
in 93? Was it as early as that?
But don t forget, of course, that I m essentially still an
Englishman.
Troy: And I think you mentioned at one time or several times, Desmond--
you always felt yourself an Englishman in Africa.
Clark: That s right, yes. Oh, yes. I never felt that I was an African.
Whether [Louis] Leakey ever felt that he was an African or not,
I m not certain. He was certainly born there. Well, of course,
he did because he wrote a book entitled White African. Yes.
271
Professional Associations
Troy: Of the many professional associations you belong to, what are the
ones that you felt strongest and most connected to? You re a
fellow in so many things.
Clark: I suppose sort of the first three that come to mind are the
British Academy, which is the social science, you would say--
classics and so onequivalent of the Royal Society, which is
science. That was founded, oh, sometime in the early 19th
century, yes. Then there s the National Academy of Sciences here,
which I was elected to in 86. And then the Royal Society of
South Africa.
But of the other, more specific societies, the Society of
Antiquaries of London I suppose heads the list there. That was
founded in about 17 14, I think. It s the second oldest Royal
charter, after the Royal Society. And I greatly enjoyed that.
Troy: Antiquaries?
Clark: Antiquaries of London, yes. It started with people meeting in a
coffee house and discussing or reading papers, producing artifacts
and all that kind of thing, and indeed that s when John Frere, who
had found the Acheulean hand axes at the Hoxne brick pits, made
the classic contribution of finding these associated with animals
long extinct, stone tools made by people in, as he said, "a
very
remote past indeed, even beyond that of the present world."
Seventeen ninety-seven was the date.
Then there s the South African Archaeological Society. That
was started by John Goodwin, and it s been invaluable for
publishing. Then there s the Society of American Archaeology,
another extremely valuable one. The Triple A, the American
Anthropological Association, which has become less useful now
because of the increasing number of specialist journals and so on
that have developed. That [Triple A] has become much more of a
sort of social-cultural journal and society, and the archaeology,
primatology, paleontology, human paleontology are usually now in
some other journals and other societies, specialized societies.
Troy: Of course, you were one of the founders of the Pan-African
Congress of Prehistory and Quaternary Studies. You have attended
all of their meetings.
Clark: I ve attended them all except the very last one, which was held in
Bamako in Mali last February [2001]. Very few people did attend
it, so I understand, because, of course, it was not easy to get
there, and I don t think that it was all that well organized. I
272
would like to have done so, but it would be impossible for me now,
with eyes as they are, without going and coming with somebody.
And so I didn t go. And then it was a questionthe problems of
Betty being here or there. So I ve been to all ten. This was the
eleventh one.
Troy: What other meetings are coming up, Desmond, that you might like to
go to, of the various societies and associations?
Clark: Oh, I may go to paleontology, two days of that in Denver next
year.
Troy: And what is that association?
Clark: Of paleontology. What it really means is human paleontology.
Paleoanthropology, I m sorry. That s what it s called. The
Paleoanthropology Society. And so it includes everything from
hominid fossils and animals and plants associated with all this,
plus the artifacts, and changes in behavior, a bit of primatology
as well, and so on. Dating and other methods, et cetera. It s a
very useful organization that meets alternatively with the Society
of American Archaeology, two days before, or two days before, the
Society of American Physical Anthropology.
Troy: I always get confused. There are two SAAs. There s the Society
of Africanist Archaeologists, and then there s the Society of
American Archaeology.
Clark: Well, the Africanist one does have the "f", the small "f." SAfA.
It is a bit confusing. That s another good one, and I try to go
to that. I went to the one in Cambridge last year. Spring of
2000. That was really good.
Troy: And what was the one that you went to in Philadelphia or
Pittsburgh?
Clark: Oh, that was the SAA [Society of American Archaeology] . I think
it had the paleoanthropology meeting before it. So I went to
both. That was very good.
Lowie Museum. Research Facilities
Troy: Desmond, another question that came up was the Department of
Anthropology and, of course, the Lowie Museum have put a lot of
emphasis over the years on American Indian anthropology and
archaeology. What was your relationship with the Lowie Museum?
273
Has that changed over the years?
archaeology lab.
Of course, you had the
Clark: Yes. What we did of course, was to build up collections for
teaching. All the teaching collections were accessed into the
museum or have museum numbers on them. You see, they were all
available there to be used. We used them regularly, right through
the whole twenty-five years that I taught. And Glynn Isaac as
well, of course. They re not used really now, I don t think,
because mostly they were concerned- -they were concerned
essentially with Old World prehistory and with Old World
techniques, the technology of stone working of one kind or another
right through to bead making.
But the rest of it was--it was a very valuable, enjoyable
experience. In particular, there were three people who were very
valuable associates. One was Larry Dawson, who I think--! m not
certain what his title was, but he knew an enormous amount about
all the ethnographic collections and everything. He d worked in
Peru, Ecuador, and so on. I think he d worked in Mexico as well.
Delightful person.
The next was Gene Prince, who was a photographer with whom I
wrote one paper, actually, and who copied a lot of my slides.
They have a good collection of slides that I used to use for
teaching.
The other was Dave Herod, very nice chap. They all retired
about five years ago or something like that, I suppose it would
be, yes. They would roll out the collections that we needed for
the lecture courses and for--yes, basically for the lecture
courses.
And then, of course, there would be--at the end of each
lecture course, there would be a time when they could go and look
at all the collections that they had seen in that course that
term, semester, or whatever it was. That worked extremely well
because they always got two or three, maybe four--I don t
rememberartifacts to write about on an exam.
Troy: And this was in the lithic technology course.
Clark: Yes, the course was called "Invention and Technology."
Troy: Have they talked about building another museum building for the
Lowie Museum?
Clark: I understand that there is a talk of building a new sort of center
for museums. Whether it will come about or not, I m not certain
because I think the zoology museum doesn t want to move from where
274
they are. But the art museum--! think they will have to pull that
dreadful building down. I think the Lowie--a whole lot of
material stored will probably go down to the new area if it
actually develops?
Troy: Where is that supposed to be?
Clark: But the main exhibition area will remain, I think, as it is . I
was told the new area was somewhere down towards the bottom of
Bancroft, I thought it was. I think so, yes. Somewhere down
there.
Troy: When I ve been in the lab it seemed crowded, and it s difficult
sometimes, isn t it, working with your collections?
Clark: No, when the students are working there on those tables and so on
--you see, you can get the stuff put out. That s no particular
problem, I think. There s a problem, yes, when people are working
down there on something else and I m trying to work on something
different. But I was talking about when we were actually
teaching.
The Careers and Whereabouts of Clark s Students
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
You have many former students with whom you communicate. You ve
mentioned Karla Savage. And Nick Toth and Kathy Schick in
Indiana. Would you say that Nick and Kathy are the two who
probably carried on the stone work most completely, in some ways?
Yes, I think so, yes. They ve done superb work, of course, on all
levels of the paleolithic and lots of other directions as well,
with Kanzi, the pygmy chimpanzee making stone tools and all that
kind of thing, and a lot of work that Nick has done with getting
wired up to see what muscles and things are involved in stone
working. Yes, I think that s right. Others, of course, are very
skilled at stone working, but not necessarily to the same extent.
And Nick regularly demonstrates the skinning of a goat, you know--
a dead goat, not a live one.
Charles Keller went on to do a great deal with Stone and now,
course Iron Age.
of
Oh, yes, indeed. Can I talk about a few more of the students?
I ve mentioned one or two of the people that we worked with, but
I ve never actually mentioned Bob [R.J.] Rodden. Bob Rodden was
our colleague, the third one in the Old World, Prehistory program.
He was trained in Harvard as an undergraduate. He did his Ph.D.
275
at Cambridge, Cambridge in England. He was given the site of Nea
Nikomedia in northern GreeceMacedonia, I think it is--to
excavate. A remarkable Early Neolithic site. I think there was
pottery there. But they were also using stone, of course, for
artifacts. A lot of skeletons from burials in the mound there.
And he did a very fine excavation. Bob was a delightful person
and got on very well with the students and with ourselves, but he
regrettably was a perfectionist.
Troy: He was on the faculty when you came here to begin with?
Clark: Oh, no. No, we recruited Bob.
Troy: Before or after Glynn Isaac?
Clark: After Glynn got here.
We got a third FTE, and, as I say, we got Bob, who was
dealing, of course, with Neolithic and later culture, particularly
the Neolithic. That worked in very, very well indeed with our,
Glynn s and my interests. But Bob, as I say, was a perfectionist,
and it was very difficult to get him to write anything down. We
had the greatest difficulty in getting him to finish his thesis.
I remember being phoned up in the early morning and so on by
Graham Clark, the chairman of the dissertation committee in
Cambridge, saying, "What is Rodden doing? We need his
dissertation" and so on. Finally we managed to get him to finish
something, with some rather miserable illustrations, and he got
through.
Well, Bob was married to a very delightful person, Judith--
Judith--Wilson, I think her name was before she was married. But
she did not like Berkeley, and after about, I don t know, it may
have been four years, she said, "I m going to go back to England.
You can come if you like," you know. That, of course, upset Bob,
and we said to Bob, "Go, of course. We wouldn t like to lose you,
but don t go until you ve got a job to go to." Well, he did. And
he was asked by Glyn Daniel, who d taken over as the Disney
professor at that time-
Troy: And where was that?
Clark: At Cambridge.
--to come and give three lectures, I think, about his work.
Well, he never came, never did it. And he s never finished
writing up Nea Nikomedia. Something he did very early on, I
think, which was before, probably while he was in Berkeley, was
published several years ago, in connection with some pottery that
276
somebody had published from Nea Nikomedia, but Bob has done
nothing else.
Troy: Is he on the faculty at Cambridge?
Clark: Oh, no, no. No.
Troy: Was Sherry Washburn very accommodating? He was the head of the
department?
Clark: No, no, George [McClelland] Foster was the head then.
Field Trips and Lab Courses. Old World Prehistory Program
Troy: Desmond, you mentioned last week that you particularly enjoyed
teaching graduate students, that you didn t like large lecture
hall kinds of classes but that .you liked getting the students out
into the field. You mentioned trips to Pyramid Lake, and
collecting grey wacky at Point Reyes and so on. When you took
those field trips with the students, how many students would you
generally have on those?
Clark: It depended. Out to Drake s Bay was for the grey wacky probably
all of them in the lab course would come, and that would be- -I
think eighteen was about our limit, and they would all come along.
We d sit on the beach. We d bring food, and we d light a fire for
tea, bring beer, I suppose. Anybody would bring anything that
they wanted. And we d just flake away and make things like core
choppers or hand axes. Some of them, of course, turned out as
picks, if you see what I mean. But it was great fun. They all
thoroughly enjoyed it.
Troy: Was that in connection with both the course "Invention and
Technology" and the lithic course?
Clark: No, that was with the lithic one.
Troy: Did the graduate students have a chance to do any hunting or
skinning or use of their tools out there at Drake s Bay?
Clark: No. Nick Toth may have done something out at Drake s Bay. I m
not certain. He certainly did in the lab as well, the skinning.
We never killed anything, it was always mostly road kills because
we d be phoned up by the road authority, I suppose, to say, there
was a deer, or whatever it was, and we d go out and collect it.
Troy: This would be around the East Bay area?
277
Clark: It might have been in Marin. More often than not, I think.
Troy: And you d look at slides of artifacts and artifacts from the
museum to complement this hands-on course.
Clark: In the lab, I don t know that we used too many slides. They would
have normally taken the African prehistory [Anthropology 128-A] , I
think, and they would have had the slides that show what the sites
are like and the artifacts and so on. That, and the "Invention
and Technology" is where most of the slides would come in. For
example, the core making and so on that Merrick [Posnansky]
mentioned this morning. A full set of slides showing the gradual
processes from the beginning to the end would always be shown.
The Lowie Museum, the Phoebe Hearst Museum, has copies of a
whole lot of my slides showing the various processes. Process is
something that we always emphasized in the lab and, of course, in
the lectures and seminars and so on. We emphasized in particular:
"Ask
questions. Never take for gospel anything you are told
unless you ve checked it out." That went to good purpose with
many of them.
Troy: The trips up to Pyramid Lake and other places, did any of the
places in California that you took your students to remind you of
places in Africa?
Clark: The ones that were reminiscent of an African site were over in
Pyramid Lake and Clear Lake and so on, many of those around Lassen
and Shasta [counties] that were small calderas. Kone [Ethiopia]
was very similar to that, the middle Stone Age sitewell, it went
right through to the late Stone Age as well. That, of course, was
in a caldera. There were various calderas, one with fumaroles
still coming out of it and so on, all simply dormant, and the
source up on the ridge of an earlier crater. Yes, that was
similar. But for the most part, we didn t, of course, have many
volcanic sites in Africa, actively volcanic.
Troy: You mentioned that you would have people coming through, like
Stuart Marks. And Harold Heady?
Clark: Yes.
Troy: And Louis Leakey, of course, would come through on occasion, and
those would certainly complement the course offerings .
Clark: Exactly, yes, yes. That was always most important, having
visitors. And, of course, the graduate students got together, and
sometimes there was a lecture involved for the whole department;
sometimes it was a visitor talking in seminars. But it was great
fun.
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Troy: You mentioned early on that the teaching suggested that there was
probably need for a good single volume of African prehistory, and
so in a way the teaching led to publications.
Clark: Oh, yes. Well, of course, all our researchwe published quite a
lot of research papers, either individually or with colleagues or
a student, graduate student. Yes, a lot of those. There must be
now, oh, almost close on 400, 1 should think, papers of one kind
or another, and then several books. I can t remember how many
books there are. Monographs of one kind or another.
But general prehistory. There was a thing that I did sometime
in the seventies--! d hav3 to look to see when it was published--
The Prehistory of Africa [1970], much of which is still very
relevant except for the great advances in early man studies, of
course, and the great advances in Iron Age studies. Everything in
between is still fairly valid, and it has a whole series of
illustrations which I think were done by Betty. Judy Ogden
probably did some as well, another very fine illustrator who s
done a whole lot of illustration for me, Clark Howell, and no
doubt other people.
Troy: The Old World Prehistory program was up in the Piedmont Avenue
building, is that right?
Clark: Yes, it was.
Troy: I get confused because I always think of the anthropology building
as Kroeber Hall, and I forget there was this whole other aspect to
the program.
Clark: Yes. You see, we managed to get hold of that building when we
sort of more or less demanded labs.
When Kroeber Hall was built, nobody had anticipated that there
would be a requirement for laboratories. There were seminar
rooms, but no space for laboratories. It was as a result of our
demands that we managed to get the building on Piedmont. It was a
Julia Morgan house with very fine paneling downstairs, which I
think was eucalyptus, beautifully done.
I had my office in the back, looking back onto the car park
area, and immediately below was the bank where students would
practice their lithic technology, flaking awaycreating a
considerable accumulation of obsidian flakes and chunks and pieces
over the years. [laughter] I think they ve removed most of it,
but there are still, of course, fragments that come out of that
bank. Very interesting.
Troy: What else was in that building?
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Clark: Sherry Washburn had his office in there. Glynn Isaac had his
office, Rodden had his office there, I had mine. It had a very
fine seminar room. I think Phyllis Dolhinow had her office there
as well. She was one of Sherry s students, working on langurs in
India.
Troy: Who is in that building now, Desmond? That s no longer part of
the anthro department, is it?
Clark: No. Demography is in that. And, of course, it has Gene Hammel, a
very good friend of ours.
Troy: Where is your office now?
Clark: My office is in the buildingit was an old fraternity house at
one time. It s 2251, I think it is, College. Immediately north
of Boalt Hall, on the second floor, again looking out onto the car
park. We re now having to pack up this coming week, preparatory
to everybody moving on the 4th of July.
Troy: What s going to happen to that building?
Clark: They re going to retrofit it. It s said to take two years to do
it.
Troy: Where are they moving you, Desmond?
Clark: Well, we re moving, so I m told, to a building on the corner of
Bowditch and Channing, the northwest corner, which I suppose was a
private house at one time. I understand I ve been allotted a
downstairs office, but it s alreadyit s still occupied by people
who haven t got their space to go into, so when I shall get into
it, I have no idea.
Success in Getting Funding
Troy: You mentioned that Clark Howell and many had been quite successful
in getting monies. You certainlyafter Glynn Isaac got
established, things began to really roll, and you were having very
good success with the Wenner-Gren and the National Science
foundations .
Clark: Oh, yes. I only ever once had a proposal turned down.
Troy: Do you remember what that one was?
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Clark: Yes, that was one to work in Ethiopia, at Gadeb, again in 1977 or
78.
Troy: Who turned it down? Do you think it was a political thing?
Clark: NSF [National Science Foundation] . I think it was Maxine
Kleindienst who wrote an unfavorable report, something to do with
Hiro Kurashina having been a one-year lecturer there. She did not
like him. Why she didn t like him, I have no idea.
Troy: Where is Maxine now?
Clark: Maxine just retired. Liv^s in Toronto.
Troy: But you were able to establish a fairly regular income from NSF
and Wenner-Gren, and this kept your field work going well. And,
of course, one of your key philosophical points is to get the
students into the field.
Clark: Exactly. Yes, yes. And, of course, as well we could get pre-
doctoral grants for students. Sometimes they were with us in the
field; sometimes they were on their own in the field.
Troy: You were able to get the timing down pretty well. I know Tim
White has that problem now, relative to going out to Ethiopia and
timing and coordinating that with his teaching responsibilities
and so on. You were able to coordinate that very well.
Clark: We were able to do that very well because we had the quarter
system, which gave you six weeks or so in the field, six or seven,
which was excellent. And then the next quarter we would analyze
and write up the material, which couldn t have been better. With
the semester system it s a little too long to be in the field a
whole semester, and it messes things up from the point of view of
the analysis as well. I mean, students get back, and they have
half a semester and it really never worked very well.
Troy: But you were able to get the timing down pretty well relative to
the northern and southern hemispheres, too, because that s an
issue in Africa.
Clark: Yes. In the southern hemisphere, of course, you excavate in our
summer, which quite often was the winter down in the southern
hemisphere, but if you work north of the Equator, more often than
not it has to be work in our winter, which we never found quite so
good. I m not certain why. It was cooler, certainly. But we d
still get a lot of rain, unusual rain. The climate certainly is
changing very much now. But it works okay. Usually students and
ourselves would get back for Christmas, that kind of thing, be
with family.
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Troy: That raises a point that I ve been wanting to ask about. You ve
certainly been in every corner of Africa. Are there places that
you visited on conferences, like Leopoldville--we were talking
with Merrick Posnansky about the Fourth Pan-African in
Leopoldville were there places in Africa that you visited just
for short periods of time that you ve always wanted to go back to,
that you found especially intriguing for one reason or another?
Clark: Oh, I think so, yes. Some of them still have great potential, of
course. Various sites in the Congo or Rwanda have a longish
sequence from the late Acheulean through the Middle Stone Age.
One site in the Katanga Province, in Zaire, it was dug by a
delightful old French priest, Pere Anciaux de Faveaux, who had
found this site and reported on it in the Third Pan-African
Congress, and we kept up with him for years until he died. He
finally went back to Belgium and died there.
Troy: Monsieur de Faveaux.
Clark: Anciaux de Faveaux. He found a very nice Acheulean site at the
Pupa River near Katentania on the Biano River, and a student of
mine, Carney Schokenbroek- -Carney was short for Garnalese, or
something. Dutch. Nice lass, but a bit feckless. She did a very
nice excavation of the Acheulean and overlying Lupenbaum following
on from what Anciaux did, and she was out there for probably two
years, I think, working on those collections, doing the
excavation, et cetera, with Anciaux. But she never wrote it up.
We were hoping she would write it up, but she seems to have
disappeared now. I think she went back to Holland.
Troy: Did she finish her Ph.D. with you?
Clark: No, she never finished it, you see. That s the tragedy of it, not
only for her but for us, of course, but also for Anciaux, who
hoped that she was going to finish it all up.
More on Careers and Whereabouts
Troy: You had a number of students, as I recall as we ve talked over the
year, who began well and then begin to peter out, or vice versa.
Clark: We ve had a few of them, yes. Do you want to go through my list?
Troy: Yes, you have a very good list of students here. Karla Savage,
who is now with the Leakey Foundation.
The first student on your list after Karla is Fiona Marshall.
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Clark: Fiona Marshall. She is doing extremely well, again in African
prehistory, Washington University, St. Louis. She s concentrated
on two things. She started off by being Glynn s student, and then
when Glynn went to Harvard, I took her over here, and so she
worked with me through to her graduation. She was the daughter of
a well-known architect in Kenya, the man who actually designed the
new government house in Tanzania, in Tabora, the new capital.
Fiona did her work on the earliest peoples in the western part
of Kenya, on the Masai Mara, I think it was. Got some very good
results from all of that. Well dated and so on. Wrote it up and
did extremely well.
She went on to study some people called the Okiek, who were
hunters and foragers, who lived in the forests of the Mau
Escarpment, the western part of Kenya. The Okiek were also known
as the Ndorobo. That was a name, I suppose, given to them by
probably the Kikuyu or the Masai. They lived in the forest. And
Fiona did a magnificent job studying them: what they ate, what
they killed, what their settlements looked like, and everything.
Her husband went out with her- -a computer man. He became
quite ill, I think, on one occasion. But Fiona was tireless in
what she did with all the work on the Okiek. She s writing it up
bit by bit, but latterly she got much more interested in doing
some work in Ethiopia in connection with rock art as well.
Hopefully she will be excavating before long in Eritrea, a
rock shelter which has rock art in it and a lot of deposit in the
floor. What we need to do is to date the rock art, and it s very
interesting rock art there, two phases: the earlier pastoral
phase, with lots of cattle and a few people and so on; and the
later stage, which is one that shows people fighting each other
and that kind of thing, a few agricultural scenes, but it s been
undated. I think Fiona is just about to get her permit to go and
do that with various people who can identify the plants and- -of
course, she can identify the animal remains.
Troy: You had Alan Pastron.
Clark: Yes, interesting man. He came out to Adrar Bous, the Sahara.
Troy: With you and Andrew Smith?
Clark: That s right, yes, and Martin Williams.
He did well. He plottedin those days, we hadn t really
understood that surface distributions on the whole don t mean too
much. He plotted a whole lot of Acheulean hand axes lying out on
the surface, but the whole of the plot was blown away by a strong
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
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wind from the sort of --actually, in point of fact, it was a
parachute which was a kind of covering for where we ate, and we
never did find that.
At any rate, he decided that he was really going to be more
interested in social-cultural anthropology, and when he came back
he decided to do that in Mexico. He worked on some people up in
the northern part of Mexico, who were fairly marginal, sort of
simple foragers and so on. Got some good results. Got his
degree, and then turned to contract archaeology. And he does
contract archaeology in San Francisco now. Most of those sites,
you know, that are now buried sites around the marina, all that
kind of thing. I haven t seen him for two or three years now, but
he used to come around, and is doing well, which is excellent.
Who s the next one?
Karen Nissen?
Karen Nissen. I took her over from Bob Heizer when Bob died. She
came to me, and she was doing rock art in the Sierras, in Nevada
and also in California as well. She produced a most voluminous--!
think it s the biggest dissertation that I ve ever seen, in two
big volumeson this very interesting rock art, hunting rock art
and so on, associated with hunting lodges and the places where
they drive game and so on. We keep in touch, of course.
Where is she now?
I m not certain what she s working with now. I think it s another
of these contract archaeology places somewhere in California.
What s the next one?
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Richard Lee?
Oh, Richard Lee, of course, yes. Only in part can I claim
Richard. Richard is the man who developed all the work on the
IKung bushmen and has done superb work there. This was the time
that people got interested in hunter-gatherers, mainly due to
Sherry Washburn, and he was one of Sherry s students, but we
regularly sort of met and discussed. He was one of our students
in seminars.
Where is Richard now?
I m not certain. I haven t seen him for a number of years,
is at the University of Toronto. TT]
[Lee
Troy: Ann Stahl?
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Clark: Ann Stahl was one of my last students, third or fourth last, I
think. She s now in SUNY [State University of New York]
Binghamton, doing very well there. She has worked on Later Stone
Age in Ghana. Very good work indeed on the Kintampo culture,
about 2000 B.C., something like that, where she got evidence for
wild plants, certainly. I think penicetum, I m not certain.
Grindstones, certainly. And in association with other sites,
which produced settlements, dwellings, that kind of thing.
Extremely good.
Then she went on to some Late Iron Age archaeology, more
historic archaeology because connected with existing people,
existing ethnic groups, and back into the past with archaeology,
so that she s able to relate sort of the one to the other, and to
see the changes in house types, settlement types, pottery forms,
all that kind of thing.
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Sussman?
Carol Sussman, yes. Carol is now working, I think, for a group
that is doing something about AIDS research. Its headquarters, I
think, are in New York, but she s in San Diego. She came out on
several of our excavations. She was in India, for example, and
she was also, in the 81 season, in the eastern part of the Middle
Awash area. She specialized in use-wear, particularly the
evidence for use-wear, marginal microchipping and so on and
polish, to be seen on quartz, which is very difficult to do.
Whether she still does any of that, I m not certain. I don t
think she does.
Quartz is very difficult versus, say, obsidian?
Oh, yes.
It s much more hard to see, the light color.
That s right, exactly. She more or less pioneered some of that
with quartz.
Who is the next one?
Sheryl Miller?
Sheryl Miller, yes. She was one of my earlier students, who has
done incredibly well. She is now professor, I think, of
anthropology, at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Colleges.
She came out to Angola with us. She s been to one or more of the
Pan-African congresses.
285
She did her initial work on the excavated material from
Leopard s Hill Cave in Zambia. The cave had been excavated by
Lillian Hodges, and Sheryl did a magnificent job of work on all of
this. This is a well-dated sequence of Later Stone Age, from
about 24,000 B.C. up to--well, almost up to the present day. 1
think up to and including Iron Age. But the main value of that
site was the sequence of the Nachikufan culture, which was present
there. And I think it was about 22,000 B.P. the first bored stone
appeared, well dated.
Troy: At Leopard s Cave.
Clark: Leopard s Hill Cave, yes, in Zambia, probably thirty to forty
miles east of Lusaka.
She is, I hope, going to help me when we get on to doing the
final monograph on the archaeology of Malawi.
What s the next one?
Troy: Laurel Phillipson.
Clark: Yes. Laurel is married to David Phillipson, of course, the
director of the Arch-Anth Museum [Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology] in Cambridge. And she is Ed Lofgren s daughter.
She came out with us at first to Koronga, the northwestern part of
Lake Malawi. We had a full season there. It s probably shortly
before that she had met David Phillipson.
She went out initially to look for- -Brian Fagan had got a
grant from I think it was the British Academy to look for the
origins of the Bantu, which is a nonsensical sort of thing. And
they wandered all over Uganda and one or two other parts of
eastern Africa and didn t, of course, find anything. It was
during that time that she met David Phillipson, I think, and they
got married shortly after that.
David was appointed as the secretary of the National Monuments
Commission [in Livingstone]. I met him first when he came to work
with us in 1959, I think it was, in Kalambo Falls. He was there
for part of the field season.
Troy: He came out of Cambridge.
Clark: Came straight out of Cambridge, yes.
David did a super job organizing the National Monuments
Commission, which was taken over in due course by several other
people, and ended up with Nicholas Katenekwa, who s there now,
doing a superb job, one of the best in the whole of black Africa
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Clark:
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Clark:
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Troy :
Clark:
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Clark:
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Clark:
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Clark:
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Clark:
that I know of, organizing the preservation of the antiquities and
ensuring that they re not destroyed and disseminating the
information about all of this.
And Nicholas was one of your students?
No, he was David s student at Cambridge. I saw him last year at
Cambridge at the SAfA meetings.
The next one you have is Beatrice Sandalowski.
Yes. She came to us from Namibia.
That was her home?
That was her home.
Interesting name. She s Polish, maybe?
1 don t know.
Swakopmund .
Could be. Her mother had a shop there, in
Did she come to you in Livingstone, or did she come to you here?
She came to us here. And I first met her, I think, at a Triple A
meeting somewhere like Chicago or somewhere. I can t remember
where it was. But she came here and finished her degree, went
out, worked on a couple of sites in Namibia, and that s what she
did her work on, mostly Later Stone Age sites, I think they were.
She also, of course, was with us in Koronga. That s where she got
her introduction to the field. And she helped excavate a rock
shelter in the Nyika plateau, which for the Later Stone Age is
sort of the southern end. With John Robinson.
Beatrice finished her Ph.D. here with you?
She finished it here and went back [to Namibia] , and she tried to
found a university. What was it called? TUCIN. Probably the
basis of the present university there.
That s ambitious .
And she was doing partly Iron Age and partly Later Stone Age work
and so on, with a bit of ethnography, in particular with people up
in the northwest, who were still foragers.
That was Namibia. And then you had Charles Nelson?
Charles Nelson did superb work in Kenya, in the Kenya rift. Went
out with Glynn. Worked through probably two seasons out there. I
287
think he was there with Glynn for one year, and then he went out
himself to do another year s work out at the Kenya rift, in the
Nakuru-Naivasha basin area, and worked on Middle Stone Age and
early blade culture. Then he went on to do computer work.
Troy: Computer work relative to archaeology?
Clark: Yes, yes. He introduced us, in point of fact, to I think it was
the Canadian mapping system, of using quadrants and subdivisions
of quadrants, and that s how we identify our various sites,
particularly those in east Africa. He was at Boston University
for a time, and now I think he s doing computer work somewhere
there.
Troy: The next one is Harry Merrick.
Clark: Harry Merrick, yes. Harry was really Glynn s student, I think,
but he did a lotbecause we dually advised many of these
students. Harry went to Yale as an assistant professor. He did
some very good work in Kenya. He and Frank Brown did a valuable
paper of the sourcing of obsidian, in relation to where you got
some of this obsidian during the Middle Stone Age, I think.
There s even more than a hundred miles difference between the
source and the obsidian, which is really quite interesting.
Harry ran, for a number of years, the Harvard Field School.
He ran it for them very successfully up to the time that the Kenya
people decided they would like to try to get some more money out
of the field course, so they advertised it, opened it, and then I
forget what the hell happened. Yes, Harvard got it. I suppose he
must have run it for Yale. I can t remember. At any rate, he did
a very good job there. But he didn t get tenure at Yale because
he never wrote anything very much up. He was another of these
perfectionists, unfortunately. Nice chap, very nice, and he still
lives there.
Troy: In New Haven.
Clark: Yes.
African Students and Others, and Some Mixed Successes
Troy: Now, we may be getting into your African students. One of the
great things you did in the department here was bring Africans,
Clark: Oh, yes.
288
Troy: This first name is Oyenuga.
Clark: Oyenuga was one of our unsuccessful ones, I m afraid. He was from
Nigeria. He was the son of some important chief among the Yoruba,
I think. He came here, and he had one year here, but that was my
sabbatical year, and Garth Samson had taken over all my courses
and everything then. When I got back, I found that Oyenuga had
sort of broken away. He hadn t attended anything. He d started
drinking a bit. He was living with some woman. He had a whole
lot of library books which nobody could get him to return. We had
an awful job with him. Finally we did get the library books back.
Oyenuga just disappeared. That was unfortunate.
Troy: This one right here, N-g-a-d-i?
Clark: Ngadi Ngomazela. He was excellent. A Malawian. His first field
season was the field workshop that we had near Dedza [Central
Malawi] at Chencherere rock shelter, and looking at various other
sites.
After a year or two, when the director of antiquities, who was
Paul Cole-King, went back to England, Ngadi Ngomazela took over
the antiquities service. Did remarkably well, yes. Then later he
was transferred as I think an undersecretary. I think he may even
be a minister now. So he s a high-up person in the
administration. I haven t seen him for a number of years now.
The next one is Yusuf Juwayeyi. We ve mentioned Yusuf. He
then took over as director of antiquities.
Troy: Is he a Malawian, too?
Clark: A Malawian as well, southern part of Malawi.
He did his field work on Later Stone Age sites, some with rock
art in them. He ran the Department of Antiquities very well, up
to, oh, even this year, when he was appointed Malawi s
representative to the United Nations.
Troy: Did he finish a doctoral with you?
Clark: Oh, yes.
Another one- -I think I put him down there- -was David Aiyudun.
I think he s dropped the David now and just has a local name, but
he was a Nigerian, and he did all right, nothing frightfully
exciting, and he went back and did some work in- -oh, what s the
name of that big river there that they dammed?
Troy: In Nigeria?
289
Clark: In Nigeria. I can t remember. At any rate, he worked there on
Later Stone Age sites, ethnography, really. A lot on pottery.
And then he got a job. When he got back there he was appointed a
lecturer at Ahmadu Bello University in Zairia. And he wrote and
said, "I m going to come back and finish my degree," and he spent
a year back here, I think it was, and indeed he finished his
degree, and he got his doctorate and went back.
After a few years all sorts of nonsense happened in Nigeria,
there are still nonsense there. But they weren t getting any
money, and the military government sacked half the people and so
on. They just weren t getting any funds. So he had to leave, and
he went to help out some Christian society, I think, for a time.
Applied for things over here. I wrote a whole series of letters
and so on. Never actually got them. What he s doing now, I don t
know. He could be back.
Incidentally, of course, talking of West Africans, Bassey
Andah was my student. Did his degree here. His name at that time
was Bassey Wai-Ogosu, but he changed it to Bassey Andah.
Troy: And where is he now?
Clark: He s dead now. He diedwas it two years ago? It may even be
three years ago now, I think. Poor chap. He ran- -he took over
from Thurston Shaw the chairmanship of the archaeology department
of the University of Ibadan [central Nigeria], and he ran that.
And he ran the West African Journal of Archaeology.
Unfortunately, I was not able to take him into the field. He
must have come out on field courses here and so on. He did his
work in--what s it called now, that has the capital Ouagadougou?
Used to be called Upper Volta- -Burkina Faso. He worked on an
interesting Later Stone Age site there. He wrote his dissertation
on that and got that.
Troy: And then Berhane Asfaw.
Clark: Berhane started with me. I recruited Berhane when we were in
Ethiopia. I met him at Addis. He had, I think, one year here
with me--it may have been more. And then he found that he was
more interested in fossils than he was in lithics, and Tim White
took him over, and he became Tim s student and is now our leading
colleague in Ethiopia. Did superb work there. Has done also
excellent work in connection with fossils that he has described
for his dissertation.
Troy: Another student Preston Staley.
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Clark: Preston was an undergraduate here. He lives here now. Excellent
person. In fact, we went out to dinner with him last night. Or,
rather, he went out to dinner with us. He got his B.A. here, and
then he went to Champaign-Urbana to get his Ph.D. under Charlie
Keller. He worked on the Isimila artifacts.
Troy: From Tanzania.
Clark: From Tanzania, for years.
Troy: Is he actively involved in archaeology now?
Clark: Not at the moment, no. H has private means, and I think he s
sort of living on that, if you see what I mean.
Troy: Jack Harris?
Clark: Jack Harris, of course, yes. Jack is chairman of the Department
of Anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He was a
student of mine and Glynn s. Probably more of Glynn s than he was
of mine, but we were in the field on various occasions, and in
particular he was in the field with us for the 1981 work on the
east side of the Middle Awash. I ve seen Jack for many years. We
keep in regular touch. When he comes down here, he always comes
in, and we chat like mad.
Troy: Sally McBrearty. What does Sally do?
Clark: Sally was an undergraduate here with me, and she also went to
Champaign-Urbana, to Charlie Keller, and she got her degree there
after quite a while, I think. She was working on the Sangoan-
Lupemban sequence that had first been studied in the Winam Gulf by
Louis Leakey.
Troy: In Kenya.
Clark: In western Kenya, yes, on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria. She
went on to work at various other sites in Kenya, in particular in
the Lake Baringo basin. She s married to Andrew Hill at Yale, and
she teaches now at University of Connecticut. She is doing some
of the finest work on the transition between the Lower Paleolithic
and the Middle Stone Age, Middle Paleolithic that I know in Africa
south of the Sahara.
The great importance of the work which she is doing [in Lake
Baringo basin of northern Kenya, notably in the Kapthurin
formation] is that there are a series of volcanic tuffs in a long
sequence of fine-grained sediments which also contain artifacts,
and you can see the chronological contemporaneity, whether they re
older or younger and so on, through this, and it should give us
291
one of the finest insights into the changes that took place from
around about 300,000, I suppose, to 100,000 years ago.
Troy: Now, you ve got Judith Reingold.
Clark: She was someone whoshe didn t finish with me. But she was good.
She did a lot of the early analysis of the Twin Rivers material
that we had. We published the report on this in the last issue of
the Journal of Archaeological Science.
She successfully passed her orals and everything, and we had
arranged for her to go out on I think they were Later Stone Age
sitescan t remember- -with Thurston Shaw in Ibadan. He was all
set to receive her, look after her, show her the sights, but she
got cold feet, or her parents did, so she never went. She later
married a chap called Frankel, I think. And what happened after
that, I have no idea.
What else have we got?
Troy: Let s see, Alan van Eggers?
Clark: Another disappointment. And, again, someone with too much money.
He did super work with us at Koronga in northern Malawi for one,
maybe two seasons. It must have been two seasons out there, I
think, yes. Excellent work there. And he wrote up the work on
the very big trench that we did at Chaminade--that was the
Catholic mission in Malawi.
We saw that this was a big trench that went through the
Kalahari sand, right down to a bedrock in the river. He was the
main one, with myself, excavating that long trench. We have all
the section drawings, plans, everything like that, drawings of the
artifacts. He wrote up the text, and then for the second half he
was going to examine the Howiesons Poort material from Border Cave
in South Africa.
Troy: What was the name of the material from there?
Clark: Howiesons Poort, the blade material from there.
Well, he did do some on that, but he never finished it. And
then he went to do contract archaeology. We kept in touch for a
time. I tried to get in touch with him only the other day, but as
far as we know, we have no idea where he is. But he inherited a
lot of money.
Troy: Was he an American or South African?
292
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
No, no, he was an American.
Hollanders from New York.
Then you had Ken Williamson.
I think his family must have been
Oh, Ken Williamson. He s another one who didn t make the grade.
Well, he got his degree.
Ken was a remarkable chap. He was an operator. He came out
to Ethiopia with us. I had him for at least two years in the
field, I think it was. And then he went to excavate Pore Epic
cave, the one that we ve been talking about, excavate more of it.
He got his pre-doctoral grant for this and so on, and he went out.
He took a couple of very attractive girls with him, and he set
them to work on excavating there. The story goes that he would
sit on the roof of the Dire Dawa Hotel, whatever it was called,
with his field glasses, looking to see that they were still
working there and would then come up from time to time.
Well, he got an enormous amount of material out of it, and
then proposed to spend the next two years analyzing it in
Ethiopia, in Addis. It all went down to the National Museum, and
he would work there for a time, then he d go out to a cafe and
have a Coke or coffee or something, go back a bit more, and he
then started his own business of making silver Ethiopian crosses
and things .
Well, the Ethiopians didn t like that, and they said, "We
didn t bring you out here in order to do this. We brought you out
here in order to do this archaeological work and complete it."
And this was around the time of the Derg and all the nonsense that
was going on, the shootings, assassinations. And they gave him
three days to get out of the country. And that s what happened.
We gave him every opportunity of finishing it when we got back
here, but he said no, he couldn t do it.
Troy: Let s see here, Sonia Ragir.
Clark: That s right, yes. She came out the first season here in
Ethiopia, yes. She excavated a Later Stone Age site on the
escarpment. Did quite well. But I don t know- -she somehow didn t
have her heart in it. She didn t want to continue, and I didn t
want her to continue, so she went to Bob Heizer, who I think saw
her through. I see her from time to time, Sonia. She got her
degree, and she s working on child memories, that kind of thing.
Troy: Something totally other than archaeology.
293
Clark: Yes, at the City University of New York. I see her at the paleo
[Paleoanthropology Society] meetings from time to time. She s
done well, yes. Nice to see her.
Troy: With Bob Heizer she was doing work with American Indian--?
Clark: No, she continued to work on Early Stone Age sites, I think, Early
Stone Age settlement sites or so, yes. Old World.
Troy: And Julie Cormack?
Clark: She wasn t a student of mine, but she started off --that s a long
story.
But there was Bill McCormack, who was just about my last
student, I think. He worked with me in India, in the Son Valley.
Did good work on a Later Stone Age site there. Then he worked on
trying to source the chalcedonies and agates and so on that were
used to make these artifacts, and worked over on thewhat was the
plateau called there?
Troy: Near the River Son, but up above.
Clark: On the north side of the Son. And then over as well into the
Belan and Ganga valleys. Did a good job of work there with all of
that. Finished. Is now working on computers. He lives in
Lafayette.
Troy: You had Keith Robinson.
Clark: Keith Robinson, yes. These are colleagues that I ve worked with.
But there must be some more students on that list.
Troy: Yes, Ken Williamson.
And then you had Curtis Marean.
Clark: Yes, Curtis was my student, again one of the last. He worked on
fauna and did quite a lot of work up on the hill here, around
Grizzly Peak, with the hyenas, looking to see the way hyenas
chewed bone and bone and all that kind of thing. He did very
well--I think he s a full professor at Stony Brook now, yes.
And then Rob B lumens chine. He was before Curtis. He became
my student. He s at Rutgers and is the team leader of the work
ongoing at Olduvai now. Doing some excellent work, in particular
in connection with the surface there at around about 2 million, I
think it is, 1.8 to 2 million.
294
They ve identified, on a buried surface, of course, found by
excavations, a face of another Australopithecus robustus there.
Troy: Let s see, we haven t done Kidong Bae.
Clark: Kidong was a Korean. He s done very well indeed.
Troy: I didn t realize he did his doctoral work here.
Clark: Oh, yes, he did, yes.
Troy: Is he the only Korean that you had that you remember?
Clark: Yes, I ve never had another Korean.
He s doing very well at one of the universities there [Hanyang
University] .
Troy: And you saw him when you were in China.
Clark: Yes, he came to the Nihewan site and spent two or three days with
us there, which was great fun. And I ve been about three times to
Korea, South Korea, of course, looking at two important sites.
One of them was Chongokni. I can t remember the name of the other
one, of which he produced a very large monograph. So he s done
extremely well.
Troy: We should mention that Merrick Posnansky was here today. You
first met Merrick at the Fourth Pan-African Congress. What is he,
an archaeologist?
Clark: Oh, yes, yes.
Troy: Just retired from UCLA.
We ll think of some more. Francis Musonda. We have talked
about him on a number of occasions.
Clark: Yes. He s the secretary of the National Museums Board in Lusaka.
Troy: And he s instrumental in the preservation of sites with Nicholas
Katenekwa?
Clark: I don t know to what extent they work together.
Well, that s a fair number of them [students]. Most of them
successful.
Troy: Would you venture a guess as to how many total graduate students
you had, Desmond?
295
Clark: Oh, I don t know. How many have we dealt with here now? I
suppose twenty-odd, I don t know, altogether.
Troy: Overall, your sense was always to bring at least some African
students on a fairly regular basis, to be trained.
Clark: Oh, yes, of course. Two we haven t talked about, two of them who
were failures. One was Onyango Abuje, a Kikuyu Kenyan. And the
other man was Jonathan Karoma, a Tanzanian. They were both given
fellowships by the Rockefeller Foundation. They passed their
orals here and so on. Onyango Abuje was always a very macho sort
of chap. Jonathan tended to be the opposite. And Onyango Abuje
went out--we may have talked about this, I can t remember--?
Troy: I think so.
Clark: We were not able to take him into the field immediately, so I
arranged with Mary Leakey for her to show him the site at Hyrax
Hill, where we had planned for him to do some more excavation.
Well, she never did that, so Onyango went out there by himself and
for three months dug in her back dirt, filling in the excavation
that she had done in the early years of the forties , I think it
was.
Troy: And this was atwhich site was this one?
Clark: Old Nakuru. Is that right? Yes.
Troy: Did Mary know that he was doing that to her site?
Clark: Not, I suppose, until she got out there. He did something up
there, nothing really very much, sort of higher up the hill, and
then we put him onto doing some work on the island, for which
there was a causeway going off Lake Naivasha. Fortunately, I was
able to go out with him to see the site he selected to excavate,
and when we got there, all it was a very late beach, with nothing
in it at all from the point of view of artifacts, nothing
whatsoever.
Troy: This was in what year, Desmond?
Clark: Oh, it was sometime in the seventies.
And so I took him back. We found quite interesting stuff up
on the ridge of the island, and he excavated there, wrote it up,
got his degree. Then he went back to the Leakey Institute that
was attached to the national museumit could have still been
called the Corydon Museum at that time, I m not certain. And he
fell out with Louis Leakey- -not Louis Leakey, Richard Leakey. He
was trying to sort of ease himself into something, and Richard
296
sacked him. He was drinking pretty heavily then. He was married
to a very nice girl, who was doing something with some of the
biologists, probably still doing that.
The last I heard--0nyango then went to the university. He
taught at Nairobi University for several years, and he did
excavate a rock shelter, which had been found by somebody
previously. Offhand, I can t remember. Again, near the western
shore of Lake Victoria, the Winam Gulf. Found some interesting
Lupemban material, the first that had been found, as far as I
know, in a rock shelter, but never wrote it up.
Latterly, as I say, he was drinking a lot. We did our very
best indeed, in several meetings with the Rockefeller people in
Nairobi. Nothing ever happened. The university sacked him
because he never turned up for his lectures. I think he was
lecturing at some other university for a short time. Whether he s
alive now or not, I don t know.
Jonathan Karoma was different. He finished his orals all
right, and he came into the field with us, and he excavated
Chencherere, the field school there. Did very well. Very nice
chap. But he could never somehow bring himself--! think he
suffered from chronic ill health. You see what I mean? He may
have been ill for some time, I don t know.
He excavated in Sandowe country, excavated Early Iron Age
pottery. Never really wrote it up, and when it came to it, the
paper bags he d put them all in, the white ants or whatever it was
had gotten to them. He taught for a number of years in Dar es
Salaam University, and they kept on saying, "You must finish your
degree." Peter Schmidt, now at Gainesville, did his very best by
giving him a Land Rover, helping in any way he could to get him to
write up all that Sandowe material. Never happened.
We had several meetings with the Rockefeller people in
Nairobi. Jonathan always turned up there looking very spry and so
on. Nothing ever happened after that. It was most depressing.
Finally the university said, "Okay, no. You re never going to
finish the degree. Get out." And so they sacked him. Quite what
he s doing now, I don t know.
Troy: Do you think the problems for African students stem from earlier
life, when culturally they re just not on the same track
academically as everyone else?
Clark: I don t know what it is.
Troy: I can see for a young African coming to Berkeley that it would be
quite daunting and overwhelming.
297
Clark: Well, one of the problems, of course, is the dreadful conditions
that they go back to, because thinking in terms of the Livingstone
Museum, there was never any money for research after about the
first couple of years or so that Musonda was there as keeper of
prehistory. Then their vehiclesthey had a number of vehicles-
all run into the ground, with no foreign exchange to buy spare
parts.
Of probably about eight or nine vehicles, Land Rovers and
things, that they had there in Livingstone, there was only one
which would go, and that was the director s car. Nick Toth had to
completely re-equip and everything one Land Rover that we borrowed
from them in 1988. New tires and everything. It s totally
disheartening. And no regular contact with others. You can see
how- -you can t blame them for a lot of this. And as I say, like
David Aiyedun, no salaries, even.
Troy: David gets no salary?
Clark: David Aiyedun didn t get any salary when the military government
closed a lot of the universities, like Zairia in Nigeria.
Who else is there there?
Troy: Let s see. I think we ve pretty much covered this list, but other
names are going to come up as we- -why don t we go ahead and get
some lunch?
Clark: I think that s a good idea.
297a
EPILOGUE- -by J. Desmond Clark
I am very pleased to be able to close this most enjoyable oral history
project with the Bancroft Library by expressing my very sincere thanks to
those who have contributed so much to its production and completion. First
and foremost, of course, thanks are due to the University of California
Bancroft Library Regional Oral History Office for their initial interest, and
to the LSB Leakey Foundation for providing funding for the oral history. My
continued interest in Old World paleoanthropology and archaeology has been
greatly stimulated through the Leakey Foundation and my good friend Professor
Alan Almquist, the director of research. In particular I wish to thank Mrs.
Camilla Smith who, through her membership in the Council of Friends of the
Bancroft Library, brought this project to the attention and interest of the
Regional Oral History Office. I would also like to thank The William and Joan
Conner Foundation for additional funding.
The linchpins in bringing this volume to a successful conclusion were
Mr. Tim Troy and Ms. Suzanne Riess. Tim was responsible for the organization
and progress of the numerous tapes on which was set down my own record of my
life history and progress in the field of African archaeology particularly
relating to human origins and the evolution of culture. This entailed an
enormous contribution from Tim, who ultimately had to reduce his input due to
other commitments, but he remained with it to the end, helping to shepherd
home the dialogues and monologues. After the close of the interviews Ms.
Suzanne Riess very generously took over the work necessary to complete what
remained to produce the edited text. I am so very grateful to Tim and Suzanne
in all of this.
It was most gratifying to receive the third and last volume on the
Kalambo Falls Prehistoric Site published in mid-October, as this is the most
significant site that I have found and excavated. This volume contains the
cultural evidence, the hard data, as it can be called, in its full
stratigraphic and environmental contexts. Most important is the full
illustrative record of the stone artifacts and the waste flaking material that
records the production process. This is probably the most complete record of
the lithic technology ever produced at any early site in the African
Continent. It is therefore a very special pleasure to thank my wife Betty
Clark for all these very fine line illustrations. These illustrations show,
as no amount of description or tables, the evolution of cultural technology
and behavior throughout the long sequence from the Acheulian to the present
day, as this can be seen in the excavations. They are the most important part
of this volume illustrating each developing cultural episode, as it is
recorded in the artifact assemblages. These illustrations were done by Betty
over the past thirty years or more, sometimes in the field, sometimes in the
laboratory and sometimes hastily and in dangerous moments during the unrest of
the Ethiopian Marxist Regime. We are all in her debt for this invaluable
record.
What makes this edited oral history so valuable for me and for those who
may read it, are the dialogues and monologues that evidence very well the ways
297b
in which the work was collegia!, and often exciting. They are dialogues
between dear colleagues and friends, who were often former graduate students,
and myself, that serve to fill out the picture as could never otherwise be
done. Their memories of the joys and sorrows of camp and laboratory life, and
the great camaraderie we all experienced on these occasions, add much to
understanding the conditions under which we carried out our work. The
monologues by my friends Merrick Posnansky and Martin Williams fit essential
pieces into the jigsaw puzzle to make a whole picture. We must all be
immensely grateful to them for these important contributions .
I am so grateful to all those who have contributed to this volume.
Especially to Tim White and the Human Origins program, which made it possible
for Elizabeth Agrilla to work with me. It is Elizabeth s editing, computer and
paperwork that has allowed me to continue with my research and my general
interest in the advances in paleoanthropology and archaeology in Africa, as
well as elsewhere in the world. Her help has been essential to me and I am
more grateful than I can say.
In short, undertaking this oral history has been a great joy to me in
reviving old memories of dear friends, young and old, and of those no longer
with us. It brings back some of the happiest days Betty and I spent together
in Africa and the great relationships that we were privileged to have formed
there with the people and the wildlife of our surroundings.
January 2002
Oakland, California
APPENDIX
1. Andrew Smith, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, March 11, 2000 298
Smith Comes to UC Berkeley 298
The Sahara, Pastoralists and the Sahel, and Rock Art 300
Air Mountains Expedition, 1969-1970, and Desert Travel 302
Movement of Humans, Pastoralists, in North Africa 313
2. Garniss Curtis, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, April 25, 2000 319
First Meeting 319
Potassium-Argon Dating, Tule Springs 320
Calico Hills 321
Dating Clovis Points 326
Dating in Africa and Java 327
Dmanisi 335
3. Charles Keller, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, May 8, 2000 340
First Meeting, 1961, and Focus on Africa 340
Stone Technology Lab 341
Isimila Site, and Personnel 344
Rest and Recreation Outings 345
The Atlas of African Prehistory 346
The 63 Season at Kalambo 348
Difficulties of Doing Archaeology, Protecting Sites 351
Update on Keller s Work, Blacksmithing 354
4. Timothy White, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, November 2, 2000 357
Together in Ethiopia Over the Years, and the Access Problem 357
New Developments, Uncovering Surprises 362
The Seasonal Teams, Personnel, Attitudes 367
Colonial Times as Easier Times 370
5. Hiro Kurashina, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, April 21, 2001 374
First Meeting as a Student, 1969, and Malawi, 1972 374
Aspects of Working in Ethiopia 376
The People at Gadeb 379
Discoveries in Kone 381
A Meeting in Beijing in 1992 385
Acheulean Finds in the Bose Basin 387
Kurashima s Work in the Pacific 389
The Birthday Celebrations for Desmond 390
6. Martin Williams and Donald Adamson, April 21, 2001 393
Sudan, 1973, Jebel et Tomat 393
Barbed Bone Point Find Incentive 395
The Challenges of the Sudan 396
Pottery Findings 397
Barbed Bone Point Story Continued 399
Betty Clark and the Running of the Camps 400
The Beauties of the Plains of Gadeb, the Webi Shebeli 401
The Dating Work in Gadeb 402
The Team at Gadeb, and the Fortunate Timing 403
Ongoing Connections with the Clarks 405
7. Steve Brandt and J. Desmond Clark, April 30, 2001 407
Catching Up 407
New Look at Afro-Asiatic Language Families 408
Work on Hide Workers 410
Recollections of Work in Somaliland 411
Bloompaas Cave, Latrines, Et Cetera 413
India in 1980 414
Brandt s Background 417
Stories from Camp Life in Ethiopia 419
More Dramatic Stories from Ethiopia 422
After Ethiopia: Somalia, India 427
Following in Desmond s Footsteps 430
8. Merrick Posnansky, September 10, 2001 432
Working with J. Desmond Clark 432
Contribution to Museum Development 434
A Framework for African Archaeology 436
Desmond As a Teacher 438
Contributions to World Archaeology 440
An Interest in Peoples, and People 442
9. Martin Williams, November 30, 2001 445
First Meeting Desmond in Carthage 445
Adrar Bous, 1970, Logistics and Adventures 446
The Work in Ethiopia, 1974 450
The Team in the Middle Awash, 1981 453
Seasons in India, 1980 and 1982 454
Finding at Esh Shawal, 1983 456
10. Jack Harris and Robert Blumenschine, January 23, 2002 458
Impressions of Desmond as Professor 458
Introduction to the Middle Awash, 1979-1980 461
In India with Desmond and Betty, Fieldwork and Festivals 463
A Pioneer in Many Ways 467
11. Conversation on the Problems at the Livingstone Museum
(Excerpt from April 18, 2000 interview with J. Desmond Clark) 470
12. "African Archaeology at the Millennium: retrospect and reaction"
by J. Desmond Clark 476
13. "Archaeological retrospect 10"
by J. Desmond Clark in Antiquities 496
14. Bibliography 502
298
Andrew Smith, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, March 11, 2000
Smith Comes to UC Berkeley
Troy: Andrew, did you come to Cal knowing that Desmond was here?
Smith: No, I didn t come specifically to work with Desmond, but I came
because of the influences of Californians. When I was in the
service, I knew people who lived in California, and the sister of
one was a Berkeley student during the heady days of the Free
Speech Movement. That was my introduction to Berkeley as a
non-student, so I was determined to come to Berkeley.
When I arrived, I had already worked very informally with the
Danes in the Near East, so I was very interested in archaeology.
So I did anthropology as a subject, but Desmond was immediately a
very effective influence, because I took a course with him on
African prehistory, and immediately my interests were moving in
that direction, because of his influence. And I was there the
first year that Professor Glynn Isaac arrived, so we coincided.
That program began attracting students into Africa prehistory
who today teach all over the world. It was the center of the
African archaeological universe, you might say. There was more
work being done in Berkeley at that time on Africa than anywhere
else in the world.
Troy: You got here in 1966. And you came from South Africa?
Smith: No, I d been living in the United States since 1958, at that
point. And I d been in the American service, and I d also worked
in the Middle East.
Troy: Where were you born?
Smith: In Scotland.
Troy: Scotland? My gosh. David Livingstone. We had some wonderful
anecdotal stories last week about David Livingstone.
299
Smith: Yes, the archives in Livingstone, in the town where Desmond
worked, are still there, including a lot of his artifacts in the
museum on display. It s quite a lovely exhibit. Same one I think
Desmond probably made. [laughs]
Troy: And what town are you from in Scotland?
Smith: Glasgow. Blantyre, Livingstone s birthplace, is very close. We
used to go on Sunday school trips to Blantyre to see the mecca,
you might say, of the great David Livingstone.
Troy: When you came to the United States, did you ^et drafted?
Smith: No, I joined up, air force for four years. I would have been
drafted eventually, because I was an immigrant with my green card.
And the draft was still in place at the time.
Troy: So you must have quickly learned that Desmond had this expansive
interest in a multidisciplinary kind of approach, that he was very
interested in paleoenvironmental and paleogeographical, and the
man on the physical landscape.
Smith: Well, that was really my interest, because with Desmond s interest
in ecology, human adaptation to the environment --at that time, it
was a very growing field, and it widened the scope of anthropology
in its true sense, which is America s great contribution.
Archaeology is not separated from social anthropology. So in many
ways, you had a rounded picture of the human experience from the
past leading into the present, and Desmond has always been very
much involved with how you interpret the past by looking at what
people do. Technology especially is one of his great interests:
what people do today is, in some ways, telling us about how people
did things in the past.
That roundedness was very attractive to a young student coming
in from the outside. And I was very, very enthused with social
anthropology as well, and ethnography. Although I always found
that dealing with the dead is easier than dealing with the living
--they don t talk back to you! [laughter] You ve got to be
really dedicated to work with people. That s not an easy
business, working with living people.
300
The Sahara, Pastoralists and the Sahel, and Rock Art
Troy:
Clark:
Smith:
And especially now, I would think. Desmond and I talked a little
bit about changes in Africa and how it s really quite problematic,
politically.
I don t know to what extent people like the Tuareg or Bedouin in
the Sahara would have changed all that much, their way of life. I
suppose they keep out of the way of guerrilla movements and that
kind of thing. Wouldn t you think?
No, I m afraid not. The Tuareg have been very much involved with
the warfare in both Niger and Mali. They ve been funded or armed
from Libya with automatic weapons, so there was a really serious
war, and I m afraid--! haven t been back to my area of research in
Mali since 1980, but I m afraid a lot of my friends are probably
dead as a result of that.
I might get a chance to go next year, because the next Pan-
African Congress will be held in Bamako in Mali, in February of
next year. So there s a possibilityand Desmond has been to all
of the Pan-African Congresses,
continues to be.
He s the founding member, and
Clark: Like to try and get there somehow.
Smith: So I may get a chance to go back and see what s actually happened
in place.
Yes, it s very unfortunate. But nonetheless, I think
Desmond s right in many ways. On the one hand the way of life has
been influenced, but on the other they re far enough removed from
the modern influences that many just retain a very traditional way
of life. I think what really hit them worst of all was the
drought in 1973. It was a very serious one, and many had to move
out of the Sahel and go southwards to where there was food. They
lost their stock, so they just went looking for work, and some
stayed. So that was some influence. Most went back to their old
way of life.
Clark: Of course, that s one of the things about pastoralists .
They are
absolutely committed to their stock. If they lose their stock, as
has happened to people in Ethiopia recently, they will go and work
as a farm hand and so on, to get money. Once they ve got enough,
they will buy as much breeding stock as they can, and off they go
again. So they reestablish themselves that way.
Smith: That modern model, you might say, comes right out of the past.
301
Clark: Yes.
Smith: Though it s very difficult to prove archaeologically. But when
Desmond and I worked in the Sahara, it was an area, almost a
laboratory situation of climatic change to which humans had to
adapt. That meant not only they but their animals, if they were
pastoral people, would be adapting. Very much like people do
today. So I ve been using modern modeling to suggest patterns
which may go back into the past for a number of thousands of
years.
And this is evident in the rock art, rock paintings. In the
howling desert of the Tassili N Ajjer in southern Algeria, no
place for cattle today, are these wonderful cattle paintings.
They re so beautiful, they really are.
Troy: Desmond, during the war you had discovered some things when you
were in Somaliland.
Clark: Oh, yes, there were some good ones there. Also, of course, in
Zambia as well, which were very different from the fine,
beautiful, naturalistic rock art that you got in South Africa, and
Zimbabwe as well. This was all geometric sort of stuff --well,
almost all of it. Some of the very earliest are rather schematic
representations of animals and so on. Extremely interesting. Why
should you have that schematic art there? There are all sorts of
things: Halley s comet, and there are sort of parallel lines and
circles, concentric circles, and all that kind of thing.
But I think it could be something to do with the fact that the
original art was probably on bark or on skin, and it sort of got
transposed in due course to the walls. Because some of this is
really very old. You ve got a rock paintingsorry, an engraved
wall in a rock shelter in a place called Chifubwa Stream, little
rock shelter, which was about--oh, I don t know- -probably thirty
feet above the present stream in the corn belt area of Zambia.
But there were a whole series of inverted circles and round,
pockmarks, parallel lines, and there was clear indication that
these had had pigment rubbed into them at one time.
They had been covered by a sterile deposit of sands, which had
been washed off near the top. The sands had buried a single
archaeological horizon. On this there was a large boulder,
something like that, that had two parallel lines sort of pecked or
engraved on it of the same kind, so that we knew what the industry
was. We had a date from about 7,000 something, I think it was.
And the industry, which is very characteristic, dated early Later
Stone Age. It was dated elsewhere in various sites as well. The
youngest date is 10,000. So it goes back quite a long way.
302
There are engraved plaques with painting on them, of animals
and a few lines and things from a cave called the Apollo 11,
wasn t it?
Smith: That s right, yes.
Clark: Fish River Gorge in the southern part of Namibia, isn t it? And
that appears to date from about 22,000. Isn t that right?
Smith: That s right, yes. They tried to refute those dates every single
way, stratographically, and they still can t. So those dates seem
to hold in there. Unfortunately, there s no other dates as old as
that to support it. This is the real problem.
Troy: And that s Apollo 11?
Smith: Apollo 11. It had been excavated in 1969 when when Armstrong
walked on the moon.
Air Mountains Expedition, 1969-1970. and Desert Travel
Troy: Let me get some of the chronology straight, Desmond. Major D. N.
Hall had that British Air Mountains expedition in 1970, 69- 70.
And you were invited on that.
Clark: That s right, yes.
Troy: But you, Andrew, were not here yet.
Smith: I was here, but at that moment, I was in East Africa. I d taken
the year off between my undergraduate degree, which 1 did here,
and then going off to do graduate studies. I got a letter from
Desmond in Nairobi asking me if I would join him to go to the
Saharabefore I even knew I would be accepted to graduate school!
[laughs] So it was a bit of a strange situation. Eventually I
got my letter of recognition to acceptance in graduate school at
Berkeley. That was the sequence.
Troy: And did you go up there, with Hall, on that 69- 70 expedition?
Clark: Yes, we were together in the Sahara for one season. And there
was another man from Berkeley, Allen Pastron, who later became a
social anthropologistworks in San Francisco actually, contract
archaeology, historic archaeology. Nice chap. We were the
archaeology team out there. And we worked with a geologist, an
Englishman who was working in Australia, and still is, Martin
Williams, a professor of geology in Adelaide now.
303
Troy: Had Hall known where he was going, or were you kind of roaming
around the mountains?
Smith: No, nothe initial project was to go to southeastern Libya, to
the Kufra Oasis area. There was a lot of interest in that, and
very little archaeological work had ever been done there.
Previously a group, graduates of Cambridge University, many of
whom became military of f icers--they were in contact with Major
Hall, and on the basis of that association with the military had
put together an expedition to Kufra Oasis in Libya.
But you know what happened in September of 1969, I m sure you
can remember-- [laughter] .
Qaddafi took over. So that meant there
was no way we could get into that area, because that was the
headquarters of the Idrisi clan. Of course, that was what Qaddafi
was replacing, and there was no way we were going to be allowed
into Kufra. So they had to either abandon the idea, or take up
the suggestion of Major Hall, who had already been in Niger in the
Air wandering with camels, to go there to do some work.
I think Desmond was influential partially on that.
Desmond, did you discuss with David Hall, because of the
Berliet expedition, that you go work in the Air region?
Clark: Yes, I did.
Smith: What was the association of you and David discussing that?
Clark: Well, somewhere along the line, David in talking with his people
thought, What we need to do is to have a bit of scientific work in
this expedition. I think he must have talked with Tony Arkell,
who was professor--! can t remember what he was at that time. Had
been to the Sahara, to the Lake Ounianga area, south-central
Sahara, towards the east, found a lot of interesting stuff. And
he may have recommended me, I don t know. David Hall phoned me,
put it to me, and I said yes, we d love to.
After the Libyan business, then we decided that we would go to
the Airs, as Andy said, and just off in the northeast corner, must
be about sixty-five kilometers or something, there was this
isolated massif. I think it was graniteyounger granites,
actuallycalled Adrar Bous. Initially French gendarmerie, on
their camel safaris in the must be in the thirties, had found
there very beautiful looking tools which looked as it they should
be Neolithic.
Then there was subsequently an expedition by the Berliet
company which had collected a whole lot more material there. They
had something to do with large lorries.
304
Smith: That s right, Berliet is a make of French lorry, and they were
sponsoring the expedition.
Clark: Yes, that s right.
So that was the place that we hoped to focus on, so far as
geology was concerned, and David Hall went along with that. We
spent as long there as we could. Didn t have quite as long as we
would like to have had. But we found a lot of material, and we
were able to excavate certain crucial areas to see what the
stratographic relationship of the different stages of artifacts
were in the sequence with our colleague Martin Williams.
We were able to produce a good interpretation of the later
Quaternary sequence at Adrar Bous, which covered everything from
the late Achulean through to a very rich Neolithic. Which was,
what was that, about 4000 b.c.? Something like that.
Smith: Yes, just after that, that s right.
Clark: And it was, of course, an area where there was no water, so nobody
lived there. But you could see how, when there had been flash
floods, you could see to where the water level had come, because
there was a line of camel droppings, which float, you see, all the
way around. And there were much earlier levels of diatomite,
which we were interested in from the point of view of the
archaeology.
Smith: Diatomites are indications of old lakes, freshwater standing there
for periods of time. And you could see those.
Clark: Yes. So we did superbly well out of all of that.
Troy: And this was because, in part, you had a very open-minded kind of
expedition leader in Hall and also this multidisciplinary group,
geologists and geomorphologists. Was Hall trained at Cambridge in
archaeology?
Clark: I think so. Either Cambridge or Oxford.
Smith: But not in archaeology, I don t believe. He was a major in the
Royal Engineers.
Troy: So, the great tradition of British exploratory expeditions.
Clark: Yes. They enjoyed camel safaris. They enjoyed climbing
mountains .
Smith: They enjoyed driving Land Rovers, and learning how to drive them
in the sand, which is an experience everyone who drives in the
305
desert has to go through. The old Land Rovers, you had to take
care of very, very gently. They were good vehicles, but they
needed to be babied a bit. Not like vehicles today. So we
learned the hard way. We broke half shafts, we did everything.
We found out that camels were better transport than Land Rovers.
Troy: And so you ended up with camels a lot of the time?
Smith: One time, we did. We sent the Land Rovers back to base to be
repaired, and we continued with camels.
Clark: Yes, we all got up to the top end of some wadi, from which you
could see the main part of the Tenere Desert, stretching over to
the east and somewhere beyond what would have been Adrar Bous .
By
the time we got there, 1 think all but one of the Land Rovers--and
we had four Land Rovers, wasn t that right?--had broken half
shafts .
Smith: That means the rear axle then is inoperative, and they were just
running on front wheel drive, you see? So they were still
operating, but not at four-wheel-drive.
Clark: So the two that we had with us had to go back, and we decided,
because we had seen about twenty- five camels not all that far,
maybe ten miles or something, south, that we passed, that we would
endeavor to get some camels, and walk to Adrar Bous rather than
sit waiting for them to come back. So off they went.
We had all our jerry cans with water, various other equipment,
that s right, and we had a superb- -you d probably call him a kind
of district messenger. They re called goumiers, is the French
term. Well, they were sort of scouts, I suppose you d say. I
don t think they were armed. They had a sort of tunic and shorts,
I think it was, pair of sandals, and there it was. They were
magnificent people.
Troy: These were Tuareg?
Clark: They were Tuareg. He went off to find some camels. It took quite
a little while. When he got back, he said, "There are three
camels coming in." One was a riding camel which he subsequently
used. One was a burden camel, which we put our water and other
supplies on, bedrolls and things. And the other one actually was
a stallion camel which he managed to get hold of that we could
ride. It had a saddle on it as well, one of those Tuareg saddles
where you have a big pommel and then you put your feet over the
front .
306
Then we discovered that the vehicles had gone off with all our
ropes. Fortunately, I had brought along several balls of a
thickish sort of sisal string. Sowhat was his name?
Smith: Zawi.
Clark: Zawi proceeded to weave these into ropes. That s what we used.
Troy: Incredible. How many were you?
Smith: There were four of us left, plus Zawi.
Troy: Four of you plus Zawi after the fellows in the Land Rover beat a
retreat.
Clark: And all the other camels were females, so they couldn t be used at
all. Otherwise it would be absolute chaos.
Smith: How it worked was, there wasn t enough room on the camels to carry
all the gear, so Desmond and Martin went off with Zawi, and Allen
Pastron and I stayed behind with the rest of the gear. Well,
Desmond and Martin--we didn t see them for at least a day or so,
but then the camels came back for Allen and I. We got the rest of
the gear on the camels, and started to move out ourselves. We
went part of the way, and just as we were about to arrive at Adrar
Bous, the Land Rovers, which had been repaired, caught up with us
again. So basically, we had been without vehicles for probably
about three or four days.
Clark: They sent them back for you, yes.
Smith: Yes. So I ve still got pictures of me on the camel, so I know I
was there. [laughs] My first camel ride.
Troy: Was there some sort of track to the site?
Smith: No, we had Zawi as a guide.
Clark: Yes, and so off we went. And as we left the Air, that particular
part of the Air was a mountain area which is 10,000 feet high, or
close on that, I think, called Greboun. So the artifacts got less
and less as we went out into the desert. I was getting very
worried that we were going to bring the whole expedition to Adrar
Bous to find that there wasn t anything there. However, we spent
the first night, which was okay, and then the next day was a very
long day.
Troy: What time of the year was this?
307
Smith: This was in January, so it was cold, particularly during the
nights. I wore an expedition parka some days, all day long. Down
jacket.
Clark: And we went on, we couldn t see any artifacts and so on. We
finally stopped just after dusk had fallen, and put our bedrolls
out on a little mound. We were utterly- -well, I was certainly
worn out. The next morning we got up, and we hadn t gone probably
more than about 100 yards, I think, when we saw a ring in the sand
which turned out to be the bottom, of which the very bottom had
been removed, of a pot which was put inverted over the mouth of
another big pot, which was full of ceitis seeds, Neolithic. So
that was good, we excavated that.
Troy: Just there on the surface?
Smith: You could see it, exposed. The inverted pot had been eroded away;
you could just see the ring of it.
Clark: The whole of the rest. And from then on we began to find a few
more, and by the time we got to Adrar Bous , there was stuff all
over the place.
But one of the interesting things about that was, we took
turns walking and riding that camel. It also took a little time
in the morning before we started off.
You would have thought it would be a tremendous relief to get
on the camel. Well, I can assure you it was not. By the time
that wretched stallion had walked- -what did he do, an hour, I
think it was, probably?--then we would say, "It s your turn to
ride the camel." So you d get on the camel, and put your legs
over it, over the pommel. But the saddle was tipped forward, and
it was one of the most uncomfortable things that I have ever been
on, I think. As the hour came to the end, you would then say
[brightly], "Martin, it s your turn to ride the camel." [laughs]
Troy: Had Zawi saddled the camel intentionally this way?
Smith: No, no, this is how you ride. What you do, you put your feet into
the neck of the curve of the camel, both feet together, and you
use your feet as a sort of accelerator to get it going. So the
distance between you and the saddle is the length between the
lower part of his neck and where you sit on the camel. You sit
quite upright, and you balance on your feet on the neck of the
animal. It s not too bad once you get used to it, but it takes a
little getting used to.
Clark: The problem was, we were not used to it.
308
Smith:
Troy:
Smith:
Clark:
Smith:
Troy:
Smith:
Troy:
Clark:
Smith:
Troy:
Smith:
Clark:
Smith:
Clark:
Of course, that was it. And normally, the Tuareg go barefoot.
You ride your camel barefoot, because you re much more sensitive
to the animal s neck, you see?
And the animal would get to know your feet, probably.
Yes, of course. Whereas I doubt if Desmond took his shoes off.
Did you take your shoes off when you would ride the camel?
No.
You see, that would be a different thing,
have to be led, probably.
So the animal would
They re notoriously independent creatures, aren t they?
No, the Tuareg camels are very well trained. I ve used them for
surveys in Mali later on, and they re very effective. You sit
high, looking down, walking at roughly the pace of a man- -they
don t walk very fast and you can see things around, so it s
really quite a good way to do surveys, if you have the stamina to
stay in the saddle.
They tried in the 19th century to have camels in the United States
for various reasons, in the Southwest --kind of aborted efforts.
And in Australia as well.
Australia now.
In fact, there are some wild camels in
But these were introduced in southern Africa just about the time
the automobile was being introduced, and in many cases--! think in
southern Africa it was the automobile that stopped the camels
being used. In north Africa, they were used.
But there are a few camels left in southern Africa?
There are a few in Namibia.
There were the Pleistocene camels, of course, in Africa,
know what happened to themthey seemed to disappear.
I don t
The camels of today were brought in by the Romans 2,000 years ago.
And presumably, the dromedary was first domesticated in Arabia.
You see, they re all extinct, of course, in Arabia now. The
Arabians, I suppose, use those super-camels that they used in
Indiathe Raj sort of developed these, I think. Maybe the Moguls
who did it before. Bikaners, they re called. Those are extremely
comfortable to ride.
309
Smith: But those are Bactrian, the two-humpers .
Clark: No, no.
Smith: Oh, those are one-humpers?
Clark: Yes. The only Bactrian ones I ve ever seenapart from the
Regent s Park Zoo- -were in Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, up on the
plateau.
Smith: I used them in Iran. The two-humpers. I used them for my work
when I was working in the oil companies.
Troy: About the expedition, how does it work? You get to these sites,
and you don t have a lot of water?
Clark: The only water we had was the water we carried with us.
Troy: Initially, I suppose, when you don t see evidence of anything,
it s a little bit discouraging, but then you came to this pot, and
things began to develop, and then all of the discomforts of the
expedition fade, and you begin to concentrate down.
Clark: That s right, exactly. That s precisely it.
Troy: I ve always wondered how you could go to these extraordinary
places, awful places--! mean, they re wonderful, but they re so
remoteand have to worry about all of the logistics, and the
issues of water and getting back and so on.
Clark: You see, if it hadn t been for David Hall and his people, who love
that kind of thing, or loved that kind of thing, we would have
been very lucky to have been able to stay in Adrar Bous, say, a
week or something. They did all the logistics of supplying us,
feeding the camp, providing the water. The water had to come from
sixty-five kilometers away.
Smith: And it was underground water, a little seep which had to be dug
for and then allowed to come. The Tuareg know where all this
water is. It was they who showed us where the water sources were.
But without our guides, you really can t operate; these people
really know their environment.
Clark: The whole group, how many were there, sixteen, do you think?
Smith: It varied in number. People coming and going. Maximum twenty,
but I think around our camp, twelve to sixteen was average.
Troy: Where did you start from? Where was the very beginning where you
flew in?
310
Smith: Tunis. And we drove first into Algeria, during heavy rainstorms.
So severe were those rainstorms that Roman bridges which had stood
for 2,000 years were being washed away. So we had the worst rains
in--well, many, many years. That was the first leg.
Troy: December, probably?
Smith: That s right, just after Christmas, yes. And then we went
immediately south and got away from the rain, but it was still
cloudy for several days before we got deeper into the Sahara,
traveling through Algeria.
Clark: Going south, did we--yes, we did go to Tamanrasset, didn t we?
Smith: That s right.
Clark: Oh, that s where we had the nonsense with the customs people.
Smith: That s the only time I ve really seen Desmond lose his temper. He
really lost his cool that time. He told those customs officers-
see, they found we had British Army radios in our equipment, so
they immediately suspected us of being spies.
Troy: These were Algerian customs people?
Smith: These were the Algerian border people, who were quasi-military.
They were gendarmerie. They were holding us up. In fact, we were
there for well over a day, trying to negotiate our way through.
We weren t staying in Algeria, of course, we were going on to
Niger. They were just holding us up. And I m afraid there were
some very short tempers. [laughter]
Clark: And they made us unpack everything in the vehicles, which we did,
and we had three or four pair of binoculars in plastic cases which
hadyou know those little packets of crystal that they put in to
absorb moisture? Ah! They seized on those, thought that was
probably drugs of some kind or another. But in the end, we parted
the best of friends.
Troy: What does Desmond look like when he s angry? Smoke coming out of
his ears?
Smith: No, no, he s very gentlemanly, but he steams a bit. [laughter]
Clark: That was good, wasn t it? That s where we climbed up to the top
of the Haggar, and went to--
Smith: --the Hermitage of Pere Foucauld.
Clark: Yes, amazing. It was great.
311
Smith: But what we were doing was crossing into Niger from Algeria on our
way to Agades, which is the main regional capital. From there, we
went directly north into the Air mountains from Agades. Agades
was sort of a main base, but we moved north to a second base
called Iferouane, in the central part or the northern part of the
Air. That became the working base for us. Just a little village,
a hamlet, just a few huts around a well. There was nothing very
much there at all.
But that was the last logistical point to our work in Adrar
Bous, where I think we stayed for about two and a half months. So
a lot of the logistic was getting back and lorth.
Troy: What was the distance between that little village and Adrar Bous?
Smith: I should think a good day s drive.
Clark: These places are rather like some of the coastal places in
Berbera. For example, as you see in the--I was going to say the
last century--in the 19th century, 1840s, when Richard Burton was
there and so on. At certain times of the year, there can be
nothing there at all. But at other times of the year, it looks
like an important tent town or city.
Smith: As people aggregate and come together. It depends, obviously, on
the conditions of the pasturage for the animals. But if it s good
weather, a good grass, then they can come together for periods of
time. It s a very social occasion for trading, for marriages, for
all the things you do. Very, very important time.
You were asking about tracks. Once you got beyond Iferouane
there were no tracks, except we were following the tracks of the
French who had been there ten years before. Now, tracks don t
disappear, they survive in the desert for long, long periods. So
we could see the French tracks quite easily. You break through a
crust which has been there for thousands of years, and tracks stay
there. The French had left a series of, what would you call them?
Markers.
Clark: Yes. Balise, they re called.
Smith: And Mission Berliet actually left several balise on the way to the
Adrar Bous. I ve got a photograph of one. It s quite fancy, says
"Mission Berliet" and all this. So we could follow their tracks
to that point, and then go straight on to Adrar Bous, which was,
of course, where they d been as well. So the only tracks we could
see were theirs, had been there ten years before.
Troy: God help us if all of these American four-wheeler people get over
there, they ll just wreck the place.
312
Clark:
Smith:
Clark:
Smith:
Troy:
Smith:
Troy:
Smith:
Clark:
Smith:
Clark:
Smith:
Yes, the whole thing will be spoiled.
Well, believe me, that s already started. Tourists going deep
into the desert--! was in Egypt in January, and saw tracks. What
we try to do now, if you re really conscious, is stay in your own
tracks. You can t tell tourists that; it s very difficult to tell
tourists .
Yes, very much so. They do that in the Middle Awash as well.
But in the end of the sixties, early seventies, we were virtually
the first people to go in there. So there were no tracks, and
that was one reason you had to be very careful. We used a thing
called a sun compass. A sun compass works on the principle of the
sundial. You get the shadow onto a vertical point, which then
casts a shadow onto a disk, which can be turned, every fifteen
minutes you turn it as the day goes past. And you can get a very,
very accurate direction, because we used open vehicles, the Land
Rovers.
Where would you put this, on the hood?
You put it on the dashboard, because it was open vehicles.
And you turned it every fifteen minutes.
Keep track on your watch, just turn it, and you could follow the
sun s shadow. Very effective. This is before the days of GPS
[global positioning system], of course. Now you don t have to
worry about things like that. You can t really get lost any more.
One interesting thing as well was, you just drive straight, you
see, and you drive fairly reasonably quickly. And it s very
difficult, with the sort of light brown color of the sand, and the
dullish horizon, to see the difference between them. You could be
driving along, going up a dune, and suddenly, of course, the other
side of the dune would be--
--a slipface.
That s right. So you had to be very careful.
So you listen to your engine all the time. The engine told you,
if it started to labor, going uphill, you then started to listen
very carefully, because once it started to ease off you were near
the crest, and you would get out and look. As Desmond said, there
was no way of differentiating a horizon.
whiteout in snow. You can t see things.
same.
It s like being in
It s all very much the
313
Clark: And the sand, when you were going up the dune, is compacted and
firm. On the other side, it s all loose.
Smith: People have been known to go over the edge and just, tcheww! roll
the vehicles.
Troy: Huge dunes.
Smith: Well, they can be, yes. Could be ten, fifteen meters high. There
are much bigger ones than that, of course, but where we were
working, they were probably about that size.
Movement of Humans, Pastoralists , in North Africa
Troy:
Clark:
Smith:
Troy :
Smith:
Troy:
Smith:
After the 69- 70 Hall expedition you were back, Andrew, but
Desmond, did you go back again?
No, never went back to Adrar Bous, no. But Andy went on to work--
--I went to Mali to do the second part of my dissertation, at
Karkarichinkat .
My dissertation was divided into two sections.
One was the Adrar Bous section, which was the earlier time period;
the Karkarichinkat, further south in Mali, was the second part of
my dissertation. I was trying to show how the pastoralism
developed and then spread into the Sahel. That s right.
That movement of humans back and forth continues to this day.
Well, in this case, we established quite conclusively there was a
second diatomite period, which was a very wet period at Adrar
Bous, but subsequently, it dried up. So by around 4,000 years
ago, A, 500 years ago, the Sahara was reaching conditions like
today. It wasn t at all conducive to cattle pastoralism.
when you first see the occupation of the Sahel by cattle.
That s
Now, we had to ask ourselves, Well, why did cattle not get
there before? Because there s grass there, there s probably
water. One potential answer is, I think, that the tsetse belts
were much farther north when the Sahara was a very vibrant area,
was green, was pasture. But once the Sahara dried up, the tsetse
belts moved south too, allowing cattle to move into areas which
previously they couldn t go in.
Tsetse belts?
The tsetse fly.
314
Troy:
Smith:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Smith:
Troy:
Smith:
The interrelation of pastoralists and an insect.
Indeed. It still exists today.
I think that was the main reason why the west African hunting-
gathering peoples were able to establish themselves there
following domestication of local plants of one kind or another.
Very interesting, because when the pastoralists move south,
usually what happens is that they clobber all of the--or rather,
they enslave. You can see that this kind of thing was going on in
northern Nigeria, because at that time there were no tsetse flies.
The tsetse fly is sort of dormant during the cold weather, and
then when the rains and the warmth come, it emerges.
Of course, the pastoralists found that if they stayed there
during the summer, they lost all their cattle. So they had to
move. That gave the west African hunter-gatherers the time to
really sort of dig themselves in, and with various different kinds
of millets and sorghum as well, you see, along that sort of Sahel
belt, they were able to establish themselves.
And today, still the same kind of situation happens, you see.
The pastoralists move down, they graze their stock on the stubble
of the fields of the local farmers, who like that very much, and
then they move back.
So it s a good relationship some of the time.
Some of the time.
Yes. There have been a series of periods when it wasn t such a
good relationship. But the pastoralists are dependent upon that
fly-animal relationship, because the fly is deadly, fatal, to the
cattle, so they have to return, they have to retreat north once
the rains come.
I think that same north-south pattern had been further north
into the area where I was working at the Karkarichinkat in--as I
say, about 3,000, 4,000 years ago. But when the Sahara dried up
the rain belts moved south, and the tsetse would have moved south
with it, meaning the tsetse belts were much further south than
they were previously, opening up the area for continual use by
pastoralists, rather than this peripatetic, this seasonal movement
which you see today.
How far is the Karkarichinkat from Adrar Bous?
I d say 400 or 500 kilometers,
quite sure.
But I d have to check, I m not
315
Troy: But you saw similarities between the sites?
Smith: I saw similarities in the way people lived. There was no direct
relationship in the form of the decoration on pottery, for
instance. Similar type of pots, but decorated differently.
Similar type of arrowheads in some ways, same kind of hunting
equipment, although slightly different design. So the way of life
wasn t terribly different, just had its own sort of cultural
signature, you might say, which was slightly different. But I
don t think the way of life was any different.
The only thing was, at Karkarichinkat, that was a fishing
camp. They were living oa little mounds after the rains had come,
and the site was full of fish bones. So it was a seasonal
occupation for fishing.
Troy: Is there still water there seasonally?
Smith: No, it s dry. Maybe during really heavy rains you might get some
for a period of time, but not to the same extent it was 4,000
years ago. No.
Clark: You see, the Sahara has had times in the past when it was very
dry. I would say at the moment it s not very dry, if you see what
I m saying.
Smith: It s not the driest period.
Clark: It s dry. But there were other times when it was highly favorable
from the point of view of water courses having water in them,
lakes appearing and so on.
Smith: Which meant vegetation, of course.
Clark: And the last big one of these, of course, was at the end of the
last glacial. During the last glacial, everything was very dry,
and fairly cold as well, I think. It was a miserableas far as
we could tell, nobody was living in the main parts of the Sahara
at that time. But from about 12,000 years in other words, the
beginning of the recent Holocene stage, post-glacialwe got a
very rich rainfall. The wind systems and everything had moved
south, and the jet stream and so on brought a lot of water into
the Sahara.
It must have been a super place then, because it wasn t
forest, it was open, there was a bunch of grassland, all the big
Ethiopian mammalian fauna all moved in, you see. And following
them, of course, came the humans, moving from the south, and
moving from the north.
316
Troy: Kind of like the Great Plains, maybe.
Smith: May well have been, yes.
Clark: Whether this was contemporaneous, we re not certain as yet. But
certainly the people moving in from the souththe vegetation,
savannah vegetation, Sahel vegetation, moved 600 kilometers north
of the northern limit today. It was pretty impressive.
Smith: And within Adrar Bous itself today, there are relict flora; there
are olive trees and cypress trees admittedly, these are North
African connection, but nonetheless, it tells us that in the past
there was a movement of vegetation that still you can see relicts
of, right in the heart of the mountains of the Air.
Troy: And these are living trees?
Smith: Yes, absolutely.
Clark: Living trees. At the top of Greboun there are these oliveswhat
are they called? Laperrini olives.
Smith: Yes, Olea laperrini, yes, that s right.
Clark: And you see, they must have got down there around somewhere
between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago, something like that. They re
amazingyou look at them, incredible. How many are there? Half
a dozen trees?
Smith: Probably no more.
Clark: Something like that. All gnarled and everything. Somewhere I
have a piece of that.
Smith: That s right, we cored a little bit to try to get a date,
remember?
Clark: Yes, we dated it, and it didn t date to anything very much.
Smith: Well, we don t know if we actually got to the central core of it.
Clark: We probably didn t. If we d really gone through we may have
gotten a greater age. But we didn t want to do that.
Smith: No, we didn t want to kill the tree. They re so rare. Olives did
grow wild along the North African literal, the other side of the
Atlas Mountains. But not in the Sahara.
Clark: And you know, when these lakes filled up, here were Nile perch,
crocodiles and so on. How the Nile perch got there, I don t know,
317
but they had survived in some way or another,
that roundwe used to use them as ashtrays.
The vertebrae were
Troy: Desmond, that experience in the Sahara, the rigors of that
experience, was that like your work in Ethiopia and elsewhere in
Africa?
Clark: Oh, yes. Yes. I think on the whole, we weren t all that
comfortable in the Sahara. When we were going, everybody was told
to take bedrolls, but I was persuaded by my brother-in-law, who
was at that time in the British Army, "For God s sake, take one of
those small sort of pup tent things. You may not want to use it,
but get it and take it." And I did, and it was absolutely
invaluable. I have a photograph- -Andy probably has one as well--
of Andy s bed after a dust storm.
Smith: I didn t have a tent. My sleeping area was out in the open. But
I learned to build a wind break, which works on the same principle
as the tent. Wind breaks are crucial. You must break the wind,
because the wind can be so cold. The wind chill factor. Desmond
was very wise to have his tent, I agree.
Clark: It really was invaluable, actually.
Troy: And the water was potable?
Smith: Oh, yes, it was good water, no problem at all. Some sediments in
it, but let it sit for a few hours and it settled, no problem.
Clark: What about, to end up with, that little story of yours about the
woman who asked about our excavations?
Smith: Oh yes, it was an American lady.
We had only one visiting group came to Adrar Bous all the time
we were there, so it was a bit of a shock to see this Land Rover
appearing out of nowhere, and out of this emerge several tourists
with their guide. They obviously had seen our tracks, I think
they d just followed our tracks. We werethis was in the camp
area, and we had dug a series of pits close by, as you know, for
various things .
And this woman gets out, American lady [imitating loud and
brassy accent], "Oh, archaeology! I love archaeology!" She sees
this trench next to us and she asks, "Is this one of your
archaeological pits?" One of our colleagues, a distinguished
professor of human anatomy at Cape Town, said [with Oxbridge-like
accent], "No, Madam, that s where we urinate." [laughter]
318
Clark: We had some incredible chap with us who was a psychologist who
came out afterwards, was with us for, I don t know, about three
weeks or something. Burton Jones was his name. I think he came
from Birmingham or somewhere like that. He was obsessed with the
idea that all these people were there in order to get away from
something. "What is it that you re all fleeing from? Have you
been crossed in love? Some dreadful thing happened?" Just could
not understand that people simply enjoyed that kind of thing.
Troy: You had a psychologist in your expedition?
Smith: Well, it was a very multidisciplinary group. We had botanists as
well.
Clark: This psychologist chap was an incredible chap. He came out with a
form which had about four pages with God knows how many little
questions on it.
Smith: You can imagine how we filled that in. [laughter]
319
Garniss Curtis, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, April 25, 2000
First Meeting
Curtis: It was in 61 that we met. I had known Desmond from a book that
he had written, and I was so pleased when he was coming to
Berkeley. I still have that paperback book.
I think it was probably the first book that you wrote on
African things, Desmond.
Clark: Probably was. One on the Zambezi Valley or something with Frank
Dixie. Published by the South African Archaeological Society.
Curtis: Then you did a review book on things that you re the sole author
of, which I have also. I forget the name.
Clark: I think the first time we met, Garniss, was when Ted McCown had a
lunch party in the Faculty Club, to which he invited you and Frank
Turner. There may have been Dick [Richard LeRoy] Hay that time as
well.
Troy: But you hadn t met in Africa.
Curtis: No, I had not been to Africa.
Clark: No, no.
The most memorable publication, I think, for paleolithic
archaeologists was Garniss and Jack Evernden s paper in Current
Anthropology, wasn t it?
Curtis: Yes, Current Anthropology. We first submitted it to the
Geological Society of America, and that thing bounced around for
months, and finally Jack said to me, "Garniss, what should we do?"
I said, "Let s pull it out and submit it someplace else." Then he
came up with Current Anthropology.
320
Clark:
Curtis:
Troy:
Curtis:
Current Anthropology was very thrilled to get that paper,
and they got it out almost immediately. This was four or five
months with the Geological Society. What s going on? "Well, we
haven t gotten it back from the reviewers." All that sort of
crap. That paper dealt with our dates in Africa, dates in Europe,
dates in North America. It was very comprehensive. It was just
about everything that we had done, but particularly with respect
to paleontology and paleoanthropology.
This was the first application in many places to dating
young things. That was the big thing with potassium-argon.
Uranium lead, the youngest thing you could date with any sort of
precision was something over 100 million years, and here we could
get right down to--I mean, we did, very shortly- -down, I think
it s in that paper too, we dated thingsnot very preciselybut
at 5,000 years, plus or minus 5,000 years. Later on, we got that
down to 5,000 years plus or minus 100 years. And then more
recently, using the argon-argon system, we dated the eruption at
Vesuvius, which was 79 A.D., 79 plus or minus nine years.
That s fantastic. Absolutely fantastic, yes.
That was a tour de force. This is Paul Renne and the other people
there at the lab, the Berkeley Geochronology Center.
Well, you can remember when [Willard] Libby, when carbon- 14 first
appeared on the scene.
Oh, yes. Libby, by the way, was my professor here at Berkeley
when I was a freshman. So I knew him for years and years. That
was 1937.
Potassium-Argon Dating. Tule Sprines
Clark: I knew him reasonably well, after he was down in UCLA. I used to
go down and sit on orals committees and so on. He was very keen
on showing that, well, I suppose you d say white people, were here
by about 35,000 years ago. Paleolithic people were here about
35,000 years ago. And Tule Springs was the site that he was
extremely interested in, and he had a young graduate student who
was Irv Taylor. He appointed a little advisory committee which
had that very nice woman, lived in Denver, who wrote on Paleo-
Indians. Extremely nice. She s dead now. Dick Hay, myself, who
else? Oh, Vance Haynes, and Bob [Robert F.] Heizer.
321
The first time we went there [Tule Springs], they put us up
in tents on the site, and the wind blew sort of pebbles all over
the place and so on, and we said, "We re not going to come again
unless you put us up somewhere." The next time, they put us into
one of those casino places.
Curtis: I went out and looked at it, and I thought, This is phony.
But what was finally decided there?
Clark: It was quite clearly shown that, in point of fact, the fauna was
not contemporary with the stone tools. You see, the problem was,
where you ve got erosion taking place and so on, you ve got stone
artifacts and fauna lying down on the surface.
Curtis: These things rolled down the hills, so bones get mixed with
surface tools.
Clark: And they dug a whopping great trench, huge great trench, with one
of these huge great bulldozers--! think it was called a DC-6. He
managed to persuade some contractor to produce this thing, and
went right across, and quite clearly it showed that the artifacts
were all up here and the fauna was down there, with the plant
remains. There was wood there. Wasn t it wood?
Curtis: Yes, wood.
Clark: I think so, yes. So that fixed that one.
Marie Wormington, that was the woman. Yes, she was one of
the pioneers, actually, on all of that.
Calico Hills
Curtis: Did you get involved in Calico Hills, Desmond?
Clark: Only in a smallish sort of way. Louis Leakey went down there, was
asked to go and have a look at artifacts with was there fauna?
Curtis: No, no fauna in Calico Hills, no. Just the pseudo-artifacts.
Clark: Yes, that s right.
Troy: Where is that located?
Clark: It s near Barstow.
322
Curtis:
Clark:
Curtis:
Clark:
Curtis:
Clark:
Curtis:
Clark:
Curtis:
Clark:
Curtis:
Clark:
Out in the desert. Sort of on the slope of a hill.
Yes. And I can tell you what 1 know about it, and Garniss will
tell you about the site and everything. So Louis said, "Oh, yes
indeed, I think that these undoubtedly must be Early Paleolithic
tools." I think what he was trying to do was to say, well,
Americans don t really know what stone tools look like in their
own country, these are really old. So he got a woman, what the
hell was her name?
Well, I ve been trying to think of it. I t-hought you d think of
it. She was at that San Bernardino Museum.
Yes, I ll think about it. She did excavate. But a small
committee wasand I m not quite certain, Wenner-Gren could have
done it, I don t know, or NSF could have done it--was appointed to
go and look with Louis.
Yes, Louis was on a visit. Now, this woman that Desmond s talking
about just by chance sent artifacts to Louis Leakeythis is 1961,
Louis Leakey at Nairobi, and they came the day I was there going
to Olduvai to collect samples for dating. So we talked about it,
and she showed pictures of these things, and Louis got very
excited about that. So go ahead.
Yes. Was it Ruth Simpson?
Simpson, Ruth Simpson, that s it.
We went out. There wasn t much of an excavation there at the
time. But we went out to look at it. There was Emil Haury, Dale
Stewart, myself, and somebody else, I
person was.
can t remember who the other
Was Dick with you at that time, Dick Hay?
Could have been Dick.
Because he came down with me the next year, or a couple of years
later, when they had that huge excavation.
It could have been Dick, yes. Or it could have been Foster Flynt.
Oh, no, no, it was Matthew Stirling!
At any rate, we all looked at this, and then we were
expected, of course, to say, "Yes, we think it is." This is more,
this is the kind of traditional way in which it was done in
Europe, western Europe. You see, somebody would find a rock
painting or something--this is a particular example in the, oh
323
what s the name of that site? At any rate, interesting rock
paintings. It s got rhinos and mammoths and so on. The question
is, were they put in there by the resistance or were they really
genuine Paleolithic representations? About thirty-odd people were
invited to go. I was not among them. Glyn Daniel was.
Then, after it all, there was a book which you were asked to
sign your name and say, on one line, "Yes," more or less, or "No."
[laughter] Glyn said no. This was around Les Eyzies, yes, the
Vezere Valley. What is the name? It begins with an R. Famous
site that people go to now. Subsequently, I think, they were
proved to be genuine.
Troy: But you were not expected to equivocate on this, it was either yes
or no.
Clark: That was really more or less it, but that was the kind of
tradition, and that s why I think we were asked at Calico Hills to
go along and look. I think most of the others said perhaps maybe,
but I said that it is not proven at the moment. There was some
kind of a little excavation, and you could see how these artifacts
were on the top, but there didn t seem to be anything too much
underneath.
Somebody was brought along, of course, with a video camera.
We were all shown sort of saying what it was that we said.
There s one there with me, and various people have said, "Ah, what
a skeptical face you had on at that time!" [laughter] And after
that, I was never invited to go to Calico Hills again. Except for
the conference.
Curtis: Yes, well, there was a big conference held down there. I went to
that one. I went out and looked at the digs, and this is stuff
that I did in my thesis: debris flows. And the volcanic rocks in
those debris flows came from miles away, and subsequently there
were faults that separated them, and a big valley, from the
nearest volcanic rocks. Those volcanic rocks had been dated
elsewhere at 6 million years. This was extremely old stuff, and
it was so obvious that there had been lake deposits, Miocene lake
deposits in which chert had formed. I had my geology pick, and I
hit a piece of that chert, and it would just explode into
fragments .
Now, these people, they started out as a nucleus digging out
there, probably at the time that Desmond was there.
Troy: Emil Haury came up from Arizona to give his judgment on this.
324
Clark:
Curtis;
Clark:
Curtis:
Troy:
Curtis:
Troy:
Curtis:
Yes. I think he was a little skeptical, but was perhaps more
polite than I was. [laughter] By that time, I d known Louis for
quite a while, and we said to each other what we thought. We
didn t mince words really.
Well, Mary Leakey took one look at those things and she said,
know, this is absolutely nonsense."
You
But Louis loves his audience so. He put out his hand--
they d give him a little brush, and he d brush off something
sticking out of the debris flows, and then put out his hand again
to get a little pick. Didn t even say anything. And there were
tape recorders there, and when one ran out, there was another tape
recorder to catch every word. He loves this adulation.
Well, this little nucleus collected people moving from Iowa
out to the West. They d come with their trailers, "What s this?"
Then they d stop. There was a great big trailer park there, all
these volunteers living there, and digging by hand hundreds and
hundreds of cubic yards of material. It was absolutely phony.
Yes. It was a cult. The believers came; they thought that this
was all absolutely genuine, there were artifacts there, because
Ruth Simpson said there were. One thing she did was a beautiful
excavation, a very fine excavation, straight through- -well, a
conglomerate, basically, with cobbles all over the place. There
must have been finer grain sediments there as well. Every so
often, you got sort of floors of cobbles, and they decided that
they could actually see a hearth. They thought it was burned.
The hearth, this was just the roots of a tree, a pine that had
been there hundreds of years ago. This is desert climate now. At
the time these debris flows came down, this was much more moist.
And here, there wasn t one hearth, but what s -his -name at UCLA,
Rainer Berger, did paleomagnetic analysis. He s a C-14
radiocarbon specialist, but he got these things oriented and found
that they had been heated enough to change the magnetism, which
meant nothing, because how did that area get hot? Well, the tree
burned down there, and the rootsof course, all those cobbles got
hot.
Where was the conference held?
I think it was Pasadena.
And totally dedicated to this site?
Totally dedicated to the site.
325
Here s the thing that s interesting. Let s say that they
had 140 or 141 specimens, no two alike, but all declared to be
tools, all made out of the same stuff, all of this explosive
yellowish, ocherish looking material. They had counted every
piece that they had discarded. Those 140 or maybe seventy-five
so-called artifacts were collected from 400,000 that they had
discarded. You know, statistically, you re going to get something
that looks like a tool of some kind. But when you don t have any
two looking alike, doesn t that tell you something?
Clark: Exactly. They didn t have the typical characteristics of a flaked
piece of stone. They hadyou might find one that had a platform,
but it didn t have any sort of bulb of percussion or anything like
that, and the other side of it would have been cortex. You might
find something that had a bulb of percussion but didn t have a
platform. Something like that, you see. There was always,
virtually always, something wrong with them. Glynn Isaac was
there, and Glynn pointed outno, I think they pointed out there
were no cores. They must have taken the cores away. But it was
Glynn who said, "Here are these blocks of this chert which are
incorporated in the site, and if you look at them, you can see
negative scars and so on." There would have been an enormous
amount of pressure on that, and those were the cores.
At any rate, they got down, oh, twelve, fifteen feet, and we
were down on one horizon, and here was Glynn looking for the
hearth. We found what we thought was the hearth, and we were
getting our cameras ready to photograph this thing, when suddenly
Ruth Simpson appeared at the top, looking down, "No, no! No!
That s not it, it s there!" [laughter] You see, all it was, if
you take enough cobbles out from this thing, you can produce a
beautiful little sort of hearth.
Troy: So she had some excavating skills, but then she was overwhelmed by
the adulation and the cult, and then there was no going back?
Curtis: Yes, that s it.
Clark: So I would imagine, yes. I don t think she could really have
believed in it. And what the situation is there now, I have no
idea. It was turned into a state park.
Curtis: A book came out, Pleistocene Man at Calico, by, who was that guy?
He was a geologist. [Walter C. Schuiling was the editor, San
Bernardino County Museum, 1979]
Clark: Oh, that chap! Oh, yes.
326
Curtis:
Clark:
Curtis:
Clark:
Troy:
Curtis:
And to a trained eye, this was so ridiculous. Just so ridiculous.
You just couldn t believe that people could be deceived. And here
was this soils expert, oh, you know him. He s published stuff all
over the place, and he was taken in, said the soils indicated
100,000 years. What s his name?
Yes. I can t remember his name. It wasn t Campbell, was it?
No. But a guy with a considerable reputation. You see, there was
a lake down in there. I think it was Lake Manly or something like
that. And on the shores of that lake, there were indeed tools.
Well, the shores of that lake came right up close to where they
were digging. It was a Pleistocene lake. We have these huge
lakes in Nevada that we have evidence of, gigantic lakes. The
Salt Lake was ten times bigger than it is today. Well, anyway,
there were tools, but they were not the same tools that were
coming out of this chert. These were in some cases obsidian, and
thousands of years old, but they were right on the surface. So
they tried to get those confused with these other things.
That was the problem, these archaic points and things. I don t
know, maybe even Paleo-Indian. But you could pick them out just
like that. Yes, these are tools, these things are artifacts.
And who was mixing those in?
conscious deception?
Do you think that was some sort of
I guess Ruth Simpson put them in, but she did recognize that they
were not dug out of the ground, they were surface finds, and
genuine surface finds. No way to date them.
Dating Clovis Points
Clark:
Curtis:
Troy:
Curtis:
But you know, these kinds of things are going to happen, of
coursehappened in the past, and going to happen again. There
was an awful nonsense about dating the Clovis points or Folsom
points.
Those dates are now very well accepted.
But now there s a fellow who s an incredible forger of the points
Yes. I had a friend when I was doing my Ph.D. thesis in
Markleeville in 1946 to 50 that could make these incredible
points out of glass or out of obsidian rock, just like Indian
327
points. And do them very quickly. He had experimented entirely
by himself.
Troy: And pressure flaking.
Clark: Yes. There are some extremely fine pressure f lakers, and as you
say, I suppose forgers of Clovis points. There were quite a lot
just after the war. There must have been at least twenty-five of
them down there round about that time, doing superb work.
Cambridge--! don t think they had a Clovis point there, I m
trying to think, at that time. They really needed to build up a
little collection. They would buy up- -you could buy up
collections of stone tools that had been made by amateurs or not
so amateur and so on, would come up for auction in the auction
sales. I remember Eric Higgs, who was the paleontologist there in
Cambridge just after the war, good chap, telling me that they came
up for auction at one of those houses , and they bought several
Clovis points, which they were very pleased with. Those went into
the museum collections. And then, after a time, another lot of
Clovis points turned up, you see. [laughter]
There was this whole new lot of Clovis points. By that
time, they began to realize, I think, that these were
reproductions--! wouldn t call them forgeriesreproductions of
extremely fine work, very fine work indeed. Made from the same
materials, of course, that the Clovis people used. No, if you
want to find out what a Clovis point looks like, best thing is to
go and buy one of those. They re not inexpensive now, actually.
People make quite a good living. There was one man who put his
son through college on what he made from making Clovis and Folsom
points. I don t know so much about the Folsom, because Folsom,
you ve got to produce those fluted--
Curtis: They ve got that groove down the side which is very difficult to
achieve .
Clark: And of course, Don Crabtree was good at that, and produced it one
way. We made a film here of it, showing him doing all that.
Using obsidian.
Dating in Africa and Java
Troy: This juncture in 1961 when Desmond showed up in Berkeley and you
guys were asked to go to Olduvai, was that when you began to get
involved?
328
Clark: No, no, it was before.
Curtis: That was before, yes. In 1956, the university was left some money
from the [Adolph C. and Mary Sprague] Miller estate, and he wanted
this money, which was just a few million dollars, to be used for
basic research in science. We had just gotten into perfecting
potassium-argon for doing young dates, and I said to Evernden,
"Let s apply for a Miller fellowship," which opened up. Evernden
said, "We re not ready." I said, "We are ready, Jack." I knew
Glenn Seaborg. I said, "We ll go see Seaborg, he heads the Miller
fellowship committee."
So we went up on the hill, and Jack was grumbling. This was
really unlike Jack. He s so dynamic, my God, he s just full of
energy. But he insisted we had more things to do. So the result
was that we talked to Seaborg, and the next day we got word that
we had been given these fellowships to be run in succession. So
we flipped a coin, and Jack won. We had long since decided what
we were going to do: we were going to start in Europe. We were
going to get specimens to calibrate the Cenozoic, because we could
get very accurately into that. But other dates too.
So in 57, Jack took off for Europe. He got to England,
collected stuff there. Then, what s -his -name, that did the
fluorine testing, Kenneth Oakley, he said, "You ve really got to
go down to Africa and meet Leakey." Well, Jack didn t pay much
attention then, but when he got to Rome, after collecting in
Sweden and all over, got to Rome, he got in withwhat s his name?
Clark: Oh, yes, Baron Blanc, Alberto Blanc.
Curtis: Yes, Alberto Carlo Blanc, Baron Blanc, who worked at Torre en Pietra,
southwest of Rome. And Blanc said, "Why don t you go down and see
Leakey?" Jack said, "That s what Ken Oakley told me to do." So
Blanc gets on the phone and calls Leakey, and Jack takes off and two
days later he s at Olduvai with the Leakeys. Well, he collected the
first specimens there, and we dated them, but it was rather hurriedly
done, so I went back in 61. The next year, I went around the world
the other way and collected in Australia and New Zealand and Japan,
and went on that way to kind of finish up the whole thing.
So I got back in 61 to do a more careful job of collecting
specimens, realized a lot of work needed to be done there, much
more than two weeks. But that got us started with the Leakeys,
and really got us into working with anthropologists there. So we
dated Olduvai more carefully.
In the meantime, in 1957, after Jack was there,
Zinjanthropus was found, and we already had a date, because it
329
came out of Bed 1. We had a fairly good date at that time, with
the decay constants that we were using, of 1.75 million years.
Decay constants changed later; brings it up to about 1.81 or so
million years. So that s pretty much how we got started.
Troy: And have been involved ever since.
Curtis: Yes, been involved ever since. First in Ethiopia, Desmond gave me
some samples that he had collected, and we dated those. Then
later on, of course, I went back with Tim [White] and with
Desmond--this is where we really got to enjoy each other s company
there in the field.
Clark: Yes, it was great fun, wasn t it?
Curtis: Desmond is so incredible. He works out there under a big canvas
setup at a site in this hot sun, hours and hours at a time. His
concentration and dedication to this is incredible.
Clark: It finally got to me. [laughs] But you see, this potassium-argon
dating was the most important work ever done on producing
reliable, acceptable dates for the Pleistocene. Never before have
we had anything of that kind. You d had the use of fauna, which
was extremely important, which was relative. This lot were older
than that collection, and so it goes on. We had no idea what the
age was.
Not only was this of vital importance for the archaeologists
and for the people who were looking at the biological evolution of
the hominid lineage, but it was also extremely important for what
we were able to understand about environments and climate, how
they changed, and producing a framework for the speed- -speed is
not the right word, because there wasn t any speed, very much, at
that time, you seefor the thousands and thousands of years that
it took to move from one hominid stage, as it were, into the next
stage.
This is what potassium- argon did for us. So now there is a
whole lot of the evolutionary development, biological and
cultural, that we can put into a reliable, datable framework in
relation to climate change and environmental change, and in
relation, of course, to very important regional areas,
particularly in the savannah of the east Africa, Ethiopia, and
going down into South Africa, where the earliest hominid stages
were found. It s totally invaluable, that.
Unfortunately, of course, it s based upon the use of
volcanic rocks and sediments of one kind or another.
330
Curtis: The reason for that is, something has to go through a molten stage
to get rid of any argon that was there, and then the argon has to
be generated in that rock from the decay of potassium-40. So any
lava that s been chilled very quickly can have inherited argon,
and give too old an age. We knew this, and we were very careful
about this when we collected. Our dates were not accepted to
begin with at all.
Troy: People just said, "No
way!"
Curtis: Oh, the correspondence from many quarters was really a riot.
Troy: You people took it on the chin.
Clark: Just absolutely- -yes, because the 1.75 and dates of that kind,
people like myself certainly accepted without comment, without
criticism. But where it came to some of these later dates that
you got, particularly in east Africa, the Kinangop Plateau, and
sites down in the rift as well, near Lake Naivasha I think it was,
Malewa Gorge, and then there was Wetherill site and Cartwright
site.
Curtis: People haven t believed those dates today, because Leakey talked
about pluvials during the Pleistocene, lots of rain, lots of
gravel, during the interglacials and so on. So there were gravels
in it, lake sediments and gravels, and this would be the second
pluvial, it can t be over 28,000 years. This was for something
called Pseudo-Stillbay, associatedwell, by comparison with stuff
that Desmond had described, and had a man from Holland named
DeVries came down to date.
DeVries had used a special technique to get a 60,000 year
date for your Stillbay, and I told him this date was meaningless.
But you wouldn t believe me .
Clark: No, that s right. And now, of course, it s been proved to be the
case. The Middle Stone Age goes way back.
Curtis: And I got 228,000 in this collection that I made in 61 for Malewa
Gorge, and Leakey just would not have anything to do with it. I
got this out of a beautiful crystal pumice with almost no pumice,
almost just pure crystals, beautiful euhedral crystals, with one
of those Pseudo-Stillbay artifacts sticking out of the cliff
underneath it. I did that twice: 240,000, 238,000.
Troy: What gorge was that?
331
Curtis: It s right near Lake Naivasha, and it was called Malewa Gorge. It
was just a gully cutting through deposits really quite good
deposits and so on.
Troy: And Leakey didn t believe the dates?
Clark: Well, it had nice Middle Stone Age artifacts in it, levallois
flakes and so on, which we d thought were about, sort of 300,000
years old.
Curtis: Let s see. I think he called those Stillbay, and the Pseudo-
Stillbay was up.
Clark: Yes, the Pseudo-Stillbay was way up.
Curtis: But he called those Stillbay, and up on the cliffs back five or
six miles, at Wetherill s site and another one, begins with a C--
Clark: Yes. I m sure those dates are correct.
Curtis: --we got 375,000, and Leakey insisted, he said, "Those are only
slightly older than 28,000. They re more primitive." But we
should go back and redate those.
Clark: It would be good, actually. Because now, you see, with argon-
argon and with the single crystal
Curtis: Much higher precision.
Clark: Yes. We were perfectly happy with just sort of within 10,000
years or something like that, or even more in the past. Now, of
course, it comes down towell, you were talking about Vesuvius.
Curtis: 79 A.D., plus or minus nine years.
Clark: And the lateness which you can get dates now. You see, that was
another thing: the cutoff. Where was the cutoff, about 200,000,
300,000 at one time?
Curtis: For potassium argon? Before we did Africa, or right after we d
been to Africa, we got down to 5,000 years, plus or minus 5,000.
And subsequently, those dates came out to be 6,000, plus or minus
just a few hundred on argon-argon. So we ve been doing all right.
Now, the first time I dated Modjokerto Child, I got 1.9
million years, and of course, nobody believed it. I did that
twice, 1.9, 1.9.
Troy: Modjokerto Child?
332
Curtis: This was the child in Java at Modjokerto, found in 1936 by a
worker working for Koenigswald.
Clark: Ralph von Koenigswald.
Curtis: Andoyo was the worker s name.
When we redid that bythat was 1.9 plus or minus 25
percent, because the only stuff that s datable there has virtually
no potassium in it. We re talking about two-tenths of a percent
potassium, whereas a feldspar may have as much as 10 to 12 percent
potassium, not two-tenths. There was this old stuff, but the
error correction was so large, it reduced the precision, so nobody
believed those dates.
Now, I said, "Geologically, it s got to be old, because
there has been- -this is within an anticline that has been
flattened off completely, so there s a long period of erosion
here, so this fits with that." But nobody believed them until we
redid them. Now we re getting 1.81, plus or minus .04 percent,
which is very good.
Troy: So you re going back now and doing a lot of things over again, to
the extent you get access to them.
Curtis: Yes. We ve gone back now in all the localities in Java. We have
a big paper coming out next year on that. All the places in Java.
Clark: Oh, good. What is Sangiran, about 800?
Curtis: Oh, heavens no. The youngest date we have there now is 1 million
years, near the top of the section, until you get into the
Nadoporo, the volcanics above, and there we get around 400,000 or
500,000. And that has some tools in it, but that s a big
unconformity over the top.
And we have these now from down in the marine section where
we have tuffs at 2 million, going up into the non-marine- -well,
the Grundspank at the base of the section of volcanics there is
1.5 million. So we know where all the fossils have been found
reasonably well, and none of them are younger than 1 million
years, had been dated at just 600,000 or 700,000 by-
Troy: And this is in Java, too.
Curtis: This is in Java. Originally doing four samples in the upper part,
I d gotten 850,000, with a big plus or minus, because the dates
range from 800,000 to 900,000. I knew that was wrong. I had Bob
Drakewe did a much cleaner section, I mean, cleaned up
333
everything. We got 1.2 million, and that date, nobody believed
that date. Now we ve proved that that date is good, well up in
the section.
Clark: Yes. No, that s fantastic. I even remember at one time, they
were either the Javanese or the Dutch who said, "Well, Java rose
out of the sea at 2 million."
Curtis: You know, there s some truth in that. We have now dates of tuffs
in the marine section in two different places at 2 million years,
so this is right near the top of the section. They had given West
Javathere s West Central, and East Java. We had gone to a
locality that was thought to be old in West Central or West Java,
right near the boundary of those two provinces , and found a nice
tuff together with a horn of a bovid. We got 2 million, 2.1 or
something million, but it s marine. It s got marine fossils in
it, in spite of this bovid horn in there.
So what we of course would like to find is something 2
million years old that is non-marine. We haven t found that,
because I think that we will find that we pushed hominids back
much furthersee, we get 1.8 million years in Java. In Africa,
out of which Homo erectus is supposed to come, Homo erectus or
Homo ergaster as it s called in Africa, the oldest date is 1.78
million. There seems to be no progenitor. We ve got Homo
habilis, Homo rudolphensis in Africa, but the anthropologists and
the anatomists say they just are not the forebears of Homo
erectus. And if they were, why are these two living side by side
starting at 1.8 million in Africa, and living together, Homo
habilis going up to as high as 1.5 million years? If erectus had
come from habilis, it s difficult to see why it wouldn t have
replaced habilis, because we find erectus from southern Africa all
the way to the Mediterranean.
So anyway, Homo came out of Africa, but much earlier than
1.8 million years. And what did it look like at that time? I m
saying it might have evolved elsewhere. Roger Lewin, in this book
that we ve just finishedRoger and Carl Swisher and I a very
good history of the finding of Homo erectus and so on- -he gets to
the point, "Where did Homo erectus begin? Well, Curtis thinks
that Homo erectus may have come from some progenitor in Asia, but
we haven t found that progenitor, so we re assuming that it really
came out of Africa." And now he s away on a trip, but I have
written to him. I said, "Well, where is the progenitor in Africa?
Why do you give Africa credit for Homo erectus when there s no
progenitor there? And there s been ten times as much study done
of the African site, and ten times better exposures than we have
in Java .
"
334
Troy:
Clark:
Curtis;
Troy:
Curtis:
Troy:
Curtis:
Clark:
So, something came out of Africa, but it might not have been
Homo erectus. It could have been something living separately
from, say, habilis, or maybe habilis itself that went elsewhere.
The progenitor of habilis at, say, 2, 2.4 million years, you could
get to Java in that 2.4. There was a big glaciation at that time.
How do you feel about that, Desmond? Startling, isn t it?
Yes, very strong possibilities, but one has to look further to
seeand this is where it s a question of getting new data. As
Garniss says, there are innumerable possibilities of discovering
new data, if you get into the field and look for it and recover it
in such a way that you can date it, that you have the context in
which it occurs well dated and understood. And of course, what s
called Homo erectus in Africa is not the same as the classic Homo
erectus in Java. They look different.
A higher vaulted skull for an ergaster in Africa than erectus in
Java. And there has to be some period of time. Since they re
quite clearly very closely related, those things have to be
separated long enough to develop these. But the earliest in
Africa is still this very different thing from the earliest that
we have so far discovered in the first non-marine beds in Java.
What is the difference in years between the earliest and earliest
at this point?
What s the difference?
Yes, in age, Africa and Java.
The oldest in Africa is 1.78 that we have a physical date for;
1.81 that we have a physical date for in Java. We have older non-
marine beds in Africa. We go right immediately into marine beds
in Java. That s the thing about Java: all of the samples that
have been found are flood plain. There are no living sites there.
So when we talk about no tools, you don t expect to find tools on
a flood plain. You want living sites. There are numerous living
sites in Africa. This was continental for the last several
million years, with volcanics and lake sediments burying these
things. So we find many living sites for early humans, and
working sites and tool sites in Africa.
Yes, but those must have been rather like the Godwin Sands, you
see, which are these wretched sands in which numerous ships were
wrecked for many, many centuries.
Curtis: I m going to have to go in about ten minutes.
335
Clark: Okay. But at any rate, it s extremely interesting. I don t know
whether you would say that the classic Homo erectus in Java is
more primitive than ergaster in Africa. It s certainly much
flatter here, and flatter down here as well.
Curtis: And there were some teeth that might be a little bit older that
are attributed to erectus, but they also could be habilis, since
the teeth are very difficult to separate at that time.
Dmanisi
Curtis: I wanted to tell you about Dmanisi, because there s a paper coming
out in Science in two weeks with a cover of one of the skulls from
Dmanisi. They have two skulls and a jaw and some leg bones now.
This is a paper written by Carl Swisher and by Susan Anton, they
are the last authors on this, because the finders want the credit,
and that s fine with Carl and Susan. But they have written this
paper, and it will be coming out with a cover photograph of the
skull of one of these. These are ergaster, but they are small.
One of them is smaller than Rudolphensis. And one is only
slightly larger than the other, but they are both under 800 cc s.
So that s exciting. But another exciting thing about this,
because Carl s been there now for several seasons, off and on, is
that every pitthese sediments--a big lava flow came down-
Troy: This is at Olduvai?
Curtis: No, this work is at Dmanisi in Georgia, southern Russia, near the
Black Sea. There were two gorges coming together with a point,
and lava came down one of these, dammed up the other one, so lake
deposits lie on top of the lava that came down and dammed the
other one. In those lake and sand deposits --some of these are
marginal were the skulls and bones, and a plethora of animals
there as well. The date for the volcanic rock is about 1.78 or
something like- -yes, about 1.78.
Clark: That s the underlying lava.
Curtis: That s the lava.
Troy: So this Georgia thing is extraordinarily important.
Curtis: Oh, wait until I tell you how important this is. This flow was
flat on top. It dammed up the other, so it doesn t take very long
to fill that lake up, and most of those sediments had been
stripped, but where they lapped onto the top of this flow, they
336
Troy:
Curtis:
Curtis:
Clark:
Curtis:
Clark:
put a monastery, and it was excavating out in the courtyard of
this old monastery, pretty well destroyed, that they found a
little pit, only three feet deep, which goes right down to the
lava flow itself. You know, this is the-- just within a few inches
of the bottom is where they have found those skulls . So they have
to be about the age, plus or minus a few years, of the flow
itself.
This is magnetically normal below, so that s what it should
be at that age, 1.78. It fits into the same category of normal
magnetism that Olduvai does, and that s Called the Olduvai chron.
Now, those skulls are within just about that far above the lava,
and this plethora of other kinds of animals were there on the
shore of the lake. There are Oldowan tools there, numerous
Oldowan tools.
So, picture this flat area now. They ve put down pits
through this. Everywhere they ve put down pits, they have found
animal bones. The two skulls are within a meter and a half of
each other. This was a shore. They re going to find a lot more
material there, and it covers hundreds of acres. This is going to
be a really rich deposit.
Is it several feet down, would you say?
Meter and a quarter, it varies from place to place, until they get
to this old lava flow. This is a very exciting find.
Clark: Yes. That s fantastically important.
Before you go, if you can, one major important thing about
this is, when we talk about Oldowan, what we re talking about is
really what there is in Africa that is dated to about, oh, I
suppose
Two million. Two and a half million.
--well, two and a half, about 2.6, 2.7 or so, up to about 1.6
perhaps, something like that.
Actually, now we d say probably up to about 1.65.
Yes. Now, after that, the Oldowan mode, in other words, these
flakes, which are sometimes called choppers, the cores called
choppers-
Curtis: Very simple tools.
337
Clark: --continue with the input now of large cutting tools, bifaces,
which are divided into hand axes and cleavers and so on.
Curtis: And choppers.
Clark: Those go right through, so you have mode one, the Oldowan, and
mode two together, after about 1.78 through to about 200,000 years
ago. And then the bifaces and the Oldowan tends to fall away, but
you can still find assemblages with choppers and flakes and so on
into the Middle Stone Age.
Curtis: They had attributed this Oldowan culture to Homo habilis, first
found and named there, and just three feet lower than
Zinjanthropus, they found the first Homo habilis. They found
others later on. They had attributed that culture to Homo
habilis. But early Homo ergaster, or erectus, if you want, was
making those same tools when it came along. They re a little bit
more advanced than the simple choppers that you find, but here
they are at the same age in Dmanisi, Georgia, as they are in
Olduvai.
Which brings up one more thing: the oldest really good date
we have on these big hand axes is about 1.4 million or a little
bit older, really good dates. And we find that in a number of
places. Well, these are beautiful things.
Clark:
Curtis:
Clark:
Curtis:
Clark:
Curtis:
Yes, that s Tim [White].
No, no. It s Konso-Gardula [Ethiopia] is about 1.6, 1.7.
But you know, our good friend Yohannes [Zeleke], his work there is
extremely careless.
But I think it was Tim and Berhane Asfaw who collected those
initial samples.
Oh, not the initial ones. He collected them. Maybe they ve
collected some later and we ve dated those. That would be fine,
because at Olduvai, there s reason to believe 1.6. Elsewhere
where Tim has dated them and we ve done the dating, 1.4. But I
would believe 1.6, as long as we don t have to believe Yohannes s
thesis dates, which were just sloppy as could be, as to where he
collected them.
Clark: Which Yohannes?
Curtis: The one that, isn t that his name, from St. Petersburg.
338
Clark: Oh, that chap! Oh, no, I wouldn t believe anything that that chap
did at all. No, that s nothing to do with those. Did you date
those? God knows.
Curtis: No, we didn t date those.
Clark: That s right, Yohannes Zeleke. Oh, he is dreadful. Now what he s
doing is he managed to persuade Allyson Brooks to bring him over
to Washington, where he s said to be teaching African archaeology
in George Washington University. He brought, of course, his wife
and child.
Curtis: He s married an Asian, a very bright gal, and very nice.
Clark: Incredible. And he s applied for asylum to live in the United
States. You see, that s the kindand this chap kept on telling
me that above all, he wanted nothing better to do than get a job
back in Ethiopia. And I like a clod believed him. [laughter]
Troy: Is the big issue in China getting in to do archaeological field
work?
Curtis: Well, the big issue there is that it s so difficult to get dates.
Troy: Things have been taken out of context.
Curtis: Yes.
Troy: And then they expect you to look at these things.
Curtis: Well, we haven t worked on any of those. Let s see, we ve done
some dating. Somebody--! forget. But it is very difficult on the
oldest specimens there, the context and the fauna that s with them
is quite old, and they indeed could be around 1.5 to 2 million
years, but the plus or minus on that, there s no precision.
Clark: Well, the trouble is, there s no potassium argon dating possible.
So you have to date using other various methods.
Curtis: ESR, electron spin resonance, thermoluminescence, all of these, if
you have everything right, give you beautiful dates, but if
anything s wrong, they re just terrible.
Sorry that I have this luncheon. But I want to make one
last comment to you about what dating has done. I dated
Kariandusi, and got around 900,000 years, even though at that time
we didn t know what hand axes were at Bed II at Olduvai, because
it was all reworked material, and we couldn t date it--we
339
subsequently found some tuffs there. But at any rate, Kariandusi
was beautiful material, and I got around 900,000 years.
Our friend Bob Heizer said, "Garniss, either Kariandusi is
wrong, or Torre en Pietra [dated at 438,000] is wrong, or they re
both wrong. We know for a fact, because there s so much work
that s been done on this, that cultures evolve simultaneously all
over. Wherever you find them, we find the same age, so this can t
be."
I said, "Where s the evidence?" "Oh, Garniss, I can t go
into that now, but it just is out of the question." [laughter]
SAO
Charles Keller, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, May 8, 2000
First Meeting, 1961, and Focus on Africa
Troy: We re going to start recording, using the phone. I think we ve
got a three-way thing.
Clark: Super. Hi Charlie.
Keller: Hi Desmond.
Clark: How are you old man? All these wires and things, you know.
Troy: [after some small talk, catching up on the situation at the
Livingstone Library] Charlie, let me ask you, you came to
Berkeley to do your Ph.D. Were you here as an undergraduate?
Keller: No. I was born and raised in southern California, but I had
ultimately gotten a bachelor s degree at the University of Iowa,
and then I had done some graduate work in anthropology as an
archaeologist at the University of Missouri, and then went to
Berkeley in 1961, as I recall, which I think was when Desmond and
Betty arrived in Berkeley.
Clark: That s right. That s when we turned up, yes. And I remember you
sitting in that little office on Piedmont- -do you remember that
one? --a very neat place where the robins used to come and sort of
bash themselves up against the window. [laughter]
Troy: And when you came here, Charlie, did you have a- -you didn t have a
focus on Africa, is that right? This was something you picked up
from Desmond?
Keller: Yes. It was one of those serendipitous things. Actually having
done contract archaeology in Missouri, that is working on sites
that were to be flooded by a federal reservoir and so onfrankly
I was fairly disenchanted with that approach to archaeology. And
as Desmond and I got acquaintedwe were there and new, and he and
Betty were there and new, and so none of us knew anyone else much.
And we talked about the kinds of things he was doing, and how he d
341
gone about them, which was more important to me. I just felt like
he was going about things in a way that I foundthat I approved
ofthat I thought was the right way to go about doing the work.
Clark: Oh, I m glad to hear that, Charlie. [laughter]
Keller: And so one thing led to another as they say. [laughs]
Troy: What was it? Desmond s multidisciplinary approach to things? Of
course that s what he s become very well known for, bringing to
bear lots of different people in various expeditions and work.
Keller: You know early on it wasn t anything as complex or sophisticated
as that. In fact my first work with Desmond was to go with him to
Livingstone, where we spent a summer going through stone tools
from Kalambo Falls, and I had done a lot of that kind of thing
working with Midwestern lithic material.
I had always been much more interested in lithic material
than in ceramics, and I just was taken with the way things were
being done, the kinds of questions they were trying to answer.
And with the material itself. I think the multidisciplinary
aspect came later, when I was much more concerned about larger
projects, but initially it was just at the lower level--! felt
like Desmond was doing things in ways that I thought one ought to
do them. We used a descriptive scheme Maxine Kleindienst had
developed which allowed us to understand the manufacturing process
as well as categorize the finished products.
Stone Technology Lab
Clark:
Keller:
Clark:
Keller:
One of the things that I enjoyed as well, of course, was starting
a stone technology lab. I think somebody had done something in
the thirties somewhere out in the Midwest, but apart from that,
nothing was going on at all here. I think that was one of the
first regular labs that was started in this country.
Oh, I wouldn t be surprised. What was that guy s name? Crabtree?
[Don E.] Crabtree, yes, he may have had a lab, I think. He was
very good. He was in Idaho [associated with the Idaho State
University Museum in Pocatello] . Nice man. I enjoyed him very
much.
That s another aspect where Desmond s thinking struck a chord with
me, because I ve always enjoyed and recognized the value in a sort
of hands-on approach to things. White room analysis is not my
342
kind of game. And Desmond was interested in stone flaking and we
--that is, a number of the graduate students and probably some
undergraduateshad a couple of memorable trips up to the Napa
Valley.
Clark: Yes, that was great wasn t it.
Keller: And hit a winery or two in the process.
Clark: Do you remember Nicolinis Winery, with the original Roman press?
Very interesting.
Troy: You went up to Napa to have some wine and do a little stone work?
Clark: That s rightcollecting the stone, yes.
Keller: Yes. There s an outcrop of obsidian up there, so we went up and
collected raw material.
Clark: That was great. Charlie--do you remember those experiments that
you did in hammering things with a chopper and that kind of thing?
Keller: Yes, yes.
Clark: Those are still in the teaching labs.
Keller: Oh, are they?
Clark: Which we ve now sort of got under our control again, yes.
Keller: Oh, that s good, Desmond.
Clark: Yes. So they re there and the students look at them.
Keller: Well, one of the things that went on, Tim, and I can t remember
exactly how this happened, I m not sure where I got it, but
somehow I was able to get a green cowhide, or part of one, and I
cut it up with stone flakes and scrapers out there in the parking
lot behind Kroeber, and I used some of those pieces that Desmond
is talking about.
After I got back here I did somewhat the same thing, got a
whole cowhide. Unfortunately, the rendering plant that I got it
from had already put it in what they call a salt bin. So it was
soaked with salt by the time I got it. When I got it home I
staked it out in my back yard, and after I ultimately took it up
the salt had killed the grass, so I had this outline of a cowhide
in the back yard. [laughter]
Clark: God, those were great days!
343
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Keller:
Clark:
Keller:
We talked about Louis Leakey doing a demonstration of skinning a--
what was it, Desmond?
Clark:
Troy:
Keller:
Clark:
Keller:
Clark:
Oh, skinning a duiker, I think it was.
the Pan-African Congress.
Yes, that was in 1955--
Charlie, I see you ve worked on edge-damage stone tools and all
kinds of things, so you re still very much into stone then.
Yes, and I ve moved onto other kinds of things since then, but in
many respects, the approach is the same.
That must be going superbly well. I remember your telling me that
some people in New Zealand had written and wanted a whole lot of
implements and so on.
Right, and they ve written again. I m in the midst of doing a
very large order for them for a place called the Stone Store in
Kerikeri, which was built as an administrative headquarters and
trading post in about 1833 just after the Maori had been
suppressed. And apparently they are refurnishing the thing. So
I m doing all the iron work, tools and cooking utensils and so on,
and so on. Over a hundred pieces they re getting from me.
Really, by God!
Last week Desmond and I talked a little bit about his work in
Angola and in Zambia, where he found some older men who were able
to smelt copper and also iron. He described that process with
these old gentlemen who had done it and kind of resurrected it.
Didn t you have a film, Desmond?
I don t know that we ever had a film of it.
Maybe I m just remembering slides.
The Northern Rhodesian Information Office photographers were
around. I wonder what they have got there and if it survived.
344
Isimila Site, and Personnel
Troy: Charlie, when was the last time you were out to Africa?
Keller: I was there in 69 and 70, or maybe 70 and 7 Iabout then. I
worked on an Acheulean site with the same kind of material, or at
least some of the same kind of material, that I had worked on with
Desmond from Kalambo. Also that was in Montagu.
Clark: Very nice site. Extremely nice.
Troy: Is that the one? Isimila?
Keller: Isimila. Right. That Clark Howell and Glen Cole and Maxine
Kleindienst had been at before I came.
Clark: They ve never written that up, you know.
Keller: Yes, yes. Well, I m afraid I m part of the same group because I
gave the project to a graduate student who used portions of it for
a dissertation which he wrote but never deposited. Preston
Staley.
Clark: I remember. You know, Preston was through here earlier in the
year, in January or something, I think it was. And he came and
had lunch. I think now he s sort of become sensible, if you see
what I mean.
Keller: He s mellowed quite a bit.
Clark: Yes, he has.
Troy: Is Preston teaching somewhere?
Clark: No, I don t think so. I think he s been making money on the stock
exchange, or something.
Keller: Yes--and he inherited his income, I believe. And last I heard he
had become very adept at statistical analysis, and he had worked
at University of Cincinnati or someplace like that after he left
here, doing statistical analysis of public health information and
things like that. And then- -I haven t heard from him since he
left there. At some point he was traveling in India with his wife
who s from India.
Clark: Oh, was he--yes. He said that he was going to come and live in
the Bay Area, I think, if I remember right. But I ve heard no
more from him since.
345
Troy: So Charlie, you spent a couple of seasons out in Africa with
Desmond, then.
Keller: Yes, it would have been the summer of 62, I think it was, that we
went to Livingstone and spent the summer looking at Kalambo
artifacts.
Clark: We were analyzing them, and indeed I went through many of your
analysis sheets in the course of going through the Kalambo Falls
material, yes.
Keller: My illegible analysis sheets.
Clark: Incidentally, that [Kalambo Falls, Volume Three] should be out
some time between July and September.
Keller: Oh, good, Desmond. I know that ll be a big thrill for you.
Clark: Oh, it will indeed, actually, a joy.
Rest and Recreation Outings
Keller: One thing that I wanted to mention, Tim, that took placeduring
that summer we were in Livingstone, we didn t spend all of our
time looking at stone tools . Desmond and Betty when they had
lived in Livingstone had a boat, a little outboard, which they had
left there. So on Sundays we would load up with some food and
some beer and cameras, and what not, and take this boat and go off
to one of the islands in the Zambezi and have a picnic.
And part of that summer Desmond and Betty s son John was
there, and John would come along. And he and I had a number of
pleasant afternoons going from one island to the other stalking
elephants that would come out of the game park that was on the
Southern Rhodesian side. Managed to stay out of trouble, but had
a lot of fun doing that. It was really a very special time.
Clark: Charlie, were you with us when we walked and bathed in- -what was
it called- -the Devil s Punchbowl, that s right.
Keller: No, Desmond, I wasn t. And I ve heard about that, and I can t
remember whether it took place before or after I was there, that
particular year it wasn t quite dry enough to go out there. We
did one time with your boat take a trip down to the upstream end
of Livingstone Island and then walked out there to the tip. Yes,
that was very impressive.
346
The Atlas of African Prehistory
Troy:
Keller:
Clark:
And of course you got up to Kalambo. Was that in "63?
That was the second time that I was there in Northern Rhodesia,
63. Desmond had been working on a project that was called an
atlas of prehistory of Africa, and I had been supported as a
graduate student by the grant that he had to do that, and I had
worked there in Berkeley plotting the locations of archaeological
sites .
Yes, I d forgotten about that,
on all of that.
Yes, you did a major piece of work
Keller: Well, there were quite a few sites, anyway, that were located
fairly well, but well, I won t say his name, but there was a
stinker in South Africa who would not make his data available to
us, and so--.
Clark: Oh, yes.
Keller: Desmond and Betty went to Angola, in the early part of that
season, and I flew to Livingstone and got a Land Rover that
Desmond and Betty had bought the previous year, and drove down
into South Africa and went around to the museums there and looked
at their stone tool collections, and plotted the locations of the
sites from their maps and from their geographical data and then
drove back to Livingstone as they came back from Angola, and then
we went up to Kalambo for the last part of that summer.
Troy: Well, it sounds like a hell of a lot of work to gather all that
data.
Keller: I ve thought about that particular trip a number of times as I ve
had graduate students of my own. There had been some hassle with
airline connections, I d missed a flight, whatever, and I d gotten
to Livingstone at the beginning of a three-day weekend- -Rhodes and
Founders Day, Desmond--and so I was behind schedule from the time
I started.
So I drove this poor old Land Rover as hard as I could down
into South Africa and all around from the Free State across to
Natal and then back up to Livingstone, and by the time I got back
to Livingstone, I had burned out a piston on the thing and so it
was really just limping along. And I ve thought about that
innumerable timeswhat I would have done, had I been in Desmond s
place? Because we were all set to leave for Kalambo, and here was
this Land Rover that was just barely functional and so we had to
wait, oh, the better part of a week to have it repaired. Desmond
347
never lifted his voice, never turned a hair, and I ve thought,
"Man, if I d been in that position, I m sure I would have blown my
top at some point or another in the process."
Clark: I think I would have now, Charlie. [laughter]
Keller: But he was extremely patient.
Troy: And you hadn t been to South Africa, right? So you had to do it
with a map in your hand, probably- -try to figure out where the
hell you were.
Keller: Well, yes with a map in my hand and at that point the road down
through Southern Rhodesia, as it was then, into South Africa was
one of the old strip roads, so it was two strips of pavement a
tire-width wide and if you met somebody, each of you took one and
you got off--so it was an interesting process to learn to drive on
that.
Clark: That was an important piece of work, the Atlas of African
Prehistory. That s what it was called. The funding came from the
Wenner-Gren and it was published by the University of Chicago.
You did a good piece of work on it.
Keller: It s never gotten the use or the regard it was due, I didn t
think .
Clark: I don t think it has, but it s about the only thing that there is,
you know--a reasonable sort of record at that time. Of course,
there are a number of more sites, and last year, I think it was,
Paul Sinclair expressed his interest in taking over the atlas,
because the money had come to an end, you see, and we weren t able
to continue. We employed Karla Savage, actually, and she was
doing a very good job, but then the money packed in and we could
do no more. And he said that he d got some people in Sweden at
Uppsala who were interested in carrying it on and putting it onto
the web, that kind of thing. So that is what hopefully they are
doing.
Keller: Oh, well, that s a great idea.
Clark: What we were trying to do was to get more data about every site
when Karla was running it, and it was for a time a project of the
UISPP [Union Internationale des Sciences Prehistoriques et
Protohistoriques] . Based in Belgium, actually. Jacques Nenquin
was the secretary of it- -do you remember him?
Keller: Yes, indeed.
348
Clark: Yes, so do I. I saw him last in Forli. I think he just handed
over to someone also in Ghent. That was the last time I saw him.
He s retired.
Troy: Desmond s going over to Cambridge this next month. David [W. ]
Phillipson is organizing a big meeting, the Society of Africanist
Archaeologists meeting.
Clark: I don t normally go to meetings actually, but I went to
Philadelphia for the Paleo [Paleoanthropology Society] . I do
enjoy the Paleo two-day meetings. This time it was in
Philadelphia, and if I hadn t been asked to give a paper, I
wouldn t have gone, but I did--enjoyed it very much actually. It
was very good seeing old friends. It sort of stimulated one.
People somewhat surprised, "Good heavens," they said, "thought you
were dead." [laughter]
The 63 Season at Kalambo
Keller: That summer of 63--there was one other thing that had come to
mind about that, Tim, and that was after we had all gathered in
Livingstone and went up to Kalambo, we had a sort of --whatever it
was--six week or so season there. But there was an Iron Age site
in Britain called Maiden Castle at which Desmond and a number of
other people cut their teeth in archaeology.
This particular 63 season at Kalambo was a little bit like
that in that there were an awful lot of people who were there, or
who passed through in the course of the time--Maxine Kleindienst
was there, and Barbara Anthony was there most of the time.
Francis Van Noten was there. I was trying to remember this
afternoon, Desmond, whether David Phillipson came for a visit that
season or not.
Clark: He was there, yes.
Keller: I know Brian Fagan did, and Richard Lee and Irven DeVore came
through on their way to their sites.
Clark: That s right, and they had a pet baboon.
Keller: That s right.
Troy: Who had the pet baboon? Irven?
Clark: Irv DeVore, yes.
349
Keller: And there were some other people whose names I ve forgottenSue
Bucklin was a graduate student.
Clark: Yes, that s right. She married a Belgian geologist, I think he
was. A geologist at any ratein Malawi. I ve completely lost
touch. And what about Barbara Anthony, is she still alive?
Keller: I have no idea. I haven t heard of her for a long time.
But it was a very lively time. Again, Desmond and Betty s
son John was there for part of the time. And he and I always
enjoyed each other s company. We had a lot of fun together- -and
it was a very interesting time.
Clark:
Keller:
Clark:
Keller:
Troy:
Clark:
Troy:
Keller:
Clark:
It was some of the best times, Charlie, because funding was
reasonably easy to get and you could go out into the field. You
had a maximum of two-and-a-half months, which was one term or one
quarter, and then you could come back; and then the other quarter,
the graduate students who came and oneself would work on getting
all the analysis tied up and everything. That was really good.
Not so good now with the semester system. But those were great
days.
Yes, yes. Well, funding is tighter. I remember the last week or
two- -maybe the last ten days as we were trying to wind up there
all of us sitting around at night trying to describe microliths by
the light of the pressure lamp. [laughter] It was fairly taxing.
Yes. Were you there when a cobra fell down from the fig tree onto
the dining room table on one occasion?
No, that was the summer, the season before I was there. I
remember you talking about it.
Good God! That must have dispersed the troops!
Well, I think that they moved slightly and came back again.
Have you been back to Kalambo Falls, Charlie?
No, no. I ve not been any closer than Tanzania since then. It
was a lovely spot. Have you been back, Desmond? When was the
last time you were there?
The last time I was there was 88. When Nick and Kathy--Nick had
a Fulbright and was trying to find an early man site in Zambia.
Unfortunately he didn t find one, but we went up to Kalambo and we
had about a week there. We did a step trench at C Site, which was
really quite interestingproduced some quite good results, which
350
we haven t written up yet, actually.
Kathy to write up.
I was going to leave it for
I came across Betty s drawings of it the other day. But
everything else is now in the volume that s about to appearthank
God. The last I heard was from Francis [Musonda] , who had been
there, they are declaring it a National Heritage Site.
Keller: Oh, that s nice.
Clark: Or World Heritage Sitethat s right. That s what it is, I think,
yes, which is nice. And Francis said there were a lot of handaxes
lying about. So I know no more about that. They wouldn t be
lying about if tourists were going to it, I think, because they
would have been sold to the tourists. But fortunately, the road
is so bad that nobody goes at the moment.
I wouldn t mind trying to get back- -what I still want to do,
what we need above all, is to get some decent cores out of A Site,
so that we can get a continuous record of pollens and
microorganisms, and also some better dates. We still haven t
really dated the Acheulean thereit must be quite 300,000 if not
a bit more.
Keller: Yes. I would have thought so. It s like the situation at
Isimila. There has been so much cutting and filling that it s
difficult to get an unbroken stratigraphic sequence.
Clark: Yes. Did you get anything? There s that one date that they got,
Clark [Howell] and Irv and the rest of them published it, I think
--about 270,000 or something, wasn t it? I can t remember whether
it was for the Sangoan, or whether it was for the Late Acheulean.
Keller: I don t think it was the Sangoan date, Desmond, I think it was
down in the other end of the Karongo where the Acheulean material
is. A potassium- argon date, wasn t it, Desmond? Or no, it was
uranium.
Clark: It was uranium series. It was done by that man oh, I think he s
still working. I can t remember his name. It was a rather
unusual name- -began with a "Z,"
didn t it? [B. J. Szabo]
Troy: Sounds as if there s a need for another couple of seasons at
Kalambo. I can see Desmond plotting this in his head. [laughter]
Clark: Well, the main thing is to try and get cores. I don t know that
one is going to get much more out of the archaeology. Of course
there s no fauna there, you see. But if we could get decent cores
and a continuous pollen record, that would be really good. It
would tie in with what there is in connection with Lake Tanganyika
351
and some of those lakes a little further north, you know where all
the Congolese nonsense is going on.
Keller: Well, and doing cores as opposed to trying to excavate it.
Clark: Yes, exactly.
Keller: You could go down into water-logged deposits.
Clark: That was a major excavation, that Trench A-A.
Keller: Yes, yes. It was.
Clark: God, it was. [laughs] Do you remember that deep pit right up at
the upper end which you and John dug?
Keller: Yes, indeed.
Clark: My God that was good.
Difficulties of Doing Archaeology. Protecting Sites
Keller: I was talking with somebody the other day about the difficulties
of doing archaeology, or anything else for that matter, in that
part of the world, at that time at least. There were things that
you take for granted that you just couldn t get and weI ve
forgotten how deep this pit was, but it was much too deep to throw
the dirt out with a shovel--we had done a sort of bucket brigade
with guys standing on ladders and passing the buckets up.
Well, that went terribly slowly so we had built some shear
legs out of bamboo, lashed together, but we couldn t find a pulley
to use to pull the bucket up so we tried running it over a piece
of bamboo which had so much silica in it that it wore the rope
through in a short period of time. So everybody had to stand out
from under the bucket when we were taking it up for fear it would
fall, and then when it did fall, we d have to retie the rope and
do it all again.
Clark: That s right. Yes.
Troy: Sounds like a hell of a pit.
Desmond and I have been talking a little bit about the
protection of sites, and of course that s a very iffy thing, but
it sounds as if Kalambo s off the beaten track enough so maybe
things are going okay up there. He s been champing at the bit
352
relative to work in Angola and the political situations in lots of
places in Africa now that really make it problematic.
Keller: Yes, which is a shame. Isimila is or was a magnificent site,
magnificent area, but it s right on a main road, and even in the
late sixties and seventies the so-called antiquities guards were
selling artifacts to tourists, and so I imagine it s just been
picked over.
Troy: We were talking to Andrew Smith about a month ago, and we were
talking about Adrar Bous up in the Sahara. Andy was saying that
four-wheelers are all over the place now.
Keller: Oh, I hadn t thought about that.
Troy: It s just wide-open up there, and where politically they re able
to get in, they just--they 11 go anywhere. Of course, that s a
problem everywhere even in the United States, too, in the
Southwest.
Clark: I suppose they come in from the south now. They can t really get
in from Nigeria, I don t think. And from Tunisia, you see, you
would have to go either through Libya or Algeria, so that s out.
Mauritania I suppose you could still operate in, but mostly I
think it s from Mali, and whatever that other one isUpper Volta
and Niger, of course, and Chad when it comes to that. Yes.
That s the way they get in. The amount of looting that goes on in
Mali, for example, is dreadful.
Keller: Have they been successful at protecting things in Tanzania and
Kenya, Desmond? Do you know? Places like Olduvai and
Olorgesailie?
Clark: Well, to some extent. You know those sites, the DK-1 and FLK,
there was another site, I think as well, I can t remember. They d
all been sort of finished and so on with a roof. But then the
roof was taken off these in order to roof the houses of the staff
at Olduvai, and so they just went and they ve had it completely.
There s no protection of sites.
But the Olduvai Museum has been sort of renovated and
there s an exhibit about Laetoli, the Getty conservation people
did that. And in the SAA [Society for American Archaeology] I met
a man, a Masai, who d been brought over, I think by Rob
Blumenschine for a month to learn about things , and he was going
to go backhe s the man who sort of explains Olduvai to the
tourists, which is quite good. Energetic sort of chap.
353
Troy:
Clark:
Keller:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Keller:
Clark:
Keller:
Clark:
Keller:
Clark:
Keller:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
That s good. Desmond and I have talked about the African graduate
students who have come here to the program and the successes and
the not so successful kinds of situations with that.
You must have been here when one of our failures, Mr. Oanuga was
here. Do you remember?
No, I think he came just after my time, Desmond.
Oh. That was when Garth was standing in for me when I was back in
Africa.
And this chap was from Zambia?
No from Nigeria. He was a son of an Oba or something like that, 1
can t remember, but he was indeed a tragedy. It s too long a
story that one.
Yes, well it s really dif ficult--it s easy somehow to communicate
techniques to someone from a really different culture and
background, but it s much more difficult to communicate philosophy
and values. There was this fellow, Simon Waane who was here, who
went back to become director of antiquities, keeper of antiquities
in the museum in Dar-Es-Salaam.
Oh, Waane, yes. Thank, God he s gone now. Oh, yes.
He was just-- just a failure.
He was a stumbling block.
He spent most of the time, not most of the time, that s not fair--
but a lot of the time he was here as a student working extra jobs
to make money to buy things to send back.
I had never realized he was up at Champaign-Urbana. I thought he
was one of David Phillipson s people.
Yes. Simon Waane. Actually he had a very interesting
dissertation on the pottery trade on Lake Malawi, where the people
he had worked with live right up against the scarp, and there s
not any room for agriculture, and so they make pots and boat them
across to the markets on the other side of the lake.
We did a whole lot there as well.
Now which side of Malawi was that?
On the east side, yes. The foot of the Livingstone Mountains.
354
Troy: I think we ve seen in the fallout from the roof collapse in Zambia
[Livingstone Museum] some of this cultural difference. I think
Desmond feels hurt because in many ways he had tried to set the
museum up to be tremendously supportive of the people and their
sense of themselves, and to have it kind of thrown up as some kind
of bastion of colonialism is silly, it really is. They miss the
point.
Keller: Yes, yes. And certainly when I was there in the early sixties,
neither the museum nor the craft village out at the edge of town
was set up like that. It seems to me that it made the most of the
talents of the Zambian population and the ethnic groups that were
represented. And the kinds of things that were presented were
presented in ways that did not at all denigrate the ability of the
people or the coherence of the culture from which these things
were coming. They did dances and whatever. And the costumes were
right and the music was right- -much better than what goes on in
many Indian reservations in the Southwest. So, yes, too bad to
have that fall to pieces. But it does take money to run.
Clark: Well, they just weren t getting the money, you see. And when we
were there in 88, they had about eight vehicles I think it was,
only one of which worked, which was the director s car, which took
him backwards and forwards from his little farm on the Maramba.
All the other vehicles, which were Land Rovers and things like
that, none of them worked because something had gone wrong and
needed repairing, and of course nobody had any funds, foreign
exchange to buy the parts. Nick had to reconstitute one of the
Land Rovers, which is what we used. And it s still like that, I
think. I don t know what you do about it. Everything is so
corrupt. Terrible.
Troy: Well, hopefully things will gradually improve.
Clark: Let s hope the good old bad old days will be back again! [laughs]
Update on Keller s Work, Blacksmithing
Troy: We have another few minutes. Most of your work now, Charlie, is
teaching and working in the United States? Or are you doing some
work in archaeology in the Middle West?
Keller: No. After I did the work at Isimila and came back here, I became
increasingly interested and concerned about how people had used
the tools that I had excavated both at Montagu and Isimila and at
Kalambo. And I just couldn t find anything in the anthropological
literature that would give me a grip on understanding how people
355
made decisions about accomplishing tasks and using tools for those
tasks.
I finally came to the conclusion that I needed to be taught
a craft kind of activity in a nonacademic situation, and that I
should try and arrange some sort of apprenticeship. I felt also
that I should do that in an activity that I was relatively
unfamiliar with, so I wouldn t bring a lot of background knowledge
to what I was learning. Then there were also considerations of
what it was I could picture myself doing. I thought about
learning to be a weaver and decided I couldn t stand it, so
through a fortunate set of circumstances, I was able to apprentice
in a blacksmith shop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And so I ve spent
time doing that- -actually went back the following summer and spent
some more time working with the two people that I had learned
from.
So I did that and kind of got hooked on ironwork, to tell
you the truth, and I bought some tools while I was there and
continued to blacksmith after I got back here. And after some
time my wife and I collaborated on a number of papers on decision-
making and classification of tools and things like that, which
culminated ultimately in a book called Cognition and Tool Use,
which we published a few years ago that Cambridge University Press
did.
Troy: I ve seen it.
Keller: Well, I hope you liked the cover, because we had a lot of fun
designing that cover!
Troy: Well, that s a wonderfully inventive way of taking what you
learned here with Desmond and moving it into new areas .
Keller: Exactly. And something which I ve pointed out in the
acknowledgement of the book. And you know, since then I had an
opportunity with an early retirement plannot quite as generous
as the one they had at Berkeley, but still a relatively generous
one here, so I left the university in 1992. Since then I ve
blacksmithed, and I m working a couple days a week now at a local
history museum where I take care of the collections--! ve redone
their databases two or three times and revamped the storage
facilities, and I take care of record-keeping and that kind of
stuff. They have a nice collection of late 18th and early 19th
century metalwork, so it ties in nicely with what I ve been doing
in the shop .
And some years ago some people donated the contents and
business records of an early 20th century blacksmith shop to the
museum. So one of the things I m going to do there the next six
356
Clark:
Keller:
Clark:
Keller:
Clark:
Troy:
Keller:
Clark:
Keller:
months or so is to help them put together an exhibit
reconstructing part of this blacksmith shop and talking about the
role of blacksmiths in maintaining the social structure and the
economic structure of the communities in which they lived.
Oh, great, Charlie! One of my happiest memories when I was young
was taking the horses down to have them shoed at the blacksmith s
in Stonor. All the people who dropped in, all the conversations,
just like some of these barber shops and so on!
Originally there were two sisters who donated this material to the
museum, so we did a lot of oral historical work with them, and one
of them was saying that, as you say, Desmond, there are always
people hanging around the shop . And one of them was a
kleptomaniac- -and he would steal tools out of the shop, so this
woman was telling me that once a month or so her father would have
to go to the man s house and retrieve the tools that he d carried
off.
How very trying!
Much of what I ve done with some of the blacksmithing stuffsome
people look at it and say, "Gee, this is done like it was written
by an archaeologist." Because I ve been interested in seasonality
for instance, what kinds of jobs were done, what times of the
year, and how it ties to the agricultural cycle, and things like
this. So yes, I feel like the medium is somewhat different, but
much of what I do is the same kind of thing that I ve always done.
Yes, that s super, Charlie,
on all of that.
I think you ve done a magnificent job
Charlie, when was the last time you were in Berkeley? When was
the last time you saw Desmond?
Oh, I think it was probably when you were here, Desmond.
I think it was probably in Bloomington.
Oh, that s right. I d forgotten about that. Desmond, you have to
tell Tim about other adventures. It ll probably take a full tape
to describe some of the fairly elaborate and riotous dinners that
we ve had.
Clark: Yes, exactly. Yes, Charlie. It was great to hear you again.
357
Timothy White, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, November 2, 2000
Together in Ethiopia Over the Years, and the Access Problem
Troy: When did you two first meet each other?
White: I reckon it would have been 1978. It would probably have been via
Glynn [Isaac], because when I arrived I took care of Glynn s
house he was in Kenya and I was housesitting.
Clark: Then 81 was the first time we were in the field together. We
went to the east side of the Middle Awash to study the area, which
was in the Afar Rift- -hot, dusty, and very sunny, bright and so
on. Large numbers of artifacts. Some particularly valuable
fauna. And we had an excellent field season out there. Came in
via Awash Station up the main road going north to meet the east-
west road, going east of course, to Assab. We went in via Gewane
and drove up to where these sites were.
I had had a previous very quick visit with one of Fred
Wendorf s students and we went up with one of the Afar--I can t
remember his name- -he was a very good chap. Took us out to some
of these sites. I was with Jack Harris at the time--I think we
had had three days or something- -one day up, one day around.
Troy: And Tim was on this trip?
Clark: Tim wasn t on that one.
White: Not the first one, no. Desmond came back and said we re going up
in this area, do you want to come along?
Troy: And that was 81, and that was your first trip out to Ethiopia?
White: Yes. And Betty came along. Betty did the logistics. We used
Desmond s old carsborrowed a car from [Donald] Johanson andwas
it three cars we had? Yes, three cars, and a couple of trailers.
Clark: I d forgotten those trailers --remember having to hammer on the
plates.
358
White:
Clark:
White:
Clark:
Troy:
White:
Clark:
White:
Clark:
White:
Troy:
White:
Yes, registration, license and so forth. They were old
agricultural trailers that Desmond had had. Jerry Decker had
them.
Decker had some of your stuff out at his place, Desmond.
Oh, yes that s right, of course. Those were terrible, totally
dreadful.
Still running, though.
Yes. That s right.
In 77, "76 I was in Ethiopia working at Gadeb--the only
proposal that I had put in that was turned down, to work more at
Gadeb, and I m sure it was turned down on an anti-review by Maxine
Kleindienst--very odd person.
Kleindienst?
She had worked at Kalambo with Desmond. And much, much later
tried to torpedo the monograph Desmond has just finished now with
Cambridge. But the good news is I just got the proofs of the
Middle Awash monograph from Kathy [Schick] . I think it s very
good.
I m so glad.
This is a report on all of Desmond s work from 81 until the mid-
nineties on the Middle Awash.
Did she get them very recently?
Yes. She got them pretty recently, I guess.
In 82 we went back, and then there was a ban on research, so
we couldn t continue, and then in 89 actually 88, 89, 87
around in those years, Berhane [Asfaw] and I did some work outside
the Middle Awash looking at new sites up and down the rift, and
then when we could apply again, we did--and that was in 90. And
that s when Kathy came for the first time.
It was almost an eight-year period in there when you no access.
We couldn t go to the Middle Awash at all. There were in fact
papers in Gewane instructing the local authorities to arrest us if
we tried to go.
Clark: Were there really?
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White: Yes. Signed by one of the highest guys in the country during the
Derg. Shows you the kind of influence that our enemies had at
that point.
Troy: And then you had a good period in the nineties and things turned
for the worse more recently?
White: Actually, it wasn t so good in the nineties. It started off well,
and then there was a change of government, and the people that we
had trained and worked with for all those nine years lost their
jobs because they were with the previous government. And they put
in a bunch of people who were basically corrupt, and it took about
three years for the government to realize that and replace them.
And so that brings us to about 95, 96, and things were pretty
good for a few years, and then in the last year things have
started to go bad again--it goes in cycles.
Clark: Yes. It s been dreadful.
White: But the worst the worst and the best of it--is that we ve got
really good folks we ve worked with from Ethiopia who are senior
scientists and just outstanding people. That s the good news,
because there is this generation of forty and fifty year-old
scientists that Desmond was largely responsible for recruiting and
putting into the field, and the bad news is because of a variety
of political reasons, these people do not have significant
positions in the government or the university or anything else.
They re operating functionally as scientists, but under a series
of regulations and directives and nonsensical things that are set
up by people who have no qualifications whatever, but who hold
power. So if that can be remedied, then Ethiopia will really take
the lead in this kind of science. If it can t be remedied in
Ethiopia, then I think much of Africa is a write-off.
Clark: Not much left.
Troy: There has been tremendous change in our knowledge in this period
in the seventies certainly since Desmond started. Have more
questions been raised in the field than answered relative to the
origins of Homo and divergences and when and where? How do you
feel about that, Tim?
Clark: Well, let me say--an enormous amount of new, vital dataunique
data, some of it, because of its age, has come out of the Afar
Rift and that is essentially due to Tim, who has found this
material. And the Aramis fossils, for example, which are what,
4.4 [million years]. Something like that you see there s
nothing like that. There s Yohannes Haile Selassie s teeth, which
are 5.2 something, I think.
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White: They re older than 5.5 [million years].
Clark: Yes. And then a whole series of other fossils including Homo.
Well, Tim can tell you about these. But these are vital fossils
and associated with cultural material or evidence of one kind or
another, which gives you a whole lot of behavioral evidence, which
was never there before.
White: And filling in some of the periods for which we had no information
at all.
You know, it s hard to talk about this stuff without the
perspective of time, and we have a perspective of time on it now--
things like Olduvai Gorge. And historically speaking Olduvai
Gorge is very, very important- -it filled in previously unknown
periods with very rich data sets, but it s very limited in the
time periods that it samples.
The Middle Awash ultimately, in the perspective of time, I
think a hundred years from now, is going to be seen as far more
important than Olduvai Gorge, because of its tremendous time depth
and spatial extent. It samples 6 million years rather than a
couple million. It samples every single technological stage. It
has fossil hominids in every one of these horizons. We have
fossils now hominids from, I think, seven or eight horizons
across 6 million years. There is nowhere on planet Earth where
you have that sort of a record.
It is inescapable that the Middle Awash will be the key
important siteand more broadly speaking, that whole area of the
Afar. When you put all of the data sets together--Hadar, Gona,
the Middle Awash--it is in that triangle that we re going to, I
think, always have the greatest insights into human evolution.
There is not going to be another one found- -a lot of people
imagine that next week maybe somebody will find another Afar. It
is not going to happen.
Troy: Do you think that factors into the political situation where they
have a sense that that is of tremendous importance?
White: It depends on the "they." If you talk about our colleagues,
certainly they know. If you re talking about the Ethiopians, they
have a sense of it, but that is not the motivation.
The motivation for many of them is personal money, because
these are poor people, even though they are government employees.
And so what you have is unethical researchers willing to exploit
government officials who are willing to take corruption money.
This is against the policies of the government, but in a country
like Ethiopia that has tremendous difficulties feeding people,
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maintaining its borders, a few lower officials soliciting bribes
from foreign researchers just doesn t have a high national
priority.
One of the things that will happen with time, and should have
already happenedhas actually been suppressed in Ethiopiais the
development of the country s economy, particularly in the tourism
realm, to actually give for the science to be able to give
something back to the country economically. And there are some
very, very good people who have appreciated that. The Leakey
Foundation is now engaged in an effort to partner with the
Ethiopian Tourism Commission and develop these resources. Because
of the importance of all of these discoveries and these sites,
it s important that they be protected scientifically, and at the
same time be used to better the country.
So the future is bright. The difficulties we have now are
frustrating, and they are low level, and they are potentially
deadly to the science if they can t be solved, but we re confident
that the government will be able to solve them.
Troy: Are they restricting access to specific areas, Tim?
White: Yes.
Troy: And you don t know why, necessarily.
White: No, we know why. We know precisely why. These corrupt
individuals would like the areas under permit to be as small as
possible and a postage stamp mosaic of them across the country
will increase the opportunities for each of these corrupt
government officials to solicit bribes from each of the research
groups working in the postage stamp size areas. It s a simple
matter of economics.
Troy: Does the ethics of this come up in international meetings among
your colleagues?
White: Many colleagues in this field, if you rank them on a scale of one
to ten in terms of their ambition versus their ethics, with a ten
being very ambitious but not ethical, and a one being the other
way around, the score for come colleagues in this field would be
approximately 9.5. Given that, it is impossible for any organized
body to control this . It has to be the governments that control
it, because it is in the governments self-interest to control it.
The foreign scientists cannot be left to control it because their
selfishness prevents them from doing that. Very unfortunate, but
the world has changed and that s the way it is .
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Troy: Certainly since your time, Desmond, there are many more people
involved .
Clark: Oh, many more, yes. And of course one of the problems as well
with that is you have to have quite a number of different
specialists in a team. You ve got to have them come into the
field, let them work with you, work in the lab as well, and each
person has to be vetted and passed by the antiquities service in
connection with the permit that is given, and of course there are
opportunities there of saying, "No, we re not going to have so-
and-so or something unless some contribution gets paid." It s all
very trying indeed.
But, you see, if you re working at a cave site--a rock shelter
site, or something like that, whether you re doing rock paintings
or excavating the floors and so on--you have a limited number,
maybe half a dozen people, specialists who need to be in there
when you re doing all of this. And usually it s archaeologists
who are working on those later sites. If you re working at places
like Axum or pre-Axumite sites you have another situation, you
see, where you ve got a small site with a relatively small number
of people that you have to get in all at once. So it s very much
easier for people like that.
Whereas I suppose if you re dealing with something that is way
down in the Plio-Pleistocene, then you ve got to include a whole
number of other people who can provide data on dating, on paleo-
environment, climate change, what the changes areall that kind
of thing, you see. And you can get it from a whole range of
different people doing different techniques and methods and of
course there will be more of these as the years go by.
So it s not easy to get any of these antiquities people to
understand why you have to have all of these people- -even
photographers for example. You see--of course you have to have
photographers. If they won t let them in without a contribution--
and so it goes on until we can get rid of the corruptness. It was
never like that under Haile Selassie. There was a good man
running it for the first few years when I was involved in all
this, somebody named Mercuria, incredibly fine scholar. What
we ve now got is the lower echelon running the thing.
New Developments. Uncovering Surprises
Troy: So every year, Tim, when you go out, you have some sense of the
surprises that are coming, but there s no way of knowing. What
are some of the big surprises you ve had in the last few years?
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White: Oh, I suppose the biggest one is that Desmond had worked
extensively on the Acheulean of the east side in 90, and then we
shifted our efforts over to the west side where we visited in
81--actually to work on the Lower Acheulean. Then as we worked
more there, we found that there was a Late Acheulean in the same
place and younger stratigraphic horizons. Desmond had excavated a
number of these sites and made some really important discoveries
refitting cores and hippo butchery and really he d done the
archaeology, and the fauna up there had never been all that rich.
In the El Nino year, in 97, it was a weird day because we
hadn t really planned to work there that day but we went and we
were cut off by water, we couldn t drive any cars out. And we had
a French colleague that had to get to the airport or else he was
going to lose his job, so I told him his only way out was we would
drive him to the river, and he had to cross the river with the
Afars and then walk a day and then get to the little town and get
a truck ride back to the capital and hopefully catch his flight.
So we took him down to the river.
Troy: What was the little town to get to?
White: Gewane was the name of the town. It was the first one we went to,
in 81.
So we drove him down to the river, and I hired about eight
guys to accompany him, and they bundled together a whole bunch of
reeds, papyrus reeds, set him in the middle of this, they wouldn t
let him get wet. I wanted to cross the river, but the Afars
wouldn t let me go, because they were worried that if I got half
way and got killed that they wouldn t be paid, so there was no way
that they were going to let me join in this damn thing. So I
walked about half way out and launched him off and there he went.
A huge rainstorm came along at that time, just drenched everybody.
Berhane was in Addis [Ababa] with all the logistics and so
forth, and we couldn t get out, he couldn t get in- -we were
literally cut off. So we drove up on the end of the Bouri
peninsula to see if we could watch him leave, and we couldn t.
And I d noticed that the Herto village was abandoned that year--
because of the heavy rains they abandoned it--and there was a lot
of green grass out there. I thought- -let s just go have lunch.
It s odd, it looked kind of like Ireland it was so green out
there. You never see green like that in the Afar. It was just a
weird El Nino year.
And we went and set up, and we got to lunch, and before we put
up the fly on the car--we needed to make shade for lunch--! told
the guys, "We ve got a half hour, just go look around." I d seen
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a hippo skull come out there. So we stopped near there and walked
out and
Troy: The hippo skulls were washed out because of the rain?
White: Exactly what the sequence of events was I don t know. I was
driving down to go to the two-and-a-half million year old sites
and I d seen this thing out the window, so we d stopped and looked
at it.
But the Turkish student, Qesur, within five minutes said, "I
think I ve found something important," and he had a piece of
hominid occipital. My other graduate student, David DeGusta,
walked about fifteen meters away and found a chunk of a parietal
of a hominid. So I said, "That s good. Let s go back and have
lunch," and we got one other cranial piece, and we had lunch and I
gave them flags .
I gave Qesur blue flags and gave David yellow flags, and said.
"Okay, go set flags at all the hominid pieces "--we always find out
where the pieces are on the surface until we figure out how they
came out, and try to track back to the source, which you can
rarely do. But in this case with David s pin flagswell, they
started to get so dense right in the center of it that he said, "I
don t want to put any more flags in because I think the skull may
be here," and in fact it was. The rest of the skull--one side had
broken off, but it was laying sideways.
So that was kind of surprising- -within a day we had two
hominids in a late-Acheulean context. It was critically important
for the origin of man in Africa. And then I guess about a week or
a week-and-a-half later we were excavating down at the two-and-a-
half million year old site a mile away, and Berhane went up and he
found the skull of about an eight-year-old child out of exactly
the same sand bed about 75 meters from where we found the two
adults. So all of a sudden, within a couple of weeks we really
added substantially to the Late Pleistocene recordand the
context had already been set by Desmond with all the Acheulean
there, so I think that was probably one of the bigger surprises.
We haven t published those yet because we re still trying to
get time control geochemically above those specimens, but there s
not very much sediment above the specimens, so it s a real big
job, and we re going to work more this year on trying to solve
that problem. That s a specific problem that s come up. We want
to date it before we publish it. And each one of the things that
we find, sometimes it s easy to get dates, sometimes it s
difficult. Sometimes we need more fauna, sometimes we need to do
archaeological excavation. Sometimes we can publish very
365
quickly, other times we find a lot of stuff in a context where
more needs to be done.
For instance with the Aramis, 4.4 million-year-old stuff, it s
probably going to be ten years between the time we published and
the first Nature paper and the time we publish the second. Simply
because we re literally flooded with data from birds, and micro-
mammals, and vegetation, and stable isotopes, and dating, and
sedimentology and analysis of all these bones, and cleaning them
up and molding them, and photographing them. It s just a huge,
huge effort on the 4.4, so even though we found it first, it ll be
published last because there s so much there that we want to do
before we publish it.
Clark: And the reason why there is so much there that s been found is due
to the meticulous methods of survey and recovery of what is there.
You see, Tim developed this technique, and where you normally find
your material is on eroded slopes, and you have to find where in
particular on the slope all this stuff is coming from, maybe more
than one horizon.
So Tim had a series of --what was it, two feet apart? something
like that, grid lines going from the top to the bottom of the
hillside. And one person in each one going slowly bit by bit
picking out every piece of bone that there was and shoving it all
into bags, noting where it all came from. And then this was all
sieved and sorted, resieved, resorted, and so on, rather like
recovering diamonds, with the finer and finer sieves and resorting
and everything. But most people would not have done that. Most
people would not have found a fraction of what Tim has found--Tim
and the people that he s trained. Really superb. That s why so
much is coming out of it--you see.
So many people simply just walk over the ground and expect to
see something lying around. You do that, of course you see the
big bones, but they re usually not the most interesting bones by
any means, and very rarely do you find broken hominid remains.
Troy: Methodologies have changed tremendously since you first went out.
Clark: Oh, yes. Yes.
White: A lot has come as a result of technologies that are available--
we re the first ones to implement GPS locations of these fossil
sites. We did it back in the eighties; as soon as the system was
up, we were there. We re using differential GPS now, so we re
submeter accuracy. That s a huge advantage. We ve got satellite
telephones now. We have communication systems, we have different
kinds of preservatives to solidify the fossils. But there is no
one right technique that you can just apply to every occurrence.
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Each occurrence has its own unique geomorphology, its own unique
depositional history, so there s no formula.
You have to be able to be flexible, but you have to be
immediately flexible because you often don t have time to wait.
We could not leave that skull in the ground that night. That had
to come out, and it was in completely unconsolidated sand. If one
cow or camel had stepped in that spot the face would have turned
to powder because the bone was so soft. That s a completely
different situation than what we faced on the 4.4 where we had
bones that were in the clay. The excavation there, the bone was
softer than the clay, so it called for a unique technique- -and it
was wet, so unique wetting and drying in getting it out. We got
out sesamoid bones in the hand of this individual, and people
don t even get those in modern burials. So a whole different set
of tools, a whole different set of procedures was involved, with
every one a little bit different.
Clark: Would you say that that bone in the Aramis fossil would be 50
percent smaller than current humans, or more than that?
White: In terms of the individual s size, no, it s bigger than Lucy.
Clark: But it s not bigger than the modern humans.
White: No, not bigger than that. But different. There are going to be
different proportions in all of the bones in the hand and
everything else.
The unfortunate thing about that one is that although there
were limb bones, the ends were explodedstepped on by ancient
hippos and so forthbefore we got to it. Just over the hill from
that in almost the same time horizon there are parts of an arm and
a hand from the left appendage, all belonging to one individual.
I think there are four wrist bones, a metacarpal, a couple of
phalanges, radius, humerus, ulna all together perfectly preserved
--really, really strong bones. We ve excavated for two seasons
and found no other piece of that.
We re going to try to go back this year and extend that
excavation more quickly, because somewhere in that horizon is the
rest of that carcass. The humerus just released from the carcass,
but if the carcass is thirty meters to the east, you can t get it,
it s too far under the overburden and we ll never hit it. If it s
ten meters to the east, then maybe we ll hit it. There s
literally no way to know whether it s there or not without trying
to just extend the excavation- -but we could extend the excavation.
: a hyena drug that arm 500 meters, I could spend the rest of my
life digging a sterile hole. So you also have the big deal of
knowing when to quit.
367
The Seasonal Teams, Personnel. Attitudes
Troy: You ve found over the years, Tim, that your seasonal teams have
gotten bigger and bigger?
White: Yes. Because more and more specialists, like Desmond was saying,
have to be brought in to solve different problems. And we ve
learned a lot more about how to manage the Afar labor out there,
maximize, because these people began with no knowledge of
anthropology or archaeology. They re only interested in money- -
what little money we can pay them. It s a job, but we have to
teach them how to do the job.
Troy: Occasionally do you find that some young person is a little more
interested?
White: Yes, I ve got one kid right now, the son of a chief, in fact, in
Bouri village. I m taking care of his education. I put him in an
English school in a town called Nazaret. Two years ago he was a
camel boy. Now he s eleventh in his class of seventy-one,
learning Amharic, learning English, learning science, learning to
read. He ll be the only Afar out there in his area who can read.
Troy: How old is he?
White: Now he s eleven.
So, yes, occasionally we have things like that, but I think
the most difficult problem at work in this area is that it is very
long-term work. Work in this area won t be finished in the next
hundred years. There is always going to be more to do, more to
learn up there. So you have to have a very long-term perspective.
But the problem we re facing is that we can t plan in depth when
the government, the local conditions, the grant money, all of it
is unstable. We have all of this instability on the one hand, and
a need for permanence and stability to do the research correctly
on the other hand.
What the hell do you do? Do you walk away from it because of
the instability, or do you say, "Well, screw the long-term view,
let s just high-grade this place. Snatch what we can get and move
on." Or do you try to do some balancing act? And the answer is,
some balancing act, never compromising the long-term value of the
place. And at the same time realizing that under the present
conditions, you can t do everything at once. You can hardly do
what you need to do.
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Clark: You re limited by the time that you can spend there due to
teaching and other things. That s where Mary Leakey was so
successful in establishing her permanent camp at Olduvai, you see.
She was able to devote full-time to it. And you can t do that now
with the limited time you have. Usually a number of the best
fossils and so on turn up at the close of the season.
Troy: Does grant money flow fairly well for you, Tim?
White: Yes. The National Science Foundation has been a solid supporter
of this research for some time. But it s always a struggle
because people don t want to give you the Jong-term support that
you need to run the project. The reason for that is that the
fieldyou could actually review this opinion piece I just wrote
for the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. I meant to
bring over copies of it, but I forgot again. I ll send them with
somebody to Desmond. Basically what we have is an inverted
ecological pyramid in this field where ninety-five out of a
hundred people sit on their asses in the lab and "analyze"
fossils.
And a few people go out and risk their necks and spend the
time to get the fossils, and the people who sit in the labs
they re the 95 percentthey re doing the reviewing of grants.
They don t understand the field work, but they do understand one
thing. And that is that the sooner they can get their hands on
the fossils that are found the greater the chance there is that
they will be able to extract some analytical information out of
them, which they can then publish and enhance their own career.
And so they dedicate themselves to trying to take fossils out
of the hands of those who find them. Now this was fairly easy
once upon a time when the people doing the field work were not
trained to analyze the fossils, and this includes Mary and Richard
Leakey. And they made their fossils available to their friendly
lab analysts who became well-known. And I could name them, but I
don t need to. So this set up an expectation on the part of
laboratory-based people and now of course the field is an order
of magnitude larger than it was before that somehow the people
who go out and work on the fossils have their brains damaged by
ultraviolet light. I mean, that they re smart enough to find
fossils, but they re certainly not smart enough to analyze them,
and they should bring them back like trained dogs wagging their
tails and dropping them in front of the analysts in the lab.
And so when they review our grants, this is what they say not
in those words, but words like, "This material has been found for
three years, and before we fund any more, we should certainly have
a preliminary indication of what the material is." "Well, I m
halfway through an excavation here where I m trying to get the
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Clark:
White:
Clark:
Troy:
White;
rest of the skeleton- -would you like me to publish the half that I
have now?" You know- -this is what we face with the funding
agencies and so it s always a struggle since there are the ninety-
five reviewers who want their hands on the fossils.
It s not quite so bad with archaeology,
the problems arise.
It s the fossils where
Especially the hominid fossilspeople don t give a damn about the
rest. In the Middle Awash project, if I said, "Well, okay, fine,
we ll play the game because after all we re funded by
anthropology. I ll just do anthropology and screw the birds. I
don t care about the mollusks, the pigs--the heck with it, I ll
give them to the three people in the world who may be interested,
let s just do the hominids," then it would be easy. But I m not
going to do that.
And of course, all of those people have got to cobble together
their support, as well, to get to Addis Ababa to study the horses,
and the birds, or whatever it is. All of them need permission.
And all of them need laboratory access, and all of them need to
stay in hotels, and so on and so forth. So all of a sudden it
gets to be a fairly large operation when you think of all the
geologists, and archaeologists, and paleontologists who are all
essential at, for instance, this Late Acheulean horizon.
You can t do it without those people; all of those people have
to contribute. That s what Desmond had seen so early on in the
study area and endeavored, even in the very first year, to make
sure that there were the paleontologists and I was there for
thatand geologists and archaeologists to cope with what we ran
into. It has just grown from then.
The only people who produced a workable lab it was done with NSF
funding [in 1982] to begin with, but the equipment and so on, that
was largely due to Tim s efforts and the training of the
specialists.
Who oversees the lab during the year when you re not there?
Well, it s an Ethiopian lab. It belongs to the National Museum of
Ethiopia, so technically it comes under the director of
antiquities, and now they ve come up with one of their latest
directives is they want to charge us $25 a day to go in and clean
the goddamn fossils that we have found.
Clark: What?
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White: And they want to charge our Ethiopian colleagues the equivalent of
$100 a day for them on their salaries to go in and study the
fossils that they have found.
Clark: Oh, no!
White: And of course these things will be waived on an individual basis.
So those individuals who kick a few bucks to the son of the
antiquities director, or whatever he suggests, this is how the
corruption works .
Colonial Times as Easier Times
Clark: In the earlier days it was never like that. Never. In the good
old bad system of colonial times, it was a damn sight easier to
get into the field, do the lab work and so on. And much less
expensive.
White: But those days are gone, and they re not coming back.
Clark: Yes.
Did I tell you that John and Liz--they have been with their
spouses to Okavango? Did I talk to you about this?
White: No.
Clark: And they normally every evening would have dinner with their
guide, very nice Botswana chap. And this last night they were
there, they were there with a group of American tourists as well,
at the camp. One of these people said to the guide, "I
suppose
things are going well now you re no longer a British colony."
"Oh, no," the guide said, "you ve got it wrong. We never were a
colony, we were a protectorate, and the British were invited in by
five of our seven chiefs. They were very, very good for us. And
they are still our best friends." This was a Botswana guide who
said that!
White: I think in the long run- -both what Desmond started in Ethiopia in
the seventies, and what we tried to continue through the eighties
and the nineties, is going to leave Ethiopia as the model country
in paleoanthropological research in Africa. I think if these
other countries have a chance to produce then Ethiopia succeeds --
and that s why they re willing to put the time and the effort into
what we re doing.
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Now it s a matter of a couple of folks who are in the way of
realizing this vision of what it ought to be like. The facilities
are there, the resources are there, the government is stable, the
economy is going to be okay, tourism will increase and with just
a couple of changes things will normalize, and if that happens, I
think there could be some very good science being done in Ethiopia
that could be a model for the rest of the continent.
Clark: Let me say as well that if these changes are going to come about,
and if it is going to get onto an even keel, the person who is
going to do it is Tim. So much of this rests entirely with Tim--
and to some extent, I suppose, with Clark [Howell] who still has a
say in things. But the continued drive to produce a scientific
antiquities service with knowledgeable, rightly trained people in
it will come from Tim. Very few other people, other than the
Ethiopian colleagues.
White: Yes, but it s been very much an uphill battle, because of one
thing that has maintained. Even though the African colonies don t
exist anymore, the colonial attitudes on the part of scientists
from outside are still extremely entrenched. They are very
strong.
I made some comments about that in this opinion piece I wrote,
that when it comes to bribing the official to get the upper hand
over your colleagues, when it comes to extending the postdoc to a
lame guy who s done nothing during his undergraduate work just so
you can put the name of an Ethiopian on your project, there are a
lot of people who think that this is. the way to proceed, that it
really is the way to do business. In their colonial vision you re
really better off with untrained Ethiopians that you can use, that
you can move around on the map, and they go out of their way to
create that kind of a relationship where power still resides
outside Ethiopia and is largely economically based.
They use that economic power in a form of colonialism over the
paleoanthropological resources. That mentality is entrenched, and
it in fact covers many of the people in the field. Ultimately
that s the mentality that was operant in Tanzania and in Kenya--
and see what the result of that mentality is there. And it could
very well be that that mentality will also prevail in Ethiopia,
and if it does, it s a write-off, it s a long-term write-off.
That s what I m really afraid of.
Troy: Ethiopia being the potential model for the rest of the continent.
White: If we lose there, then basically you can turn the lights out.
Because at least in Ethiopia you ve got this group of really
qualified people who know what s good for the science, and who
know what s good for their country. If they lose this battle to
372
the incompetent, greedy, selfish faux scientists that are
supported by these colonialist institutions, if and when that
happens, then you just turn the lights out. So that s where we
are right now. It s impossible to predict which model will
prevail in Ethiopia, but I m not exaggerating about the colonial
attitude. It s there very, very stronglyyou see it every day.
Clark: It s mainly the French who ve always kept a facility there. It
was set up, of course, because archaeology was really started by
the French in Ethiopia right after the war. They were there
before the war as well. And they ve had that attitude and have a
permanent man there what is that inscitute called? Maybe it s
not even there any longer.
White: That s no longer the case; the French attitudes in Ethiopia have
changed for the better. When you look at what Desmond did before
those colonial days were even gone, Desmond knew what the right
future was for these countries and took steps in the right
direction, but unfortunately most of his colleagues did not share
his attitudes, mostly because they didn t know Africa. Mostly
because they sat in their comfortable laboratories and figured,
"This is the way we do business in Africa."
So rather than seriously training the people and sticking it
out and knowing that you re going to lose two- thirds of the
students you train, they took a short-cutit s just easier not to
do it that way, it s easier to exploit, it s easier to grab and
run. Long before I was even a graduate student, Desmond was
implementing those attitudes. Unfortunately he was not able to
transmit them to succeeding generations. But his own students
show that kind of mentality where they work in different countries
in Africa. There are some very good success stories that come out
of those, those students of Desmond s who ve learned here at
Berkeley about the right way to do it, who have the right
attitudes to take.
Troy: And you re talking about Africans as well as others.
White: I m talking about collaborations between Desmond s former students
who were both African and American and other nationalities.
Clark: And of course Glynn has to be mentioned. The program that we had,
he and I, basically is what it was. It produced some good
students. Glynn had amazingly fine, innovative ideas. He was
trained in the natural sciences as well as in anthropology and
archaeology there in Cape Town. And he had that approachthat I
never had actually, except by learning it from experience.
And the students had some pretty good, sound, solid training
based in the lecture room, the lab, and of course particularly in
373
the field. I always, whenever possible, with very few exceptions,
took the students who were later going to do their own research,
into the field for the introduction to what field work should be
like. And we tried to give them the pleasantest form of camp life
that we could. Certainly when Betty was running it, it was
excellent, and we did extremely well- -food and drink- -they were
looked after very well. Yes.
White: That still goes on today. Look at Henry [Gilbert], look at David
[DeGusta] , and Yohannes Haile Selassie, look at Gen Suwa, look at
Yonas [Beyene] . These guys are now able, because of the years
that they ve spent on this project, to go out on new projects of
their own. They ve set up projects of their own.
The whole Konso project basically is another generation from
Desmond coming out of the Middle Awash, where Gen came with me and
learned how to do it. Now he s gone and opened up a big,
fantastic new site, with boisei and erectus, and early Acheulean
and dating and fauna. We found the site ourselves on the
inventory project. I mean, there was just nothing there in 1988
and now twelve years later, it s this huge important research
area. That s just a direct lineal descent, handing down from what
Desmond started to do a long, long time ago.
Clark: We had good innings together, Tim. I only regret that I m not up
to it much longer.
White: I m not sure I am after this year, either! [laughter]
Clark: Will we be in touch again before you go out, Tim?
White: No, I leave on Tuesday.
Clark: You re going on Tuesday. Well, God bless!
White: C est la vie, Desmond.
Clark: Take care, old man. Safe journey out. My very best to Berhane.
374
Hiro Kurashina, J. Desmond Clark, and Timothy Troy, April 21, 2001
First Meeting as a Student. 1969. and Malawi, 1972
Troy: Hiro, when did you first meet Desmond? Let s start there.
Kurashina: Sounds good. It s always good to establish some sort of
chronology. I first met Desmond back in 1969, in Anthropology
128-A, which was entitled "African Prehistory." So that s the
benchmark year we can establish right now.
Clark: That was a joy, wasn t it? Yes. I hadn t realized it was
1969, yes. I seem to have lost count of dates these days, if
you see what I mean.
Troy: Hiro, had you come to Cal to study anthropology /archaeology, or
was this just a course that you took and then all of a sudden
that was what turned you on?
Kurashina: Well, I think it s the latter. In fact, let me elaborate on
how it happened, a little bit. Prior to taking Desmond s
"African Prehistory," I took Anthropology 1, taught by the late
Dr. Sherwood Washburn, which was an introduction to
anthropology or critical anthropology. And then I remember
taking Dr. Ted McCown s "Fossil Man," which was Anthropology
100, so there was sort of a natural progression to taking
Anthropology 128-A taught by Desmond. And that was really the
most exciting university class I took as an undergraduate.
That was really the pivotal experience in my life, really, in
my career and everything. Desmond really changed my whole life
by my taking that class.
Troy: You hadn t been to Africa, had you, at that point, Hiro?
Kurashina: No, no. I was just a very impressionable young student at
Berkeley. I was totally impressed by what Desmond taught in
that class. I wanted to learn more about the history of
humanity that really originated in the continent of Africa.
375
Troy:
Kurashina:
Clark:
Kurashina :
Clark:
Kurashina :
Clark:
Kurashina :
Clark:
Kurashina :
Clark:
Kurashina :
Clark:
When was the first time all of you fellows went out to Africa
together? Did you go out separately at first, Hiro, or did you
go out with one of Desmond s expeditions?
It was actually only three years after I took Desmond s
"African Prehistory" class. It was back in 1972. Desmond
kindly invited me to accompany him to go to Malawi to excavate
an Iron Age or late Stone Age, Iron Age rock shelter. I called
it Chencherie, in the Dedza district. Desmond had a training
grant from the Ford Foundation. So together with Gadi
Mugomezulu from Malawi, and I think Karla Savage from Berkeley,
we were trained at Malawi, under the tutelage of Desmond.
That was quite a joy, wasn t it, Chencherie?
It was.
It was really cold there, of course. It was very high.
You used to say "perishingly cold."
[laughs] Yes, that s right, yes. Those were great days,
actually. Of course, then we had Keith Robinson with us as
well. Do you remember him? Wasn t he there?
Yes, he was.
I think he was, yes. Yes, I m sure he was, because when we
climbed various sort of hillsides to look for the rock art and
so on, he had done a survey before, and we found them, I think.
But Chencherie was really quite an extremely interesting site
because it covered what was in the time, I suppose, one of the
latest Stone Age sites. I can t remember what the dates were
that we got from it now. They were fairly recent, I think.
And it was quite clear that these people were sort of foragers
who were in contact with Iron Age food producers.
Do you remember that burial that you excavated as well?
Yes, I remember very clearly. In fact, I think it was
discovered very, very close to the end of the season.
That s right, yes, about the last three days or something, yes.
It certainly was.
Yes. That was good. Well, I never had a full report on that
:rom the British Museum. Went back to the British Museum. I
think it was Paul Cole-King who sent it back, together with one
or two other burials.
376
Troy: Desmond, that season you published some of that, didn t you?
Clark: I think we must have somewhere, but also one of my students,
Diane--what was her name, who did the fauna?
Kurashina: Grader.
Clark: Diana [Catherine] Grader. Yes, exactly. This [writing the
fauna] was one of the major parts of her thesis, I think. I
think it was the main part of the thesis. She s teaching now
in Portland, Maine, I think it is.
Aspects of Working in Ethiopia
Troy: And from that point on, you then eventually began to move
further north, of course, into Ethiopia, Hiro. Tell us a
little bit about how you began to get interested in that area
and the expeditions and whatnot.
Kurashina: Well, basically I was just totally impressed with the way
Desmond could organize an expedition. His brilliant
organizational skills led me to be part of the expedition to
Ethiopia, and it was very interesting.
I think the first time when I went up to Ethiopia,
Don [aid] Johanson s team was already out there, coming out of
the field. Desmond met with Don Johanson at a pizzeria in
Addis Ababa. I think that was around December of 1975. Is
that correct, Desmond?
Clark: I think that probably is, actually.
And let me say that so far as the organization of the
field seasons was concerned, a tremendous amount of what made
it valuable and successful was due to Betty s organization of
the commissariat: the food, all that kind of thing, and of
course keeping the books, which meant that we were able to
devote our full time to the actual research that we d come to
do. Betty s input into that, not only in Malawi and Zambia but
also right through Ethiopia, was totally invaluable, right up
to 1981, with the first field season in the Middle Awash, yes.
Troy: That s right, in 1981, when the Ethiopian Ministry of Culture
invited you to bring in a big multidisciplinary expedition.
Clark: That s right. We were able to do that. This was after--!
think it was 1979, could have been late 78, that Jon Kalb was
377
sent out of the country by the Ethiopians. He d been working
with a permit to work in the Middle Awash. He s just written a
book, incidentally, which I have but haven t had a chance to
read.
Troy: When you say he was sent out of the country, was there a kind
of falling out between him and the Ethiopians?
Clark: Well, we never knew what the situation was, and I think Jon
Kalb did his best to make it look as if we somehow had been
responsible for his going out, and that was not so. I think it
was when we were working in the Middle Awash that several of us
met with Berhannou Abebe, who had been the head of the Center
for Research and Cultural Heritage at that time, and he told us
why it was that Jon Kalb was sent out of the country. I had
not heard this, really, before, although I had seen various
files that suggested something of this kind.
Several people were there, listening to him [Abebe] .
There was Alan Almquist, Kathy Schick, Yonas Bayene, and
certainly Berhane Asfaw. I m not certain who else was there,
but it was quite interesting. And he said--I was amazed by the
fact, I was never accused by Jon Kalb of having organized his
removal. Apparently his permit was due for renewal, and
Berhannou Abebe, the head of research, had said, "We would like
you to work with two qualified, experienced scientists to train
our Ethiopians," because Kalb, after he d fallen out with Fred
Wendorf--he d been working with undergraduates, and maybe two
of Fred s graduate students had been with him for a time. But
basically they seemed to be undergraduates that he had with
him, who no doubt were doing a good job of work.
But they wanted their Ethiopians trained. They said,
"Could you please tell us who you are going to select for this
job?" And nothing happened. And nothing continued to happen.
In the end, they said to Kalb, "You won t get your permit
unless you do this, which we think is fair enough." Jon Kalb
said, "All
right, I ll go to the university."
So he went, to try to get the university-
Troy: Now, where was Kalb?
Clark: Kalb was in Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa.
Troy: Was he on the faculty there?
Clark: No, of course he wasn t. He didn t have a doctoral degree. He
had an M.A. , I think it was, or maybe a B.A. in geology, but he
was good at geology.
378
And so the university had some general kind of sort of
general permit in order to do work in various places. What
they did not have was a permit to go and dig up fossils and
things. So this went back to the Center for Research, in the
ministry. They gave him, I think, sort of one more chance, and
nothing happened. And the next thing we knew was he had been
given three days to get out of the country by security. There
was a little more in it on the security side that we don t know
about, but that basically was the reason why Kalb didn t get
his permit and had to leave the country.
He s been back on and off since, I think, but not, of
course, into Middle Awash because it was two years later, I
think it was, that we were given the permit to work there. And
that was it. And that, of course, caused a lot of animosity on
Kalb s behalf, which I have no doubt is written in the book,
his new book.
But that was that. And then the Ethiopians clamped down
on research until they reorganized the whole system. It was
nine years, I think, before we were able to get back.
Troy: Hiro, we recorded with Tim White last fall, and he talked about
the political issues of working in Ethiopia and so on and so
forth, and it was very interesting. A lot of tensions all of
the time. Do you recall some of that yourself?
Kurashina: Yes, I do. Of course, you know, the politics was handled by
Desmond very diplomatically. It wasn t an easy time,
considering the rather unstable political condition of
Ethiopia. What really impressed me was the way Desmond was
able to gain full support from practically everybody in the
National Museum, in the appropriate government authorities,
wherever they were, even in the field, outside of Addis.
He had the fullest support, admiration, and respect from
all those playersmaybe perhaps except for Jon Kalb, who is
under discussion right now. But his charmthat really paved
our way into the success of doing work in Ethiopia. Desmond
reallyyou know, your charm touched the hearts of everybody.
Clark: Well, you know, Tim, the main thing was that we were dealing
with scholars. Today I don t think you can call any of those
people who are in authority such as that, scholars. They re
more political employees of the Antiquities Service that are
next in promotion, so to speak. In the old days, under Haile-
Selassie and for a time, if not much of the time under the
Derg, we had scholars who were running the thing. They
understand, you see. These days, what with the corruption and
379
everything that s going on right through, you never know one
day to the next what the answer is.
But at that time, the whole administrative system of the
former empire was indeed still organized under good control,
and that s why we got the support, I think, that we did. We
also got on extremely well with all these people.
The People at Gadeb
Clark: Do you remember the delightful people that we had working for
us at Gadeb?
Kurashina:
Clark:
Kurashina:
Troy:
Clark:
Kurashina:
Clark:
Kurashina:
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Yes.
Weren t they delightful?
Yes, they were, and they were really interested in the
paleoanthropological work we were doing, and I liked that sort
of association you established with these people as well.
You two had done work in the east central highlands and the
Gadeb in the late seventies. Is that right? 1979, I think,
you had a publication on hominid occupation of the east central
highlands.
Before that weren t we working at Lake Besaka? You were at
Lake Besaka, surely.
I was, yes.
Do you remember going with Betty into one of the sugar
plantation stores to get supplies in one of our Land Rovers,
and then coming back, and all the acacia thorns that there
were, and I think on one occasion you managed to get more
acacia thorns and flats in the tires than you had with spares,
you know? I think you got five, if you see what I mean.
Yes.
Yes, those were great days.
And that was when you were at Lake Besaka. You d be going into
Awash station?
Well, our camp was in the Awash National Park, isn t that
right?
380
Kurashina: That s right.
Clark: Yes, that s right, with that excellent man that was given to us
by the warden there, whom we saw for a number of years
afterwards. Alto Waldi.
Troy: Now, Hiro, when you were in the Gadeb and in the highlands and
Besaka and so on, that was quite a little bit different from
Malawi, wasn t it? Tell us a little bit about the difference
and what you felt when you went up to Ethiopia.
Kurashina: Yes. I can tell you one interesting example of the difference
between the experience I had in Malawi and also our experience
in Ethiopia. You know, in Malawi we did have collaboration
with people like Keith Robinson and other people in the
country. But I think the pursuit wasn t a really
interdisciplinary pursuit in Malawi. It was really more geared
toward training.
However, in Ethiopia the approach was just incredibly
collaborative, with international scholars from several
nations, really: Australia, U.S., England, France. And also
the approach was multidisciplinary, covering a wide range of
fields, like geology, paleoanthropology, geophysics, physical
anthropology, ethnology, paleontology. We didn t have all
these disciplines in Malawi, but we had the full force in
Ethiopia, combining the expertisebrilliant scientists,
really, Desmond hand picked from all these different countries.
We worked really well as a team.
Desmond?
Don t you think so,
Clark: Yes, I do, actually. Got on extremely well. We got on very
well with the French as well. Remember Francis Anfray?
Kurashina: Yes!
Clark: Who had, of course, a program there the whole time. The French
foreign affairs people actually provide funding for
archaeological research, ethnographic research, and so on,
which is something, of course, that is never done in the U.S.
or in British areas, unfortunately.
Troy: You re saying that the French at that time were being a lot
more supportive in some ways.
Clark: Oh, they were very supportive, yes, yes. In fact, the initial
plan was a joint French and U.S. team to work in the Middle
Awash after Jon Kalb had left. Raymonde Bonnefille came out,
and Jacques Tiercelin came out with Jack Harris and myself
381
initially for a very quick look at a few things. But for some
reason or other I can t remember--! think probably due to the
fact that we had other things to do, they had other things to
do, it didn t--but, of course, the cooperation was there at
Gadeb, with Raymonde Bonnefille and also with Franchise Gasse.
Awfully nice person.
I keep in touch with them from time to time. Franchise,
I haven t seen since Beijing, actually, at the INQUA
[International Union for Quaternary Research] congress.
Raymonde Bonnefille now, of course, is working in the Nilgiri
Hills in Southern India, looking at tree forms with correlation
on the Gondwana Land sort of vegetation with Africa, I think.
But no, that was very good. And then, of course, we d
bring people in from various places outside for specific
matters of one kind or another, certainly of the Middle Awash,
of course. In latter times, Tim [White] has been working at
the Aramis and a series of other sites, including the Bouri
Peninsula, of course. We ve had a number of international
people coming in, again more French coming, which was good.
Discoveries in Kone
Troy: Hiro, after the publication in Nature in 84 of the
paleoanthropological discoveries in the Middle Awash, did you
continue working in the Awash? Where else did you go with
Desmond in the years in the 1980s?
Kurashina: Well, I think the last expedition I was with Desmond was back
in 1981, so we didn t really go on to other adventures
together. But one of the sites which really formed a very
important part of my dissertation was Garibaldi, or Kone, where
the Middle Stone Age worship sites were discovered in really
great primary context. I was intrigued by looking at and
examining the artifacts coming out of that particular locality
in Ethiopia.
I spent many hours trying to figure out the processes
involved in the technology to produce typical sort of Middle
Stone Age flakes. One day I discovered several flakes all
conjoined back to a core. It was real exciting to be able to
see that we were able to examine a site that really had
fantastic potential for research.
Troy: Again, what was that site, Hiro?
382
Kurashina: The Italian is Garibaldi, but in the local language it was
Kone.
Clark: Yes, that s what it s known as, yes. Garibaldi, I think, was
Garibaldi Pass. You see, it was the pass going up from the
lowlands, from the rift, in other words, up towards the
highlands. An Italian engineer had built his house there, the
ruins of which were still there. I went up through there in
1941, of course. But the name of the pass was still there. We
used the local name. And this was within a volcanic complex
area. It was a series of craters.
The main site was actually a little caldera, which I
discovered, in point of fact. I had a fever at the time,
malaria.
Troy: You had malaria. What year was this, Desmond?
Clark: Oh, I think it must have been 1974. Didn t we start in 1974?
I think it was, yes. You never pass up what appears to be a
hole in the ground in Africa because there may always be
something in it. And so we did stop, and we looked, and indeed
there was a whole lot of obsidian flakes and things all over
the place. We drove on. Of course, it was decided that we
should go back and have a look at that.
Martin and I did some work there, and Hiro--I think that
was the second season. What was it, 75, was it, Hiro?
Kurashina: I think it was, yes.
Clark: Hiro did this magnificent excavation of the horizon or one of
the horizons there was a whole series of horizons, actually--
and discovered, higher up on the rim of the volcano, outcrops
of obsidian which had been flaked, large chunks taken and
brought down into the caldera, where presumably there was water
and also some trees. They created workshops there, and Hire s
work of refitting was really excellent, and the way in which it
refitted to show the use of what were called Nubian cores of
the Middle Stone Age there. There was very good Levallois,
both radial and prepared forms, and blades as well. And that s
all in Hire s thesis. It s excellent work.
That, of course, is one of the most important ways of
being able to recognize undisturbed flaking floors, and the way
in which certain parts of the flaking process, from the cobble
downwards and so on, or chunk downwards, had been left or had
been removed, and you could see how- -for example, at Kone there
were very few finished points, if I remember rightly. They
383
obviously would have been taken away for final finishing, done
probably elsewhere.
As far as I know, nobody s worked there again, but I
think John Yellen thought he might do a bit. But you covered
it all pretty well in your thesis, with Martin s geology.
Kurashina: Thank you so much, Desmond. You know, the horizons that you
just mentioned were incredibly thin, as I recall.
Clark: Yes.
Kurashina: The beautiful obsidian artifacts were spilling out of these
geologic exposures.
Clark: Yes.
Kurashina: Kone was like a badlands kind of a situation, wasn t it?
Clark: Yes, it was, yes.
Kurashina: And we could see alternating dark and light colored geologic
layers.
Clark: There were paleosols and things, I think. Vertisols. That s
what they were, yes.
Kurashina: Martin did the geology there. Again, it was really one of the
most enjoyable sites I worked with Desmond in Ethiopia.
Clark: It was good there, wasn t it? Except for, of course, the
water. Do you remember the water?
Kurashina: Yes.
Clark: Which was a real problem. The water was very deep water that
carae--we had to import water from the sugar plantation, but it
had chemicals in it, and it upset one s tummy quite a bit. I
always remember Steve Brandt rushing off every so often to go
to the bathroom. Do you remember that?
Kurashina: Yes. In fact, at one point I think he fell down into the
toilet!
Clark: Hiro, you were with me as well in Laga Oda.
Kurashina: Yes, I was.
384
Clark: Yes, of course. The work we did on the rock art, both at
Serkama, tracing all that stuff there, and then Laga Oda, with
the actual excavation and the further tracing.
Kurashina: Yes.
Clark: Actually, I published the other day the rock art from the lower
shelter, remember? The one in which we did the excavation.
Kurashina: Yes.
Clark: Because we got the carbon dateswhat do you call it?--
reconciled to be A.D. , B.C., etc. It turned out that the first
bones of cattle were about 1500 B.C., 1500 to 2000 B.C.,
something like that, which was quite the only date we ve got
so far, for any of this rock art.
Troy: Now, Desmond, where is this publication?
Clark: Oh, it s in the Rivista [Italiana di Paleontologia e
Stratigrafia] . It s a journal in Florence. It was a memorial
volume for Paolo Graziosi, who was a very well-known
prehistorian of, certainly, European Upper Paleolithic art.
And he had several seasons in Somalia and did excellent work in
Eritrea and Ethiopia. So that s where it is. I can get you a
copy.
Troy: Did you two go up to the Webi Shebele area also, Desmond?
Clark: Oh, of course. That s Gadeb. Have we talked about that?
Troy: No. Hiro, that was very high country up in there, wasn t it?
Kurashina: It was. It was amazingly high. And cold in the morning. In
fact, in the middle of the night sometimes we found ice in the
plastic wash basins we had outside of our tent. But during the
day, of course, it was warm, so the difference in daytime and
nighttime temperature must have been, I don t know, maybe fifty
degrees? Maybe more.
Clark: Yes, it was amazing.
Troy: Desmond, remind me. What was the name of the town up there?
Clark: There was Adoba.
Troy: Adoba, yes. That sounded very remote.
Clark: Yes, it was pretty remote. You know, the local people were all
Muslims. Very nice people, indeed.
Troy:
Clark:
385
Was that part of the same season you were at Laga Oda? You
were not just up in the Gadeb, that was a combined expedition
year, wasn t it?
Our main work in Gadeb I think was
have been.
75 or 76. Yes, it must
A Meeting in Beijing in 1992
Troy: Now, did you fellows go on to work outside of Ethiopia later in
the eighties? When did you get together again? Because there
was a point, Hiro, when you went to Guam.
Kurashina: Yes. After 1981 I think I had to really concentrate on my work
in the Pacific: Micronesia and Guam, the Mariana Islands. So I
could not really join Desmond in India or in China. However,
when I learned that Desmond would be a visiting professor at
Beijing University in the early 1990s, back in 1992, I jumped
on the opportunity to take my wife, [Dr.] Becky [Rebecca A.]
Stephenson, with me so that Becky could meet with Desmond and
Betty in Beijing.
Clark: That was a great joy, that. It really was.
Kurashina: You were just tremendous.
Tim, I think I mentioned to you in my e-mail
communication earlier how I kind of joked around in my
communication with Desmond: wouldn t it be nice to have Peking
duck in Beijing, you know? It was like my therapy, really, to
have a meal together with the Clarks. And it happened.
Clark: It was magnificent, Hiro, that meal that you gave us.
Kurashina: What I liked about it was at the end of the meal- -remember the
carts that brought several kinds of Chinese tea? Instead of an
after-dinner drink or liqueur, they brought different kinds of
tea. I thought that was Chinese-y or whatever you might call
it, Desmond, you know?
Clark: Yes. That was super.
Troy: How did you know where to meet in Beijing?
Kurashina: That was interesting. You know, Beijing is such a huge place,
and during the time we were there, we could not have any access
to a map of Beijing. But luckily, we hired a very delightful
386
Clark:
Kurashina:
Troy:
Kurashina:
Troy:
Kurashina:
Clark:
Kurashina:
Clark:
Troy:
Chinese interpreter and guide, who somehow knew how to take us
to the residence where the Clarks were staying on the Beijing
University campus.
That s right, yes.
It was like a miracle for us to reconnect in this huge, ancient
city of Beijing.
That must have been quite a flight for you, Hiro, you and your
wife, to go from Guam all the way to Beijing, really almost on
a moment s notice. I guess you had some time to plan it, but
that flight would have taken you through Tokyo?
that flight go?
Or how does
Yes, I m glad that you mentioned it because it was really a big
challenge to fly to Beijing. We flew to Tokyo and then to Hong
Kong, to obtain an entry visa to China. We flew on Dragon Air.
I love the name, Dragon Air. From Hong Kong to Beijing. We
were met by our guide/interpreter at the airport in Beijing.
We were quite relieved by the fact that there was somebody who
could take us to both Desmond and Betty in the really huge city
of Beijing.
Did you have a chance, Hiro, on that trip, you and Becky, to
get out into the field at all, or was it kind of a short visit?
It was a very brief visit. Unfortunately, Desmond and Betty
were really busy, getting ready to go out to the field. I
think we had Diane [Gif ford-Gonzalez] and Nick [Toth] and Kathy
[Schick] getting in there also to get out to the field. So we
had a very nice lunch together, I think at the Institute of--I
can t remember the name of the institute, Desmond.
Oh, the IVPP, Institute of Paleo-something [Institute of
Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology] .
I m sorry I wasn t able to join Desmond in the field in
Beijing. What he had to go through must have been quite
exciting, to be able to be the first Western scholar to obtain
an excavation permit after the war. Is that right, Desmond?
Yes, that s right, it was indeed, actually, yes, yes. The very
first after the new regulations and so on that they had
introduced, yes.
Speaking of cold, Hiro, there s a wonderful picture of the
expedition group: Desmond and Kathy and the gang, all looking
very cold. Do you remember that picture, Desmond?
387
Clark: Oh, I do indeed. Nineteen eighty-nine. That was the winter
after Tiananmen Square. We were, of course, in Beijing over
Tiananmen Square. Had to get out. But we got in touch with
our people again, and they said, "Yes, it s okay.
Transportation and so on is operating once more. Come." So we
did. We spent Christmas, actually, out in Nihewan. It was a
great joy, yes. But it was very cold. Beautiful, beautiful
sunlight, but very cold.
And we were able to see that yes, indeed, the horizon was
where we thought the artifacts were. They were indeed there,
and they were indeed artifacts. That was the basis of the
subsequent research that we did, yes.
Acheulean Finds in the Bose Basin
Kurashina: You know, I have kind of a burning desire to ask Desmond: Many,
many years ago there was an exhibit, I think at the de Young
Museum in San Francisco, where some prehistoric artifacts from
China were on display. It was a traveling exhibit. One of the
artifacts on display looked like a very rough Acheulean hand
axe. I wondered if Desmond found any Acheulean s ites or
Acheulean type artifacts. Desmond, did you find anything like
that?
Clark: Not in the Nihewan. The Nihewan was around 1,000,000. We had
Frank Brown out doing the geochronology, which was very good.
It s about 1,000,000, possibly 1.1, 1.2, something like that.
The Chinese have got dates for another site, Chair Chang Liang,
not far distant from our own at Donguotouo, which they think
may take it back to 2,000,000, but I would like to know more
about that and where the samples came from and that kind of
thing. But ours was certainly 1,000,000. And they were all
small tools, really. We had one absolutely classic chopper in
a lava, but almost all the other tools were all in a rather bad
chert. Sometimes quartz. And they were all small. They were
all typical. In other words, they were all Oldowan type or
Mode 1 tools.
But elsewhere at the sies of Dingcun in the Fen Valley,
Shaanxi Province, and Xiachuan in the Nihewan Valley there were
these point tools that s the name the Chinese give to mostly
unifacial, quite big pointy things. Very occasionally, they
are bifacial. And, of course, when you get further down into
the south, where Rick [Richard] Potts and Huang Weiwen have
been doingthe Basin Valley, I think it is, yes [Bose Basin].
There are things there that have a vague lookthey re mostly
unifacial, but occasionally there are some that have been
388
worked on both sides and they have a vague look of early
Acheulean. The dates are there, I think, on the basis of the
tektites, which I suppose probably date the horizon reasonably
well to something like .8, I think. Maybe less. I m not
certain.
But Potts seems to suggest that these may be Acheulean.
If they are, they certainly look early Acheulean, not later.
There s nothing at all like the later Acheulean and the
development of the proto-Levallois technique and all that kind
of thing.
But at the site where the Homo erectus was found, at
Gonwangling (Lantian) , Shaanxi Province, south of Xian, there
is one bifacial tool that does look like an early Acheulean
tool. I think it s in quartzite, not lava. And then, of
course, in Korea, in South Korea, Kidong Bae s sites,
Chon gokri, for example again, you ve got these biggish sort
of things. There s nothing that really was a cleaver or
anything like that, that had the morphology of a typical
cleaver. The rest are the uniface points and occasionally
something that s bifacial.
Again, I think these are much more likely to relate to a
kind of late Middle Pleistocene transitional phase from the
Lower Paleolithic into, of course, the Middle Paleolithic.
Something like the Sangoan that we have in Africa. But this
still has to be worked out. People have to argue about this.
I would say that there is nothing that is quite clearly a well-
developed later Acheulean. There is certainly these big things
associated as well with flakes of some kind or another, but I
don t think any large-scale excavation has been done. I ve not
seen any publication of any of this as yet.
If they are contemporary with the Acheulean, then they
should be called something else, I think, not Acheulean. The
Acheulean, the later Acheulean, I m talking about, which is
something less than 1 ,000,000--probably within 500,000 up to
about 200,000 and a little less than that this is where the
Acheulean is most developed, of course. And it is not only in
Africa but also in India and in the Middle East as well.
And then we get in the final stages we get this very
interesting interaction, which you can see so well at
Kapthurin, of well-stratified, correlated work done by Sally
McBrearty and her team in the late part of the Kapthurin
Formation in Lake Baringo, where there is not only the late
Acheulean, but also something that is sort of Mode 1 or that
could be called Acheulean. It s called Middle Stone Age,
associated with Sangoan and possibly even something that is a
389
very evolved kind of Acheulean, which in South Africa is called
Fauresmith.
Now, I found what I called at the time a Fauresmith in
Gondar in 1941 and published a note on that. But this is
extremely interesting, and I think that what we have in China
is a contemporaneous kind of changeover into the Middle
Paleolithic in China is really not very well understood, I
would say, at the present moment. That s where there needs to
be quite a lot of emphasis on the field work in the future.
Troy: Good. Desmond, that was wonderful.
Kurashima s Work in the Pacific
Troy: Desmond, have you been to visit the Micronesia Research Center
that Hiro--have you been to Guam?
Clark: No, alas, I haven t been, for various reasons. I haven t been
able to get over. Latterly, of course, we ve had the problem
of having to sell the house and come over here and settle
again. And then what I m trying to do is get off the final
monograph, which should have been published, of course, a
number of years ago, on important sites.
The first one of these is Kalambo Falls, of course, which
now is said to be coming out in June. The next one is the
Adrar Bous in the central Sahara, everything from late
Acheulean up to a beautiful Neolithic. That s being published
by Tervuren either later this year or early next year. We re
doing the finishing touches with that now. And the next one
after that is the Sudan, which is going to be published by a
publisher in Adelaide, in South Australia that Martin Williams
has organized.
And then there s Malawi, of course. We need to pull
everything together, all our previous work. There s still some
that hasn t actually been published as yet. And all Keith
Robinson s work, which laid the foundation, of course, and very
little has been done subsequently on the Iron Age of Malawi,
which is extremely important. And Keith was one of our team
members for the first three or four years that we were there.
Troy: This has been wonderful. We re going to get low on tape here,
but, Hiro, this is great. We ll go through the transcript of
this, and then as questions come up, we ll get back in touch
with you.
390
Kurashina: Thank you.
Clark: Hiro, it is a joy to hear you again. Betty, who s here, sends
her love. Do give Becky ours.
Troy: Hiro, in these recordings we ve done with Desmond, we ve
touched literally on just about every continent, except for the
Americas, but certainly Europe and China and India.
Clark: You didn t come to India, did you?
Kurashina: No, I didn t.
Troy: But talking with you, you re one of the primary people in all
of the archaeological work in the Pacific, and it s just
fascinating that so much is going on there. Tell us a little
bit about that, because I know that there are now major issues
of global warming and rising sea levels and whatnot, so are you
under a lot of pressure in some sites to get things done and
recorded?
Kurashina: It s interesting that you mention that. Many of the
archaeological sites in the Pacific are situated along the
coast, at fairly low elevations, so there is tremendous
urgency, correct, to do some of these sites. But, on the other
hand, some of the geologic wonders are quite interesting in the
Pacific. There s continual geologic movement, either going
down or going up. So luckily sometimes, the sites are going
up. In reference to the sea level. Even if the sites go down,
archaeological work is still possible in the form of underwater
archaeology. Anyway, it s a fascinating place to do work.
I just wanted to also say--it has nothing to do with my
work, but everything I learned under Desmond was applicable to
what I do here. Surprisingly, the methodology I gained from
Desmond in the field in Africa was most invaluable to the work
I do, I ve done here. I always remember many of the valuable
pieces of advice he gave me. So, although the geographic
location is outside the context of Africa or China or India,
where Desmond has worked during the past I don t know how many
decades, it s interesting that I feel I have not wasted my time
being here, doing archaeology.
The Birthday Celebrations for Desmond
Clark: Nice to hear that. Do you remember that maxim that I used to
tell you at one time, that I actually got from Miles Burkitt,
391
at the 1955 Pan-African Congress? When Miles said, "Never let
the sun go down on an unmarked artifact."
Kurashina: I ll always remember that.
You know, Desmond, this is the month of April, and
usually, back in the good old days in Berkeley, we used to
celebrate your birthday in April. So you must have had your
birthday, Desmond.
Clark: It was the tenth, old man. It was very good. I was here by
myself, but--do you remember Karla Savage? Karla came, and
Preston Staley and his wife, who is from Assam. They came, and
we had spareribs, I think it was, and some smoked salmon, et
cetera, some wine. And Jim Anderson s daughter, Pia Anderson.
Do you remember her?
Kurashina: I do.
Clark: Well, she was here with her boyfriend, and so we celebrated my
birthday out here on the patio, where I ve got a garden of
roses and sweet-smelling plants and things.
Troy: It s just beautiful, Hiro. He s done a wonderful job in this
smaller place. The little garden is just beautiful.
Kurashina: That s wonderful.
Troy: It was Desmond s eighty- fifth birthday.
Kurashina: Yes, another milestone. I wanted to extend our belated
birthday wishes to Desmond on behalf of Becky and myself.
We re thinking of you. We always talk about you, Desmond,
very, very fondly. I just wanted to really let you know you
are the greatest mentor I ve ever had. You set the highest
standards, great vision to train students such as myself, and a
man with really impeccable professional activity. This is
something I learned from you, in addition to everything else
you told me, and I believe that you are the true leader among
all the leaders in the field of archaeology, and I think your
presence is really being much appreciated by all of us.
Clark: Well, Hiro, thank you very much. I ve always and some of my
students have continued thisalways tried to make friends of
our graduate students, take them into the field, and introduce
them to the sort of hard parts of things and so on. And It s
been the greatest joy to keep in touch with a number of them
ever sinceyourself , of course, in the forefront of this.
Nick and Kathy as well. As I say to people like Preston
Staley, who s come to live in the Bay Area, they all turn up,
392
Kurashina:
Clark:
Kurashina:
Clark:
Kurashina:
Clark:
Troy:
Kurashina;
Clark:
Kurashina:
you know, sort of suddenly one day. It s good. Well, Hiro,
our very, very best to you and to Becky.
Thank you, and likewise our love to you, Desmond, and your
family from Becky and myself.
You know, one more thing I wanted to say.
Yes?
Remember the 1986 conference we did in honor of you?
Yes, I do. That was a fine conference, yes.
Anyway, at the end of the conference, one of your former
colleagues, who left Berkeley to take a job at Brown, I think,
Bill [William] Simmons, mentioned to me--you know, a lot of
very nice things were said by international scholars, something
like 300 scholars who came to celebrate your seventieth
birthday at the conference, a lot of nice things were said
about you, but Bill Simmons said they were all just
understatements, really, and I agreed, that a word cannot
really express our gratitude to you, Desmond.
Oh, thank you, Hiro. And, of course, Betty too, because we ve
been a team for many years now.
Hiro, thank you very, very much for taking this time.
Desmond is a very, very special person to me, to many of us who
have had a chance to get to know him. And, Tim, thank you very
much for taking your time and effort to try to contact me. It
wasn t easy, but I appreciate your kind help, and I will look
forward to hearing from you again,
to all of you.
And all of our best wishes
Thank you very, very much, Desmond and Tim. It s been a
real pleasure. I feel re-energized to do more work.
God bless, Hiro.
Same to you. Bye bye.
393
Martin Williams and Donald Adamson, April 21, 2001
Sudan, 1973. Jebel et Tomat
Williams: This is Martin Williams and Donald Adamson speaking from
Adelaide, Australia, on Saturday, the 21st of April, in the
year 2001, talking about our joint work with Professor J.
Desmond Clark in Africa, as part of the oral history project of
the Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley.
Don and I had already worked along the Lower White Nile,
the right bank, from Khartoum as far south as the village of
Esh Shawal, about 350 kilometers upstream of the White Nile, on
the eastern side. We had done that in January 1972, so when
Desmond and his team arrived from Berkeley early in 1973, we
were there to receive them in Khartoum. We stayed briefly in a
most interesting hotel called the El Shark, about which more
anon, from Don.
Quite soon we set forth in a hired Land Rover. (Our own
was still on the high seas, having been shipped from Sydney to
Port Sudan.) We moved down to Shawal, and we then drove about
twelve kilometers eastwards from the White Nile to two little
granite mountains, locally known as Jebel et Tomat. The fuller
name in Arabic is Jebel et Tuweimat, which means "the twins,"
because these two little mountains, granite inselbergs,
sticking up above the incredibly flat clay plains, were a major
feature in the landscape.
I d previously camped there back in 1963, when I was doing
soil survey work for Hunting Technical Services, and had
noticed in some of the pits that we put down that there was
quite a lot of pottery and bone, and it struck me that someday
it would be interesting for an archaeologist to come and do
some systematic excavation.
So here was Desmond, with Andy Smith, who was a Ph.D.
student from Berkeley, and Dan Stiles--later Dan worked for the
United Nations Environment Programand Ken Williamson,
394
likewise [from Berkeley]; and they started work almost
immediately. Now, the conditions were fairly tough. Sudan is
a very hot country, even in the winter. Khartoum has the
dubious distinction of being the hottest capital city in the
world.
But quite soon they had penetrated into some very, very
interesting deposits. They went through a layer of pot
fragments, pot shards, and down into a pit that had been a
storage pit for sorghum. It subsequently turned out that this
was one of the records of the earliest domesticated sorghum
ever recovered from that part of Africa.
A little later the whole team moved north to Wagiulla,
which was in the main irrigation area, and was a rest house
used by the block inspectors, so we were very generously
allowed the use of this. I set forth to Port Sudan to collect
the Land Rover, and the rest of the camp used that as their
base.
We then, having completed the work at Jebel et Tomat, moved
north to a camp again in a rest house, in a place called
Fatisa, which is about 100 kilometers south of Khartoum.
Fatisa was one of the private pump projects, with water pumped
up from the White Nile. And from there we worked on the old
dune systems that were partly buried by White Nile alluvium and
which had a series of Late Stone Age sites from hunter-
gatherers who had lived above the surrounding marshy plains, on
the slightly higher ground, no doubt to seek some refuge from
mosquitoes in the wet season, and who were hunting the big game
and the smaller game that came down to the river and who also
were collecting shells of an amphibious snail called Pila,
which has both lungs and gills, and there are quite a few of
these concentrated at the campsite. In terms of the
dimensions, they re about eight, nearly ten centimeters in
diameter, as they re quite substantial snails.
There had been speculation earlier by A. J. Arkell, "Tony"
Arkell, in a monograph in 1953, I believe, the Shaheinab
volumealthough it could have been the early Khartoum volume
that the Early Khartoum culture, which was characterized by
pottery and also characterized by barbed bone points, was
probably about 8,000 years old. And by an extraordinary
coincidence, in one of my old soil pits that Don Adamson had
revisitedand he can tell you about that discoveryat a depth
of about a meter, between two layers of fresh-water shell, for
which I already had radiocarbon dates (one of them, the
uppermost one, 8100; the lower, 8350 or thereabouts, with quite
small errorterms) in between these, Don recovered the first of
the barbed bone points .
395
Barbed Bone Point Find Incentive
Williams: Don will tell you more about his discovery of two more of
these, but some days later, when Don had rejoined us back at
the camp at Shabona, the name of the dune site, Desmond was
heard to remark, "Bottle of whiskey for the first man to find a
barbed bone point." And so Don took him aside, and from his
shirt pocket, wrapped up in pink loo paper, produced the first
of these, and then took Desmond aside and produced another.
And, of course, we already knew the age of the first one,
so Arkell twenty years earlier, thirty years earlier, had been
absolutely right, and we sent him a telegram immediately, from
Khartoum, to indicate that the Early Khartoum culture was
indeed about 8,000 years in age and, of course, pre-Neolithic.
Another site that we visited was the classic site of Jebel
Moya, where we put down some trial trenches. Jebel Moya was
midway along the main railway line, between Kosti and Sennar,
and was, again, a granitic series of hills. The technical term
is an inselberg, an island mountain, in German. And it s there
that in 1911 Henry Wellcome had carried out three field seasons
of excavation with a gang of, I think, 5,000 laborers, to whom
he gave ostrich feathers if they were sober for more than a
week. He built this remarkable Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
series of houses from these great granite boulders. He had his
own Italian baker. And he recovered a substantial number of
skeletons, human skeletons, as well as archaeological material
but, again, no age. So we were able to recover charcoal and
demonstrate reasonably conclusively that this was a late
Neolithic site, heading towards the Iron Age.
Thus, at the close of the Sudan season, we had really
established the interplay between prehistoric adaptations to
the changing behavior of the White and Blue Nile. This was a
time from about, say, 9,000 years ago through to less than
2,000 years ago, when the White Nile was engaged in cutting
down but periodically flooding once more, at progressively
diminishing rates, into the landscape, draining the swamps.
And it s from those swamps that came one of the most
exciting discoveries of that particular season. In fact, it s
from the pottery in the vicinity of Tomat that Don found the
famous sponge spicule pottery, and he will be talking about
that.
396
The Challenges of the Sudan
Adamson: Well, I m Don Adamson, continuing the story of our activities
with Desmond in the Sudan. I think at the very beginning, I d
like to give an impression of Desmond, operating in a tough
context that I think he, himself, said to Martin and myself
many years later was one of the hardest field seasons that he d
ever had, because the Sudan is an unforgiving place. Its
resources and its infrastructure even then were collapsing, and
it was with great difficulty that Martin and I managed to
actually provide even Lhe barest of essentials to an incoming
group of archaeologists.
We had, for example, delivered us and the group this Land
Rover, which we d done with extraordinary difficulty. For
example, we purchased it ourselves, with our own money, and
shipped it the same way, but the actual getting of it through
the bureaucracy was itself a saga, for which Martin is totally
to be credited. He went over to Port Sudan and extracted it
from Customs, under extraordinary difficulty, and drove it
across from Port Sudan to the Gezira [region between the Blue
and White Nile, south of Khartoum], itself a difficult journey.
And yet, despite all these efforts, what we could provide
to the archaeological team was so basic as to be almost
embarrassing, to us. Here are these distinguished people
coming in, and we are having what is a very tough field season.
So I think my impression of Desmond was formed for the first
time under these conditions, and I can only sura up his approach
to the whole thing as being firstly, admirable in putting up
with tough conditions. And the same goes for his wife, Betty,
who was an invaluable support to everybody, particularly
Desmond, under conditions that were quite almost awful.
So I d sum up Desmond s approach as being indomitable
determination to proceed with the field season against whatever
adversity circumstances threw at him. I think this probably
summarizes his whole career of extraordinary determination to
proceed under difficult conditions, and he s the most
outstanding example, I think, of anyone I ve ever come across
in this regard.
However, to get back to the details of the trip and our
work there with him, and starting, as Martin did, at the
beginning, at Jebel et Tomat, which is just east of Esh Shawal.
We set up a camp there between the two jebels, underneath a
couple of sparsely foliaged trees, and they were the only trees
within probably twenty or forty kilometers of the site. They
cast a parsimonious shade on the baking clay plains of this
397
part of the Sudan. It was a tough camp. We lacked shade. We
had to rig up tarpaulins and woven mats to keep out the dust
and to provide basic shade. We were essentially camping in the
open, apart from our small tents.
Food was basic. We got what supplies of fresh food we
could from the neighboring cultivation along the Nile. Cooking
facilities were atrocious, and not surprisingly, many of us
suffered substantially from tummy troubles. New country and so
on and so on. Toiletry was basic washing and loo facilities.
And I vividly remember many of us--we miraculously survived,
but many of us suffered substantially from diarrhea and other
upsets.
It was a difficult time, difficult conditions, but as
Martin said, everybody got stuck into it straightaway, and
great progress was made. The retreat, I almost call it, to
Wagiulla rest-house was a blessing, but it did involve a
substantial distance of commuting each day to the site.
Pottery Findings
Adamson: I had great fun there. Martin and I were charged with what you
might call putting the archaeology into a geomorphological and
landscape history context. So we had a little more freedom
than just being sort of tied to the hole that was being dug, or
the holes that were being dug, and we ranged significantly
around the area. We were building on our earlier knowledge,
which was very substantial, going back to Martin s soil survey
work from much earlier.
He and I had visited the site also ahead of the
archeological troop, and yet we were able to build further
knowledge of the region. Prowling around with this sort of
freedom, I happened to notice a type of pottery that was really
a little odd and different from normal. Most of the pottery
was tempered with coarse quartz, whereas there was pottery
scattered about which had no coarse visible temperwell, no
coarse temper in it at all. It was fine grained and generally
nicely decorated, if it had any decoration at all.
This led me to look at this material with some care, and I
had a field microscope with me, an Open University microscope,
manufactured in Britain, where the Open University operated,
and it was a tiny thing, about the size of two cigarette
packets, but it would magnify to 400 times. It was a proper
compound microscope of the design of a famous Englishman called
398
Dr. MacArthur, who developed this design as a prisoner of war
in Singapore during the Second World War.
He was a tropical health doctor who wanted a simple, easy-
to-transport microscope to diagnose malaria and such things as
a tropical health medic. He got this microscope designed,
manufactured in Britain after the Second World War, and I was
lucky enough to have one with me, a powerful little machine to
take into the field under such difficult conditions.
Scrapings from this pottery showed instantly that it was
loaded, absolutely j air packed with the silica spines, or
spicules, of what was obviously a fresh-water sponge. As well
as that, it had reproductive structures in it from the sponge,
all cooked up together. And quite plainly, the silica spines,
which are almost a millimeter in length in some cases and
therefore should be visible but they re invisible because
they re microscopicthey re below the human eye resolution in
diameter, long, thin spines that you need a microscope to see--
they acted as a reinforcing material for the clay that was
being used to make the pottery, and they substituted for coarse
temper-like, sandy quartz grit or plant, chaffy hay material,
which was also being used. It had the effect, of course, that
the potters could decorate rather nicely the surface of the
pottery without tearing out lumps of plant material or hunks of
quartz, so it lent itself to fine decoration.
Well, this was a nice discovery because it was new for
Africa at the time. I believe similar material has been found
in the swamps, adjacent to the swamps of the Niger River
subsequently. And later research snowed that it was, at that
time, only known as a technique of pottery making from the
mouth of the Amazon River and from the Everglades of North
America. So it was great fun.
I suppose that was the beginning and the end of my
archaeological discoveries at Jebel Tuweimat. This pottery
subsequently showed up along the lengths of the old swamps of
the White Nile, from north of Jebel Tuweimat down to the
beginning of the Sudd swamps in the far south. And it led to a
very nice paper with Desmond, handsomely illustrated to show
this lovely material. It was a great pleasure that I could
sort of make a contribution to Desmond s contribution to
African archaeology, even in this very minor way.
399
Barbed Bone Point Story Continued
Adamson: Well, we eventually, as Martin said, finished up our work at
Jebel Tuweimat with considerable success, I think. We moved on
to the northern sand dune site of Shabona, and it was at this
stage that I again, with the freedom to move about, untied to
specific archaeological sites, went down and opened up Martin s
old soil pit at Tagra, a significant but not a great distance
to the south, along the banks of the White Nile.
I got left there with some pretty basic camp material, like
I had myself a tiny camp tent and some basic food and a jerry
can of water, to be collected in a few days time. Digging
away, I had the extraordinary experience of unearthing this
barbed bone harpoon point that Martin has described.
Archaeologically, of course, that was a very significant find
because we had been looking for these. They had been found as
a characteristic item of the tool kit of the people that were
living in and adjacent to the White Nile swamps, and one of the
characteristic artifacts that were discovered by Arkell at the
Early Khartoum prehistoric site.
During the time at Fatisa, I also managed to take our Land
Rover away for a couple of days and crossed the Nile on a ferry
from Esh Shawal to another village on the western bank called
Guli where I managed to penetrate the swamp and visit two old
point bars in the swamps, which showed up as islands in the
swamps. And with the help of local people, rode across to a
couple of these, on one of which was an archaeological site
where there was abundant shell pottery, not sponge pottery but
pottery of an earlier age.
Again, among the debris I didn t really do any digging. I
simply looked at the surface and scratched a bit, and there was
another barbed bone point. It s these two barbed bone points
that caused the sensation back in Fatisa and won me a bottle of
whiskey, which of course was immediately consumed by the party
as a whole. I m not a whiskey drinker; I prefer wine, which
was non-available. But a ceremonial sip was had by me and
copious quantities by everybody else.
And that was great fun. There ended, I think, my
archaeological contributions to the Sudanese expedition of that
difficult but really extraordinarily memorable and great fun
year.
400
Betty Clark and the Running of the Camps
Williams: It would be appropriate to conclude our discussion of the early
1973 field season in Sudan by mentioning Betty, of course,
because Betty arrived slightly later than Desmond, and we met
her at the airport. Don and I went to collect her and took her
to the hotel, and then almost immediately set forth for the
field with her.
It was now the season of what in the Sudan are called the
Haboob, or dust storm... These are really dramatic events, when
a wall of dust three or four hundred meters high suddenly
appears, and day is converted to night, and this fine layer of
dust penetrates everywhere. We were using the old Tilley lamps
with a kerosene base, and Betty, with great ingenuity and
displaying her true Yorkshire grit, discovered yet another use
for this peculiar pink Sudanese toilet paper, namely to filter
the dust from the kerosene before it went into the lamps.
While Desmond was out excavating with the archaeologists
from Berkeley, Betty would be in charge of what she quaintly
called the commissariat. That was making sure that we were fed
with good, fresh food, that the water was of good quality, that
all the necessary material to ensure the smooth running of any
archaeological camp were there, and were there in a way that
we--we tended to take it for granted, you know. We really
didn t question until the occasional times when Betty wasn t
there, as we found in later trips in Ethiopia, and then we
realized how much thought, intelligence, and hard work had gone
into the smooth running of the camps.
As Don has intimated, the archaeologists and the
geologists, biologists worked very well together, but we worked
in our different ways. Desmond would concentrate on the
excavation, on the plotting, on the preliminary drawing and
drafting of the artifacts, on the notes at the end of the day,
in his quite illegible scrawl, which to my amazement he can
still decipher thirty years after the event. I ve learned to
read about one in every four words on his Christmas card
greetings. 1 think it probably goes back to his wartime days,
when he developed this shorthand for his notes.
One of the extraordinary things about Desmond is his recall
of each day in which he was engaged in excavation and what was
recovered. This is a memory that we know, from discussions we
had later in Australia with Desmond and Betty, goes back to
1970, almost perfect recall on a day-by-day basis of everything
that he did and everything he recovered on each day. Really
quite remarkable.
401
We were fortunate also in that the graduate students from
Berkeley were a really very, very capable group indeed. They
were professionally competent. They were generally pretty
diligent, and, again, generally fairly independent. And these
are the very qualities, I think, that they had in part acquired
through interaction with Desmond and, of course, with Glynn
Isaac at Berkeley.
The Beauties of the Plains of Gadeb, the Webi Shebeli
Williams: It s Martin Williams once more, and I will talk this time about
Ethiopia. I will deal with the early 1974 and early 1975 field
seasons in the Ethiopian rift in more depth, but here I ll just
give a little prelude to the work we did in the highlands. In
1975, after we d completed the excavations at the cave of Pore
Epic French for porcupine Desmond, Frances [Williams], and I
set forth on a reconnaissance trip to the high plains of the
southeastern plateau of Ethiopia.
Specifically, we visited the plains of Gadeb. These are
located at an elevation of about 2,250 meters above sea level
and roughly 100 kilometers to the west of the town of
Shashamane. This was a magnificent area: open, grassy plains
through which meandered the wide waters of the Webi Shebeli,
which finally makes its way down into Somalia but never reaches
the sea.
One of the reasons for the flatness of these plains is that
some two million years ago, and I m being fairly general now,
lava flows dammed the ancestral Webi Shebeli river, and the
lake came into being, and the lake itself persisted for roughly
300,000 years and was later blanketed in ash flow deposits from
the volcanoes that surrounded the lake basin that rose up to
4000 meters in elevation, and more, and were glaciated no doubt
repeatedly during the times of maximum glaciation. The river
had subsequently cut through its lava dam and created a very
deep and spectacular gorge and was engaged in entrenching down
through the old lake sediments, giving magnificent exposures.
And so during our first reconnaissance trip, when I can
vividly recall in the cold, crisp dusk scrambling around for
little bits of dried cattle dung to make a fire to cook our
meal, to get a bit of warmth, because most of the trees had
long disappearedthe trees that did grow by the river were
good old Australian gum trees, which made me feel quite
nostalgic and almost within minutes of stepping out of the
Toyota Land Cruiser, the first thing we spotted sticking out of
402
a bank section about twenty meters high were Desmond s beloved
Acheulean bifaces.
The following morning, as we walked from outcrop to
outcrop, more and more artifacts became evident, and we
realized that this was a site that would repay serious
investigation. And so we returned to Gadeb early in 1978.
Betty, Desmond, again the team from Berkeley, a team of
graduate students, and Don Adamson was with us on this
occasion. Don had last worked with us, of course, in the Sudan
back in 1973. Francoise Gasse from France, who is one of the
world s leading diatomists. And briefly we were visited by
other archaeologists from the University of Addis Ababa,
notably Richard Wilding, who later died in a tragic car
accident in Kenya. Richard took part in excavating one of the
Iron Age sites.
The Dating Work in Gadeb
Williams: And so work began in earnest from the campsite in Gadeb that I
think we all agreed was probably the most spectacular and the
most beautiful campsite that many of us could remember. In
particular, sitting on the throne in the early morning, gazing
across the waters of the Webi slowly flowing past, we could see
great flocks of Sacred Ibis making their way to their early
morning destination, and then the work of the day would begin.
Frances was engaged in collecting samples for paleomagnetic
dating, using the paleomagnetic reversal and normal polarity
chronology, and Don was engaged in some quite exciting
experimental archaeological work, about which more anon, and I
was doing my usual pick axe and shovel operation on what
Desmond referred to as geological step trenches. These were
very strictly defined as being certainly trenches dug without
benefit of brush or dental pick, or even trowel.
Nevertheless, they revealed the stratigraphy, and we were
enabled to tie in the relative position of all of the
archaeological excavations very, very precisely indeed. We
were facilitated in this by the fact that about every 5,000
years there had been a fairly significant volcanic eruption in
this locality, or in the vicinity of the locality, so we had
layers of ash, quite distinctive ash bands, and the ash bands
themselves were deposited both beneath and above the
archaeological sites, and so we really were very, very
fortunate indeed.
403
Getaneh Assefa, who was the acting head of the department
of geology, also visited the site and spent quite some time
collecting samples. Getaneh had done his Ph.D. at the
University of Minnesota under Professor Herb Wright, and was a
sedimentary geologist. We were visited briefly by Raymonde
Bonnefille, the French palynologist, who collected samples for
pollen analysis.
What emerged from the season s work at Gadeb was the
realization that we were looking at the first evidence, really,
of major tropical desiccation and cooling, round about 2.35
million years ago, which then initiated the changes in hominid
cultural adaptations associated with the inception of stone
tool making. Indeed, in other parts of the world around about
two and a half million, 2.5, 2.4 there was a dramatic build-up
of ice in North America. There was deposition of wind-blown
dust in Central China. There was the onset of the seasonal
Mediterranean climate around the shores of the Mediterranean.
So a number of quite dramatic global events were taking place
which altered the environments in which these early hominids
lived.
And another exciting find from the 1978 work was the
recovery of some portions of welded tuff, artifacts that had
been in a fire, heated to temperatures in excess of 500 degrees
Celsius, and when analyzed by Dr. Mike Barbetti from Sydney
University, provided circumstantial evidence that round about 1
to 1.5 million years ago in the highlands of Ethiopia, Homo
erectus were, to a high degree of probability, using fire.
This led to a joint paper with Desmond as the senior
author, Mike Barbetti, Frances and myself, which later appeared
in the Guiness Book of Records, for some inscrutable reason.
So I ll now pass over to Don, who can talk about his
impressions of the Gadeb camp of 1978.
The Team at Gadeb. and the Fortunate Timing
Adamson: This is Don Adamson again, continuing about Gadeb. First I d
like to mention that the Frances that Martin talked about is
his wife, Frances Williams, who as Frances Dakin spent a long
time in Ethiopia at the University of Addis Ababa, as a
geophysicist . Her work has been extremely good over the years
and part of this teamwork.
404
Secondly, a bit more jocularly, Martin mentioned that the
paper on possible use of fire appeared in the Guiness Book of
Records. I should emphasize the obvious, which means that it
was quoted there and, of course, it was published in a proper
journal. But that s a jocular and obvious comment.
My comments personally about the time in Gadeb are very
simple and very brief. It was, as Martin said, a wonderful
place, and I had a wonderful time doing a bit of what you might
call reconnaissance work as well as helping with digging
trenches and so on, and so I had the freedom again to move
around a little.
I think one thing that can be pointed out from the Gadeb
experience was to praise and record Desmond s extraordinary
interest in gathering groups of multiple-disciplined people to
focus on a problem, in this case not merely on the site that
was being excavated but on the basis as a whole, which was
associated with this lake. I have happy memories of a trip
where we took off --"we"
being Martin Williams, myself, Desmond,
and a couple of other people, including, critically, Francoise
Gasse, whose work on diatoms helped greatly with the chronology
of this site.
We took off to try and solve the question of where was the
dam that ponded back this great body of water with its
wonderful diatomaceous stratigraphy. And we had a glorious
three days of just wondering down the valley. Indeed, we found
the dam. But it was typical of Desmond that he would break
away from the day-to-day compulsions of an archaeological
excavation for a brief but critical reconnaissance to try and
help build up the bigger picture.
And, of course, his encouragement of multiple disciplines
is part of that principle of building up the larger picture.
To me, it was an idyllic time. I think we did it at a critical
period in history, a window where we could do this work at this
site on the Somalian side of the Ethiopian rift, but still, of
course, in Ethiopia. It was critical and difficult because
some months later the war broke out between Somalia and
Ethiopia, and there were insurgents in the mountains that were
adjacent to our site.
One of my vivid memories is traveling across these
mountains to get formal permission from the Governor of Bale
Province to conduct this work. We had an adventurous trip
across the mountains, Desmond, myself, and, of course, an
Ethiopian antiquities officer, the three of us in a Land Rover.
And we duly paid our respects to the governor of Bale Province,
405
drank appropriate refreshments, the documents were signed, and
we returned across the mountains.
But it was a somewhat adventurous trip because there were
military roadblocks at frequent intervals in these mountains
and up in the forests. Wonderful, incidentally, driving
through juniper forests, absolutely pristine, virgin forests in
these high mountains. But it was a bit adventurous to sort of
have to penetrate roadblock after roadblock, and with warnings
to not stop on the road because of the insurgents in the
mountains. So it was an idyllic but adventurous time, and
fortunately everything turned out well. No one came to any ill
harm, and in retrospect it s a golden time. And there I think
I d like to leave it.
Ongoing Connections with the Clarks
Adamson: I do want to say something about the Desmond and Betty Clark
connection to Australia, at a personal level. Elizabeth
Winterbottom is Desmond and Betty s daughter. She lives in
Wollongong [Australia] with her husband, David, and there
they ve raised a family. Not surprisingly, Betty and Desmond
relatively frequently, roughly once a year, have made a habit
of visiting them there.
Martin Williams and I have on several occasions, sometimes
with my wife, Heather, visited the Winterbottoms when Desmond
and Betty are in residence. It s a very nice insight into the
family side of the Clarks. It s worth saying that Betty,
Desmond s wife, is called Betty, whereas her daughter is always
called Elizabeth. I once got into terrible trouble by getting
this confused and using the names the wrong way round, and I
was promptly, promptly put in the picture about the subtleties
of this.
It s been very good also from the professional point of
view to be able to visit Desmond in Wollongong here in
Australia from time to time. It s a substitute for us going to
Berkeley, if you like, and it s yielded some quite useful
interchanges professionally, where we ve exchanged manuscripts,
talked details of future work, and so on, and generally it s
been a delight to see this other side of the academic and the
professional and distinguished archaeologist.
I think that s really all I need say about the Australian
connection, but it s something that probably doesn t crop up in
interviews with the other archaeological members of Desmond s
406
associates, with whom you re collecting tapes. It s been great
fun here in Australia, as well as in Africa.
407
Steve Brandt and J. Desmond Clark, April 30, 2001
Catching Up
[telephone conversation]
Brandt: Hello, Desmond?
Clark: Oh, it s Steve. How nice to hear you, old man. How are you?
Brandt: Good.
Clark: How was New Orleans?
Brandt: It was great except, you know, five million archaeologists in one
place.
Clark: Yes, exactly. Any interesting papers?
Brandt: Well, our session went really well.
Clark: Good. What was that on?
Brandt: It was called "Parting the Red Sea: Holocene Interactions Between
Northeastern Africa and Arabia."
Clark: Saudi.
Brandt: Well, Saudi and Yemen.
Clark: You took that into pre-Axumite and Axumite times?
Brandt: Yes, Axumite, but earlier too, with the rock art in particular.
Clark: Oh, that s good, yes.
Brandt: Ethio-Arabian rock art style.
Clark: I ve been communicating with a chap who has been working on sheep
and goat, actually, and also cattle, particularly cattle, and the
408
introduction of the Zebu. It seems about the earliest was 700
years ago. That s all. And sheep and goat later.
Brandt: Where?
Clark: From Saudi. That s the fat-tailed sheep. Don t know about the
other ones. But the fat-tailed sheep sometime after 500.
Brandt: Yes, but really Bos taurus was there much earlier, the humpless
cattle.
Clark: Oh, I m sure it was in Saudi, but not in Africa.
New Look at Afro-Asiatic Language Families
Brandt:
Clark:
Brandt;
Clark:
Brandt:
No, no, no. No. But actually Agazi [Negash] and I gave a fairly
radical paper. Just to stir up the pot a bit, to see what
people s reactions were. What we were arguing is that the
similarities in the rock art between Ethiopia-Eritrea and Yemen-
Saudi Arabia might suggest some kind of an interaction sphere
taking place in the Neolithic with connections between the two,
across the Red Sea. Obsidian from Yemenyou know, they ve found
obsidian in the Neolithic sites in Yemen which are traced to
Ethiopia or Eritrea.
It could have come from Aden, I suppose.
Well, they ve looked at the sites in Yemen, and they don t match
and they think it s coming from Eritrea-Ethiopia. We also know
that Egypt was getting obsidian from Eritrea and Ethiopia about
that same time, so we think there s some kind of interaction
sphere going on. And here s the radical idea, in that we re
arguing that if you take into consideration the linguists
argument about the origins of Afro-Asiatic, the whole language
family, all branches of Afro-Asiatic are in Africa except for
Semitic, right?
Yes.
But Semitic is also found in Ethiopia, spoken by tens of millions
of people. So the question has always been how did Semitic get to
Ethiopia, and no one could really figure that out because the
Sabian [kingdom] argument doesn t really hold anymore, and Ge ez
is not like Sabian, et cetera, et cetera.
Clark: No, by no means.
Brandt:
Clark:
Brandt:
Clark:
409
So what we argued for was actually proto-Semitic developed
somewhere in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, whatever, along with all
the other Afro-Asiatic branches and that the people who came
across, people who were interacting, these Neolithic pastoralists,
were in fact proto-Semitic-speaking people.
They came from where?
to Arabia?
You mean they originated in Africa and went
Yes. In other words, Semitic arose in Africa, spread to Arabia,
and then spread north eventually as Semitic fragmented into the
three major branches: eastern Semitic and western Semitic [and
Ethio-Semitic] .
Well, that s fascinating,
linguists.
I m sure you got a reaction from the
Brandt: No, there were no linguists there. These were all archaeologists.
But you know who I did get a very positive reaction from,
and that s from Ofer Bar-Yosef. And I was really worried about
him. He was in the audience. But he said it was very interesting
to him, it explained a lot of things. Even if you think about
Akkadian. Akkadian, you know, which is the earliest Semitic
written language, spoken by-
Clark: --out of the Sumerian, yes.
Brandt: Exactly, and you know, who were they? I was doing some research,
and it turns out the Akkadians are thought to be northern Arabian
nomadic pastoralists. That explains where they came from. And
you know when it was? It was 2300 B.C. when Sargon conquered
Sumer, and that s right smack in the period of decreased humidity,
a major aridity. And I would argue that Arabia was drying up, and
pasture was drying up, and you have all these nomads figuring out
what to do.
Clark: Quite, yes.
Brandt: And we know what nomads can do. They re the original guerilla
warfare experts, right?
Clark: Yes, I suppose so.
Brandt: Genghis Khan, the Arab conquests.
Clark: Oh, that s good, Steve. That s very interesting indeed.
Brandt: So what happened was that you had eastern Semitic over thereyou
know, towards Iraq, et cetera, then you had western Semitic
410
developing in Arabia and in the Levant (that s the other branch),
and then you had Ethio-Semitic developing separately, and that s
how you see Ethio-Semitic, a very long prehistory and also mixing
with Cushitic words. So anyway, we re going to write it up and
see, maybe for Current Anthropology, something like that.
Troy: Steve, let me just ask--this is Tim--with whom did you give the
paper?
Brandt: Oh, with Agazi Negash, one of my Ethiopian graduate students, who
worked with Desmond.
Clark: A very good man indeed, actually. He s due to come for a postdoc
when he s finished his dissertation.
Brandt: He s turning in the rest of his dissertation today.
Clark: I m so glad. Oh, great.
Work on Hide Workers
Brandt: And, by the way, we got the grant. We don t know how much.
They re probably going to cut it down somewhat, but we re going to
get it.
Troy:
Brandt:
Clark:
Brandt:
Clark:
And that grant is from?
That s an NSF [National Science Foundation] grant proposal to work
in Ethiopia on the hide workers, which is actually following in
the footsteps of my first season with Desmond in Ethiopia-- 1975
when I first went to Ethiopia.
The Gurage hide workers. You were there when we went with Hiro
[Kurashina] . That was at Lake Besaka.
But you and Hiro worked on the hide workers up in Gadeb, and that
caught my attention way back then.
That was an extremely interesting little piece of sort of
ethnoarchaeology. We [Clark and Kurashina] wrote it up. [In
Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of Us, Academic Press,
1981, edited by Richard Gould.]
That was amazing, what you could find there, what they were
doing, the artifacts that they were making as the cutting parts of
the tool to scrape hides, clean hides, were quite long-ish,
unifacial, well-worked pieces of obsidian, probably about four to
Brandt:
411
five inches. They gradually worked them down, sharpening them
after almost every other sort of scrape until you got something
that was rather like a thumbnail scraper when it was thrown away,
and they were all shoved onto dumps.
In due course, at sites that were essentially old ones, all
you found, because all the ash and everything had been blown away,
disappeared, all you found was this concentration, which many
archaeologists, including ourselves, of course, would have called
the finished tools, except what they were, they were the waste
tools, after it was all finished.
As we know, we ve found many other ethnic groups still doing that.
Of course, [James] Gallagher [University of Wisconsin] did work as
well.
Clark: That s right, he did.
One of the things I did point out in my review in Nature--!
suppose you ll get it in due coursewas that the very first
person to draw attention to the Gurage hide scrapers was Gerry
[Gerald] Dekker, who actually went there and saw it and produced a
really good video, and that got Gallagher onto it.
What s happened to Gallagher? He was a nice man.
Brandt: Yes, and I saw him at the SAA [Society of American Archaeology].
He actually reviewed our proposal also. We sent it to him. He s
a professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Clark: And he s okay, though?
Brandt: Yeah, he s doing fine. He s involved in a number of different
things. He hasn t worked overseas, though, as far as I know.
Recollections of Work in Somaliland
Troy: Steve, when was the first time you went out with Desmond?
Brandt: It was that year, 1975.
Troy: Then you went on and got your dissertation work on Lake Besaka.
Brandt: That s right, yes.
In 75 I traveled to Africa. The only place I d been
outside of North America prior to that was Europe, when I went
Clark:
Brandt:
412
there after graduating high school. And so Africa and
particularly Ethiopia was incredibly fascinating. I really sort
of fell in love with the place, and I ve worked in the Horn [of
Africa] ever since. I think Desmond would probably agree with me
that in spite of all its problems, it s still one of the most
fascinating places on earth, including the rest of Africa.
Absolutely,
do.
There s high potential, and there is so much more to
Steve was doing a fine job in Somalia, both in the north and
in the south, until everything collapsed politically.
Yes. Well, actually, that s also following in your footsteps.
I ve been following in your footsteps all my life, I think,
because after Ethiopia closed down, basically in the late
seventies, "79, I sort of crossed the borders and started working
in Somalia. As Ethiopia closed down, Somalia opened up.
Yes.
It was Desmond who did the first really serious--well, I can t say
the first serious work because [Paolo] Graziosi also worked maybe
a couple of years, a few years earlier. But Desmond did some of
the most important, pioneering work in Somalia.
Yes, he was roaming around there in Somaliland during the war.
Exactly, and so we went to some of the sites that he used to work
at. In fact, we even found somebody who remembered Desmond in Bur
Hakaba.
Did you really?
Yes. He was a very old man, who said that he remembered you.
Where was the site?
It s called Bur Hakaba. It s a regional sort of administrative
town next to a big granite hill. "Bur" in Somali means "hill."
I think you were stationed there, weren t you, Desmond?
Well, we were stationed in Isha Baidoa, but Bur Hakaba was part of
our district, so we had to go there at least once a month, then
sort of out to Bur Eibe and so on. That s where I really learned
to walk. It was great fun.
413
Bloompaas Cave. Latrines. Et Cetera
Clark: But, Steve, one thing you d be interested in: I was talking to
Richard Klein [fauna work] the other day about thewhat s the
name of that site which has this very fine Stillbay?
Brandt: Bloompaas.
Clark: Yes, something like that. And Richard was saying they [bone
points] were beautifully made. Some of them are only about an
inch high. They re both bifacial and unifacial. I told him that
you had worked at the Guri Makeke [Guri Wabayo] , as it was called,
and found that in point of fact what I thought was probably a
Neolithic was certainly Upper Paleolithic. In other words, the
Eibian.
Brandt: Exactly.
Clark: Yes, and I told him about that. I thought this was extremely
interesting, and there could well be parallels because you know
that Eibian. We need to be able to compare that kind of thing.
Could be a very, very late--well, I don t know if you d call it
Upper Paleolithic or sort of transitional Middle Paleolithic.
Brandt: I agree, although I think the Bloompaas stuff--! think they re
arguing that it s pretty old,, that material, even though it s
small.
Clark: I don t know.
Brandt: You re not buying it, though, huh?
Clark: I m a little doubtful about those, and certainly, of course,
they ve never ever found any more of those two well-made bone
points. They ve got a certain amount of other sort of bone stuff,
but the bone points were found the first season, and almost
certainlythey were high up, and almost certainly they come from
the LSA [Late Stone Age], because of dates.
Brandt: Yes. There was an old story about--! know I ve told this to you;
I don t know if you remember, but there was an old story about you
working in Somalia during the war, that whenever you marched your
troops into a new area, you would have them dig rectangular
foxholes .
Clark: Oh, essentially.
Brandt: You could see the stratigraphy.
Clark: The latrines. Yes, exactly. [laughter]
Brandt: I think you denied it. Are you still denying it?
Clark: [laughs]
Troy: Well, he s got a story, Steve, about going out to see a friend, a
gamekeeper in Zambia, out to the west of Livingstone, who had a
latrine, and they were looking at the stratigraphic layers there
as well.
Brandt: Yes.
Clark: The most famous one that I know is the one that was made in a
baobab tree, out at Katima Mulilo, in a previous trip, by the
administrator, the South African administrator there, whose name
for the moment escapes me. Really quite a character.
Brandt: You mean in the hollow of the baobab tree?
Clark: In the hollow of the baobab tree, yes.
Brandt: That s a good place. Protected, I think.
Troy: Steve, what was the name of that site that you were talking about
with the short points?
Brandt: They call it in Somalia Guri Wabaio.
Clark: "The Cave of the Arrow Poison." And Guri Makeke--Makeke, I think,
was a mat, wasn t it? A sleeping mat.
Brandt: Yes.
Clark: Because that s the one we used to camp in.
Brandt: Right. That s the one that we excavated.
India in 1980
Brandt: The Horn of Africa, Ethiopia in particular, is the second most
interesting place I ve ever been to. The number one place was
also where Desmond took me, and that was India. I was there with
Desmond in 80, I think it was. India was the most it still is
the most interesting place I ve ever been to, in spite of the fact
I didn t see very much. The place is so diverse. The cultures,
415
Clark:
Troy:
Brandt:
Troy:
Brandt :
Clark:
Brandt:
Clark:
Brandt:
Clark:
Brandt:
the countryside-- just incredible,
times.
It s overwhelming, actually, at
And the food- -I know Desmond s never cared for the food.
Well, some of it was good, and some of it was not, if you see what
I mean. We did have tummy upsets as well, actually, because we
didn t have a frightfully good cook. I remember I think it was
Betty came upon him one day cutting up the beef on his bed or
something.
In 80 where were you folks? What was the site?
We were in Madhya Pradesh.
Was that when you were on the Son River?
No, we weren t on the Son River. We were on the Ganges, in part,
and then we excavated a Mesolithic rock shelter, which was really
amazing, how we got there. I don t know if Desmond s already told
you.
Steve, I think you ve got that mixed up, haven t you? On the
Ganges we went to see those sites that, G. R. Sharma and his
people had found and excavated. Extremely interesting sites, with
those burials there.
Oh, you re right, yes.
The rock shelter you excavated was actually along the top of the
escarpment in the Son Valley.
Oh, that s right. We excavated that Acheulean site as well.
That s right. It was still, I think, Ultar Pradesh, until you
crossed the Son. And that was very interesting indeed, that
shelter, with rock art in it.
Quite a lot of game, because it was a game preserve, and
thank God the Baiga were thereyou know, these hunting-gathering,
marginal cultivatorswe saw quite a lot of them.
Yes, I remember them making a fire with fire sticks,
tea going.
They got our
The amazing thing about going to that rock shelter is we
were in this camp, and we would be picked up by our taxi, which of
course were elephants. We d get up on the elephants, and the
taxis would take us to the escarpment, which was, I don t know,
seven or eight kilometers, I don t know exactly how far. And then
416
we d get off and we d hike up to the top of the rock shelter. But
the elephants were our taxis. That was great.
The other thing I remember about that is that at lunchtime
the servers would come running all the way up from the camp- -they
would run how many kilometers?--ten kilometers or whatever it is,
to our site, carrying the chapati [Indian bread] and all the
different dishes, the stacked-up dishes that the Indians have.
Clark: Really?
Brandt: Maybe you never knew that.
Clark: I never knew that, no.
Brandt: We would get hot lunches.
Clark: Good Lord.
Brandt: Yes, running from some camp up to the rock shelter so they could
serve us these lunches.
Clark: We had a camp close to-what was it we called that? Bagore.
That s right, Bagore, yes, yes.
Brandt: That was also an interesting place.
Clark: Those were good days, weren t they?
Were you there over Holi?
Brandt: Yes, we were there in Allahabad when they had the pilgrimage--
which made big news this year because that was the grand one.
Every nine years they have the super one. We weren t there for
the super one, we were there for just the regular one, so there
were only a million or two million people, something like that.
That was just amazing, that was one of the things I ll never
forget, walking down those paths, meeting the people you know,
everybody is heading toward the Ganges.
Clark: Completely sort of Tent City.
Brandt: Yes, Tent City.
Clark: With fakirs and all sorts of people, yes.
Brandt: And the contortionist, remember? He was all contorted with a
little sort of alms plate on his chest, and crawling inch by inch
down to the river. Everybody was watching him and throwing little
alms to him. It was amazing. His legs were wrapped around his
head,
toes.
417
He was crawling with his fingernails, effectively, and his
Clark: My God.
Troy: Have you been back to India, Steve?
Brandt: No, never have, but I ve talked with Melanie, my wife, many times
about doing that. There s too many other places in the world, it
seems, to visit. But I always think of Ethiopia as the second
most interesting place, yes.
Brandt s Background
Troy: Where did you do your undergraduate work, Steve?
Brandt: I did it at Berkeley.
Clark: Yes, that was the first time we met. Steve was an undergraduate,
I think, weren t you?
Brandt: I was an undergraduate. Ken Williamson introduced me to you.
Clark: That s right. That was down in the lab.
Troy: And when did you start?
Brandt: I first met Desmond in my junior year, maybe, 1970 probably.
Troy: Had you started in anthropology /archaeology, Steve, or is that
something you came into after you got here?
Brandt: No, I started in anthropology. I was always very interested in
archaeology, because I volunteered in high school--! grew up in
Southern California, and in high school I became interested in
archaeology and volunteered my services at La Brea Tar Pits, so I
undertook my first excavations in high school. My mother used to
drive me down to the La Brea Tar Pits and drop me off.
They wanted volunteers to dig up one of the pits because
they found a womanthey found a skull and some skeletal remains
of a prehistoric woman dating to about 9 or 10,000, which is very
early. Still is pretty early for early human remains in North
America.
Clark: When was that, Steve, when you were there?
418
Brandt: I was fifteen, so it was 1965.
Troy: You haven t encountered anything like the La Brea Tar Pits since?
Brandt: No. Thank God. What a messy place that was.
Troy: Oh, I can imagine. It must have been awful. How did you actually
excavate?
Brandt: They pump out the water and the tar every day, and then you d have
to go down in the muck and scrape it all ^way. We had little
platforms and stuff, but: it was the amount of fossil material was
just incredible. I ve never seen anything like that either, a lot
of fossil material.
Troy: The museum there has done a good job of kind of displaying a lot
of that.
Brandt: Yes, right. That didn t exist when I was there.
So I became very interested in archaeology pretty early. I
went up to Berkeley and I have to admit I wasn t a great student
the first couple of years or so. I was probably more interested
in skiing than I was in academics. Desmond probably doesn t know
this, but I had a job making ski boots in Walnut Creek when I
first came to Berkeley.
Clark: Really?
Brandt: Yes. They were prototype ski boots that a ski instructor had
invented. It was a no-buckle, slip-on ski boot. I heard about
him making these ski boots when I was skiing in Mammoth Mountain,
a resort in central California. Somebody came up, and it s such a
radical boot, I said, "Where d you get those?" And he said, "Oh,
well, there s this guy out near Berkeley who s making them." And
I said, "I ll go see him." So when I moved up to Berkeley, I went
out and saw him, and he offered me a job, and I used to go out
there in between school, helping him make these ski boots.
And then, to make a long story short, his company- -he was
bought out by a very famous ski company called Scott ski boots and
ski poles and ski goggles, which is based in Sun Valley, Idaho. I
guess it was my sophomore year--I don t know, the beginning of my
junior year, something like thatis when this happened. And Mr.
Scott, the owner of the ski boot company, came out and offered me
a job in Sun Valley, Idaho and to give up completely my schooling.
I don t even think my parents know this! [laughter] But I was
very tempted, as you might imagine.
Clark: Yes.
419
Brandt: To be able to work at a ski resort for the rest of my life, I
guess, or whatever.
Clark: Just think of what you missed.
Brandt: Yes, I know. [laughs] But I decided not to. I was pretty
interested in school, so I stuck with it.
Stories from Camp Life in Ethiopia
Troy: Steve, do you have memories of camp life in Ethiopia?
Brandt: I sure do. Lake Besaka. I think Ken Williamson was with us that
season.
Clark: Yes, he was there I think both seasons.
Brandt: That would have been 74 and 75. I wasn t there for the first
season. I was there for the second season in 75, and Hiro was
with us.
Clark: Yes.
Brandt: Was Dan with us then, Dan[iel] Stiles? No, I don t think so.
Clark: No, I think he was doing the work at Sterkfontein.
Brandt: Right. And so it was Hiro, and also it was that other fellow who
sort of went crazy. I ve forgotten his name. Edwards, maybe? I
think he was with us that season for a little while.
Clark: Oh, Steve Edwards. I see Steve from time to time. Yes, he was up
in Gadeb .
Brandt: Yes, right. I remember Lake Besaka. We were camping there, and
we had a fairly primitivewe didn t have very many luxuries back
in those days. We didn t have generators or any lights, the
pressure lamps that always were such a pain in the butt. I
remember being served for breakfast toast with beans on top of it,
which I had never experienced in my life before. [laughs] I
guess a British tradition.
Clark: Yes, baked beans on toast.
Brandt: Exactly. But it was pretty different from what I grew up with!
So that was interesting. And I always remember Betty s sort of
sharp tongue, often directed at me, I think. [laughs]
420
Clark: Yes. I ll tell you one thing when it comes to baked beans. Far
and away the best baked beans are Heinz baked beans. It s very
difficult to get them here. God knows why. But all the others
are allthey re not the same.
Brandt: I ll have to look and see if we have it here on the East Coast, in
the Southeast. If they do, I ll buy a case and send it to you.
Clark: Oh, that would be very nice of you. [laughs] I d even pay you
for them.
Brandt: I remember that was also sort of my first experience with being
unable to control your bowel movements.
Clark: Yes, you remember that? Everybody sitting in the vehicle or
something, and Steve saying, "I must just go to the bathroom."
Brandt: Yeah! Even back then we didn t have Lomotil. Lomotil was the
best thing we could get. Enterovioform. I remember also Betty
used to get Enterovioform pills from Mexico or something.
Clark: Italy, I think. It was good, actually. Very good.
Brandt: "Warning: If you take these things, you may die or something like
that." [laughter]
Clark: Do you remember the Karaiyu as well?
Brandt: Of course. When I went back in 77 we worked very closely with
them. They were some of our best friends. They protected us.
Troy: This was at Besaka, when you went back in 77?
Brandt: Yes, when I went back to do my dissertation work in 77. That
was, of course, a whole nother story. But let s talk about 75
and finish.
Yes, I still remember Lake Besaka camp life. I also
remember Gadeb camp life, freezing to death up there. [laughs]
Clark: But wasn t it super? The thing I have always remembered there is
the incredible bird life, all sorts of migratory things, like
wattled cranes, for example, which must be the biggest crane, I
think. What are they? Sort of close on, well, five feet,
certainly, if not more. Beautiful, beautiful animals.
Brandt: Yes, and the sunset over the river. Or was it sunrise? I can t
remember.
Clark: It was sunrise.
421
Brandt: Sunrise, yes. Watching from the latrine?
Clark: We faced our loo due east. Is that right? Yes, that s right.
And as the sun rose, one type of bird the first ones were the
Hadada ibis. Do you remember that? Hadada? All coming in. And
then the others came in. It was absolutely beautiful.
Brandt: I did learn that from you, Desmond: always to site my toilets in
beautiful locations. In fact, I learned how to make a toilet from
you. I still use that exact same design.
Clark: Really?
Brandt: Yes. A "thunderbox" with a flat bottom, with a hole in the
middle. That s what I use today when we don t have any other
facilities. People are always amazed at it. They ve actually
copied that design from me. [laughter]
Troy: Did you construct those before you went out, or you took the
lumber?
Brandt: No, they were constructed before we went out in Addis Ababa, along
with the screens and other things.
Also what I remember about the Gadeb camp, of course, was,
as I said, being cold, because I wasn t prepared with an adequate
sleeping bag for the cold conditions that we had. Of course, it
was beautiful. One reason why it was beautiful is that it was
wide open, because all the forests had been cut down. God knows
when. And so we had no wood to use for fuel. We had to collect
cow dung. Remember that? Dry cow dung. That was our fuel. We
sat around a burning fire of cow dung to keep warm and to cook
with. I m sure we stunk like hell, but who knows?
Clark: It kept you warm. Cow dung produces a very fierce, quick fire,
very hot. Absolutely super. The dried cow dung, that is. And
all the local people, of course, made cow dung patties, which they
stored in nice little sort of round sort of humps all over the
place. It was the only fuel they had.
Brandt: That was the fuel we used, too.
Troy: Would you see people grazing cattle, or was it pretty empty up
there?
Brandt: It was pretty much the dry season, so the forage had already come
and gone .
Clark: Yes. They were very nice people, extremely nice people.
422
Troy: The people up there are who?
Brandt: Oromo.
More Dramatic Stories from Ethiopia
Clark: Steve, you must tell the story about the drunken man who ran into
your car.
Brandt: Oh, yes. Well, okay. One day--once a week or maybe twice a week
was market day at Adaba--it was market day, and it was our day
off, so I asked Desmond if I could take the Land Cruiser into town
for the day. He was reluctant, but he said, "Okay, go ahead." I
was going to buy some supplies and whatnot, and so off we went,
along with two of our other workers--! didn t have any other
ferenge, foreigner, with me.
We got to Dodola, which was the first town, and then we
started to head towards Adaba. I think Dodola was where the
market was, because people were walking along the streets, heading
toward Dodola, and some of them were drunk, after drinking all day
at the market. And so we re driving along, and I m going fairly
slow, and I see this man walking in front of us, sort of in the
middle of the road. You know, what we always used to do is to
honk the horn to let them know we re coming.
I honked and honked, getting closer and closer to the guy,
and he s not paying any attention. Then we pull up pretty close
to him, and I swerve to the left, and I honk the horn, and the guy
all of a sudden came to attention, and instead of going to the
right, he went to the left! And he smashed right into the car,
the Land Cruiser.
We slammed on the brakes, and we looked around, and there he
was, on the ground, knocked out, with blood coming from his head,
and we said, "Oh, my God, what are we going to do?" So we threw
him into the backnot threw him but dragged him into the back of
the Land Cruiser, and we went back to Dodola, to the police
station. And we get into the police station, and we take him in.
By that time, he had recovered. He was conscious.
We got to the police station, and we all went inside, and
then the policeman said, "Okay, what s happened here? Explain
what happened," and we tried to do what we could. In the
meantime, he said, "Okay, we have to go"--by the way, it was very,
very dangerous to hit anybody because it usually meantif you hit
423
an Ethiopian in a car accident or something, it often meant
deportation.
Clark: Yes, right.
Brandt: Because it was always your fault.
Clark: Quite.
Brandt: And the best way out of it sort of was to leave. I was really
worried about this. So we were in the police station--! say
"station." It was just a mud hut, effectively. And everybody
started pouring into this hut. We were completely surrounded by
hundreds--it seemed like hundreds of people, all staring at us,
wondering what s going on.
And so then the policeman says, "Okay, well, we have to go
back out to the scene of the crime and see exactly where it
happened. In the meantime, you"--the man who got hit--"you stay
here at the police station, and we re going to go out to the
accident site."
So we go out to the scene of the crime, and I guess he saw
some detective movies or something, because he starts to pace out
the skid marks and this and that, trying to figure out exactly
what had happened, and we re trying to explain to him what
happened. He said, "Oh, I don t know. This is serious, duh-duh-
duh-duh." And so we re really worried.
Then we go back to the police station, and the man is gone.
The man disappeared, and the policeman is furious, saying, "Where
is this guy? What happened to him?" And everyone is shrugging
their shoulders. They say, "We don t know what happened to him."
So the policeman says, "Well, case dismissed. You can go. If
this guy s not here, you can go. Just go. Go!" So we pop back
into the car, into the Land Cruiser, and off we re driving, and
these two Ethiopians that were with us, one of whom spoke English,
are laughing like crazy.
I said, "What s so funny?" They said, "Oh, well, you know,
back at the police station, after you guys left, we started
telling this man that if he didn t leave this police station
immediately, they were going to throw him in jail. And, "You
should flee immediately." And so this guy got so scared that he
left, and so that s the reason why we were able to get off Scot
free and came back to the camp. Desmond, of course, was really,
really concerned.
Clark: No one knew that, Steve. Well, well. That s super.
424
Brandt: Luckily everything worked out okay.
I tell all my students that story, actually.
Troy: You did the right thing. It wasn t your fault.
Brandt: Well, thank God for those Ethiopians that were with me. They
saved me there.
Troy: That really could have disrupted your career if they wanted to
make a deal out of it?
Brandt: Yes.
The other Gadeb story, which is even more frightening in
some respects this is turning to 1977, the season that I was
doing my dissertation work. You remember this story, when I went
to look for you, Desmond? In your camp?
Clark: Which one? Offhand, I don t remember.
Brandt: Okay, let me tell you. In 77 things were very bad in Ethiopia.
It was the beginning of what came to be known as the Red Terror,
when the Derg or the Marxist military government seized power and
were killing people left and right. I mean, you could be killed
just for having a typewriter in your house, as a subversive
activity, typing. They were pulling people out of the houses at
night. You d hear gunshots all night. You d see dead bodies in
the street.
Clark: Oh, you mean about Bill Morton?
Brandt: No, not Bill Morton. That s another story. That was that year,
too. A geologist that worked with Desmond and us inwell, he
didn t actually work with us that time, but he was killed. That s
another story. I wasn t there for that, but things were very bad.
You d walk down the streets of Addis Ababa, and you d see
these huge murals of Uncle Sam, with his head cut off, rolling
into a basket with blood all over the place, saying, "Yankee, go
home," and these sort of things. [laughs] It made you feel
really comfortable.
We arrived in January of 77 to begin our work, just when
they were having all kinds of problems, and you couldn t go out at
night, and things were pretty difficult. I couldn t get my
permitDesmond was in the field in 77, he was at Gadeb, and I
couldn t get my permit to go to the field without Desmond s
signature. So Donfald] Johanson, who was there at the time,
425
offered to lend me his Land Rover so that I could drive up to
Gadeb to find Desmond and have him sign the permit form.
Do you remember this yet, Desmond?
Clark: Yes, I think so.
Brandt: So off we went, my wife and I. And stupidly enough, very stupidly
we didn t take any interpreters with us, right? That was a big
mistake. So it was just my wife and I, and we knew very few words
in Amaric or any other Ethiopian language, and off we went to
Gadeb, and I thought that I knew exactly where Desmond was camped.
But I didn t. And so we got to Gadeb, what I thought was Gadeb.
You have to turn in from the road toward the river, and you go
through people s fields and paths to get to the river, where I
thought Desmond was camped. We got to the river, and he wasn t
there, where I thought he was.
Pretty soon people came up to us, the local villagers, who
were these Oromo. They were on horseback, and they re great spear
throwers, they can hit a target at full gallop with a spear. So
they re milling around, sort of saying, "What do you want? What s
going on?" I kept on saying, "Uh, uh, uh." I was trying to
describe where Desmond was, and I kept on saying "ferenge." You
know, ferenge, foreigners. And "mekena"--car. And "melka"--you
know, crossing. Because Desmond was camped near a crossing, a
river crossing, and those are, like, three words that I knew.
So the villagers are looking at me, and they say, "Okay,
yes. Foreigners? Vehicle? Crossing." They say, "Okay, okay."
I mean, they say, "Come with us." They started waving and we
followed them. We re in the Land Rover, and we re following them
down the river. I said, "This is not right. We re going the
wrong direction." We finally get to a place where they wanted to
take us, and that turned out to be a river crossing. They thought
that we wanted to get the Land Rover across to the other side.
Then when I said, "No, no, no, that s not what I want to
do," they started getting really angry with us. They tried to
open the doors, and we got really scared. We, like, slammed it
into first and off we went across the countryside, with them
chasing us at full gallop behind us, on horseback. We were
scared. We finally got to the road, and we made it. I mean, we
were going through people s fields. Everybody was screaming at
us.- It was pretty bad. And we get to the road and we drove into
Shashemene and spent the night . We thought for certain the
military was going to come get us.
We never made it to Desmond- -never saw Desmond. We went
back to Addis Ababa, and about--! don t know when it was--a few
426
Clark:
Brandt:
Clark:
Brandt:
Clark:
Brandt:
Clark:
Troy:
Brandt:
Clark:
Brandt:
Clark:
days later, the Ethiopian government announced they were going to
provide arms they were going to give rifles to all the local
people to protect themselves. Remember that?
Yes, the militia.
Yeah, they were encouraging militias. I m certain if that had
happened, like, a week or two later, when they d had rifles, we
probably wouldn t be around.
That s true.
Then, Desmond, we had to wait around for you to come in- -he came
in from the field a week or two after thatand you signed the
permit and you said at the time, I remember, "You know, Steve, we
had trouble with the local people. They were giving us a hard
time when we were doing survey work downstream." Do you remember
that at all?
No. Mostly I think it was okay, but the real problem was the
militia on the roads because there were not proper roadblocks.
And Addis Ababa was particularly bad.
Oh, that was dreadful. People with bayonets on rifles and all
that kind of thing, yes.
You wouldn t know where the roadblocks were in Addis. They were
just everywhere.
They were everywhere. In fact, there were so many, each
roadblock they could see each other. We were trying to get up to
the American embassy one day, and this is a hill going up. At the
bottom of the hill is one roadblock, and everybody has to get out,
and they search everything, and then you get in the car and they
can see the next roadblock straight up the hill. You drive up,
and everybody had to get out again, and they searched everything,
and continue on. It was about five roadblocks to get up to the
American embassy.
We then proceeded--! know I ll never forget this story.
This was when things were getting really bad. I mean, all
official Americans were thrown out of the country. We were
allowed to stay because we weren t "official," so to speak.
Were you there when Jon Kalb was thrown out? When was that, 78?
Oh, speaking of Jon Kalb, guess who was at the SAA, selling books?
I m sure.
427
Brandt: Jon was there. It was really fun to talk to him, actually. Have
you seen his new book?
Clark: No. I just got it, and I haven t had a chance to look at it. I m
sure there are a lot of bad things about me.
Brandt: No, I don t think so. Mellie [Melanie] is still reading it, so
I m waiting for her to finish it. I don t think there s really
anything.
Anyway, I remember going up to the American embassy and all
these roadblocks, because we were worried about what happens if
everything falls apart and we have to evacuate or something like
that. We wanted to find out what the American embassy had to say.
So we get to the American embassy after five roadblocks, and we go
and see the consul, the acting consul, because there wasn t even
an ambassador.
"What happens to us?" we ask. And he says, "Well, actually,
we have no responsibility towards you. You re on your own. The
only thing we will do for you is that if you die, we will send
your body back in a black bag." That s what he told us!
Clark: Yes, it wasn t so good. The British embassy helped us a lot then.
Who was that man? Richard Wilding. He was very helpful as well.
Brandt: A very nice guy. You know he died.
Clark: Yes. Absolutely tragic. Some beastly vehicle ran into him on the
airport road, at night.
Troy: In Addis.
Clark: There or in Nairobi, yes.
After Ethiopia; Somalia, India
Troy: And so then things went from bad to worse. We ve talked to Tim
White a little bit, Steve, about this, and then you fellows had to
go elsewhere for almost a decade, didn t you?
Brandt: I went to Somalia. Desmond, you went to India for a few years.
Clark: In 79 I went to the Anthropological Ethnographic Congress, or
something in Delhi, which was a bit of a sort of shambles, but it
was V. N. Misra, who had the conference in Poona afterwards. And
that was absolutely superb. It was there that I met G. R. Sharma,
428
Brandt:
Clark:
Brandt;
Clark:
Troy:
Brandt:
who invited me to go out and have a look at his sites on the Belan
Valley, which I did. And then he said, "Why don t you come out
and we have a joint expedition?" And that s how the Indian work
started.
I always wanted to ask you if you really enjoyed working in India.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, yes.
But you went back to Africa.
Well, Africa is my sort of home, if you see what I mean, yes. I
love Africa.
Steve, how long have you been at Gainesville [Florida] now?
Since 1990.
first job.
I first went to University of Georgia. That was my
Actually, there s a story about that. Do you remember,
Desmond, when I was working for the Army Corps of Engineers? Just
before 1980 when you were going to go to India. You asked me to
go to India with you. And remember I had this job at the Army
Corps of Engineers?
I was offered a permanent job with the Army Corps of
Engineers. It was something that Desmond didn t really feel was
worthy of me, I guess, and we argued back and forth about what to
do about it. I couldn t go--the Army Corps of Engineers wanted me
to work with them, and I couldn t go to the field for so long a
time, and as a result, we had this problem, what to do.
Finally we resolved it. I was able to go to the field with
you for half the time. I went for six weeks rather than I think
twelve weeks or eight weeks or nine weeks or whatever the field
season was. But I came back earlier than planned. Then I was
offered a job at Georgia when I got back, so that started my
academic career. So I never ended up working at the Army Corps of
Engineers anyway.
But that was something that Desmond instilled in me, and
that is an interest in cultural heritage protection, conservation.
Desmond has always been interested in trying to save
archaeological sites from destruction. That s something that I
been very interested in.
now in Ethiopia.
ve
In fact, I m very deeply involved right
Clark: Yes, of course.
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Brandt:
Troy:
Brandt:
Troy:
Brandt:
Troy:
Brandt:
Clark:
Brandt:
Troy:
Brandt:
I leave next week for Ethiopia, to work on a road project. We
discovered sites on it that the European Union is funding, and
they never did an environmental assessment on it. We found Stone
Age sites on this road, this new road, plus modern cemeteries that
the E.U. has ignored, et cetera.
Is this in the Awash?
No, this is in southern Ethiopia, in Jima, down towards the Omo.
So the European Union is funding your survey of all of this road
work, in an effort to preserve the heritage.
Right.
But it s not necessarily Paleolithic or Neolithic but even more
contemporary things.
Right. Yes. Pretty modern.
Steve, now I come to think of it, there s one site somewhere
around Jima where years ago I actually got a specimen, and I think
I may still even have it, of a ground stone axe from down there.
At the sites you re going to work in connection with this road
building thing, there may be something similar, which would be
very interesting because we don t know what those ground stone
axes belong with, as far as I know.
Yes. I don t know, either. I don t know what those are. We
found some stone axes in our excavations last summer. And they
date to very recent times, the last thousand years.
So what else shall we talk about?
You probably have innumerable projects you want to work on.
want to go back to Somalia?
You
Oh, yes. I d love to go back to Somalia someday, but it s not a
good place to be right now, I m certain. It s really difficult to
work in the south. It s still basically anarchy in the south of
Somalia. People are still getting killed left and right. In the
north, it s calmer. The norththey ve declared themselves their
own country, the Republic of Somaliland or something like that,
with the capital in Hargeysa. However, no country in the world
recognizes it, so it s on its own. I recently--! think I told you
this, Desmond--! received an announcement saying that the next
[8th] International Somali Studies congress is going to be held in
Hargeysa in July of this year. I ve shown it to Melanie, and she
says, "Over my dead body are you going to go."
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Clark:
Brandt:
Troy:
Brandt;
Clark:
Troy:
Clark:
Brandt:
Clark:
Troy:
Brandt:
[laughs]
I m thinking, "Well, maybe if I get a bullet-proof vest or
something." To get there, you have to fly to Djibouti and get on
a plane with an airline that has turned out to be highly risky to
fly on, Dallol Airlines. Also I think Djibouti now is pretty
angry with Somaliland, so, I don t know, things don t look too
likely.
But the work in southern Ethiopiathat 11 be quite peaceful.
Things are fairly calm there.
Where we are, yes. But even things in Ethiopia are heating up.
Almost deja vu in some respects. Desmond, you heard that last
week-- .
Yes, about the riots,
things, though.
It looks as if the government is on top of
Were the riots in Addis?
Yes, yes.
The riots were at the university.
University and high school students.
And then there were some students from Addis, from the university,
who hijacked the plane and went to the Sudan.
That s what they re claiming. I don t quite understand it. It s
very bizarre. There s something else going on. It was a military
plane, an air force plane, and these people were on it. Usually
they were getting, like, free lifts somewhere, which is
impossible. They were soldiers who revolted. That whole story is
bizarre. I don t know what to make of it.
Following in Desmond s Footsteps
Clark:
Troy:
Brandt:
But Steve is doing a first-rate job in Ethiopia.
And Steve, you will be out there how long?
Well, this E.U. project I ll be there for one month, and then
we re going to start working on the hide workers project this
summer as well. We ve been funded.
431
Troy:
Clark:
Brandt:
Clark:
Brandt :
Clark:
Brandt:
Clark:
Troy:
Desmond, you were saying he s doing a first-rate job with
Ethiopia.
With the World Bank and all the work with the hide workers down in
southern Ethiopia. It s really going to show us a tremendous
amount about not only the technology involved in all of this but
also, of course, associations with the local people.
[doorbell, conversation]
Let me just conclude by saying that the one thing that I really
want to do in terms of following Desmond s footsteps, and what I
plan to do next year I m trying to take a leave of absence next
yearis to finish writing a book that I ve been working on off
and on for a while, and that is basically an archaeology of the
Horn of Africa, starting from the earliest hominids to the
present. And this is also following in the footsteps of Desmond,
who wrote a very influential, important book called Prehistoric
Cultures of the Horn of Africa that was published in 1954.
First one I ever wrote. It s long overdue for total revision.
Right. Well, it s still viable, so to speak.
That s something that I want to do. I want to try to, as I
say, follow in your footsteps and come up with a newer version of
that whole story, which you very kindly introduced to me all those
years ago.
Well, Steve, it s been great talking to you. I ve thoroughly
enjoyed some of those memories. And one or two that I didn t know
about. [laughter] Have a super time back there.
Next time we re out in
Okay, great. I hope to see you sometime.
California we ll definitely get together.
Absolutely.
We ll be in touch with this and keep you posted on what s
happening.
432
Merrick Posnansky, September 10, 2001
Working with J. Desmond Clark
First a little bit about who I am. I am Merrick Posnansky. I was
educated in England, both at the Universities of Nottingham and Cambridge.
I took my Ph.D. in England before I went to Africa in 1956. I had some of
the same advisors that Desmond had, particularly Miles Burkitt, who was one
of my influences at Cambridge and recommended that I go out to Africa.
I went out to Africa in 1956, first to work for the Royal National
Parks of Kenya, where I worked closely with Louis B. Leakey. Many of the
sites that I worked at had been visited by Desmond Clark during the war
years .
In 1958 I became curator of the Uganda Museum, and was at the Uganda
Museum for four years. After that I transferred to the British Institute
of History and Archaeology in Eastern Africa, and ran the Kampala office
for two years. Then in 196A I joined the University College of East Africa
at Makerere in Kampala, Uganda where I started teaching archaeology and was
influenced, in many ways, in some of my teaching by the work that Desmond
had done in Livingstone.
In 1967 I went to Ghana as professor of archaeology at the University
of Ghana where I spent nine years and initiated a teaching program at the
undergraduate, at the M.A. , and at the Ph.D. level. We developed the
largest teaching department in Africa with an establishment of six full-
time teachers at that university. I also served at that time as an
external examiner for many other universities including Ibadan in Nigeria.
I joined the University of California in 1977 and taught full-time
until 1994 when I took early retirement, though I still do some teaching.
This year I will be teaching two courses.
I think that says a little bit about what I have been doing. I have
known Desmond since 1959. I first met him at the Pan-African Prehistory
Congress in Leopoldville in that year and got to know him, and we have been
in contact ever since. So I ve known him now for forty-two years, and we
share many things in common: having had graduate training at Cambridge,
having worked as a curator of an African museum, and initiated archaeology
in particular regions of Africa. Later I came to the University of
California, so I spent twenty years in Africa, followed by twenty years at
the University of California which replicates, in some ways, Desmond s
433
experience of, I think, twenty-five years in Africa, twenty-five years at
the University of California as a full-time teacher.
Desmond has in many ways been a role model of mine. He was well
known to me even as a graduate student in Britain because he was a very
prolific publisher, particularly at that time of reviews, book reviews, in
Antiquity, so I learned about the literature of Africa from Desmond and
also enjoyed in particular some of his writings on what was then Northern
Rhodesia.
When I met him I was impressed by his--l suppose by his composure:
the way he had his act together, that he was running a museum in Africa,
had a lot of time for research, had a fantastic network amongst all the
other researchers throughout Africa, had been influential in all three of
the previous Pan-African Prehistory Congresses, and in some ways was a
pivotal person for bringing people together in African archaeology, even
the Frencheven though he didn t know French very wellthe French, the
Spanish, the Portuguese, and so on. He was one of the few people who had
visited all the regions of Africa, and also knew scholars in Europe.
I got to know him much better a little after 1959 when I decided to
do two things: first of all, to bring together people in museums in Eastern
Africa, and we organized a body called the Museums Association of Middle
Africa, and that brought together people from East Africa, from Rwanda,
from the Belgian Congo, and also we had visitors from West Africa. At that
time we decided that we should try to expand our organization to cover all
of tropical Africa, and decided that we should have a meeting somewhere
else in Africa. Although Desmond was getting busy to leave for California,
he very generously allowed us to meet at Livingstone in 1959.
One of the things I appreciated about Desmond at that time was
although he had been brought up somewhat in the old colonial tradition, and
was a member of the rowing club on the Zambezi, and was very much
associated with the English settler community, he was one of the first
English academics who was welcoming to African academics and was willing to
see the future. At that time other British people working certainly in
Central Africa were not really willing to respect the academic integrity of
their African colleagues.
We finally held a meeting in Livingstone. It was a great success.
It was actually the first time in that city that Africanswe had Africans
from Nigeria, and we also had a Japanese representative from UNESCO that
non-whites had been allowed to live in the official government rest house,
or guest house, in Livingstone. It was a meeting which led us to establish
the Museums Association of Tropical Africa and get recognition from UNESCO.
I remember at that time Desmond was busy trying to complete his
Prehistory of Southern Africa for Penguin. He was working like mad. He
was helping us with the conference, he was packing up. And I must say that
I admired his industry and the wonderful way that he and Betty could work
434
together- -not always in an enjoyable manner, because I think Desmond would
have liked to have played a bit more--but certainly in a very effective
matter.
Desmond was then very helpful to me later on in East Africa. We
exchanged off-prints, he put me in touch with various people, and I think
that it was this generosity of spirit to fellow researchers which endeared
him to many people throughout Africa and the outside world. He would
always send me his recent off-prints.
As a scholar, Desmond has been really rather remarkable. He has a
breadth bigger than any other scholar in African archaeology because he s
worked on the earliest archaeology, the archaeology of the Early Stone Age.
Though he was an expert on the middle Stone Age and the later Stone Age,
he s also worked on geomorphology, working on the geological history of the
Victoria Falls region, and he s worked in rock artsome of the best early
work on rock art in the Central African area was put together by Desmond in
collaboration with colleagues in Southern Rhodesia. He also worked on the
Iron Age and on the Historic Period, and he s written articles on forts of
the later period of the nineteenth century, and also on sixteenth and
seventeenth century Portugese sites, so he has this fantastic breadth.
Contribution to Museum Development
Not only was he an archaeologist, but he was a fantastic museum
curator, a model for many of us. His museumhe took the time to become a
member of the Museums Association, not only of Great Britain from which he
came, but also of South Africa, so he lived in many different worlds. He
took the advantage of the opportunities of these different worlds, and his
museum was remarkable. It was certainly remarkable to me, coming down from
Uganda, because it was a well-maintained museum, there was very good
discipline, but it was a fantastic teaching museum. You could go around
the museum and learn. It wasn t over-specialized to the extent that only a
few people in that particular discipline could get anything out of it, but
it was displayed in such a way that there was a popular appeal whether it
be in archaeology, ethnography, or in history. Desmond was one of the few
people who really made the maximum use of the idea of a museum by including
history, by bringing things up to the present day. In East Africa at the
famous Coryndon Museum, the main museum of Nairobi, that was much more a
natural history museum, and an ethnographic and archaeological museum, but
it wasn t as good an ethnographic museum, and it certainly didn t have the
history coverage.
Desmond made sure that all the record keeping, the acquisitions, were
fabulous. He assembled a fantastic staffhe s always had a good eye for
picking people of great ability to work with him, and this can be said of
the people he had in Northern Rhodesia. People like Jim Chaplin who was
435
the inspector of monuments, and Barrie Reynolds who was the keeper of
ethnography, to name just two.
Another thing that Desmond did is he felt that museums should be
living, so he was a great supporter of the idea of the folk museum, of the
crafts museum. Just outside Livingstone he helped establish a museum which
was a folk museum in a sense in that it brought together the different
peoples of Northern Rhodesia so that you had different houses
representative of the different ethnic groups; so you could go to this
little village, a few miles outside of Livingstone, near Victoria Falls,
and see the way people built the houses in different parts of Northern
Rhodesia, how they made their pots, all their different crafts. On
different afternoons there were different ceremonies taking place, so you
could see masked dances--the average urban African doesn t see masked
dances, but this way you could see masked dances. You could see how copper
ingots were made, how different artifacts were made, and these artifacts
were often available for sale in the folk museum shop. I think this was a
great contribution. At that time there was a folk museum in Niamey in
Niger, but elsewhere this idea hadn t really been thought out.
So Desmond made a fantastic contribution to museum development in
Africa, and I m only too sorry that the work that he started was never
really continued. Although museum development continued in North Rhodesia,
which then became Zambia, the care in museums hasn t been followed up, so
that you have people sitting in offices in Lusaka who don t make sure that
objects are accessioned, that don t make sure that sites are maintained in
the field. They don t maintain a sort of tradition of excellence in
temporary collections.
I remember one of the very fine exhibitions that Desmond had was the
exhibition marking the centenary of the discovery of Victoria Falls--!
still have the catalogue from it on my shelf, and it is a wonderful
coverage of the historical side of the discovery of the Falls. He
collected documents from different sources, both in Britain and elsewhere
in Central Africa, to try to give the visitor to the museum an idea of the
importance of the event. The handbook is still invaluable.
From Livingstone, Desmond went off to Berkeley--African archaeology
was in its infancy in 1961, and courses hadn t been taught in African
archaeology in America, they had hardly been taught even in Africa. In
fact, in 1962 ] .
taught the first class in Eastern Africa in African
archaeology. There had been a few classes taught in South Africa, at Cape
Town. Desmond was very much a pioneer, a pioneer who we looked to, and he
was someone who in his career trained more African archaeologists at the
doctoral level than anyone since that time. He and his students have
really built up the study of African archaeology.
Desmond, because of his contacts and his fantastic networking
ability, brought to Berkeley students from Japan, from different parts of
Africa and Europe. He made sure that the people who came from Africa got
436
scholarships. He worked with the Leakey Foundation and tried to get
students from Zambia, students from East Africa, from West Africa, from
Ethiopia, from Kenya, so practically all the regions of Africa were
represented in the student body at Berkeley. He worked closely with
students, and so he would often have an African student working with an
American student, and I think that this helped us to develop the
discipline, and it meant that amongst young scholars you had a wonderful
rapport.
A Framework for African Archaeology
Desmond also helped to develop African archaeology as an important
aspect of African studies. There s hardly a book on African studies that
came out in the early 1960s, whether it be the volume by [Robert A.] Lystad
or others, that were trying to say what African studies consisted of, which
didn t have a chapter covering archaeology by Desmond Clark. This, in the
early sixties, was done when Desmond was extremely prolific. He was not
only writing research articles, he was writing different books, chapters in
books, and so on.
In the 1960s he worked on trying to build up a framework for African
archaeology in a series of Burg-Wartenstein symposia organized by the
Wenner-Gren Foundation. The first one which he did, I think, was with
Clark Howell and he was trying to work out, as it were, geological
sequence, and work out the early sequence of humanity, etcetera, and the
links with the natural sciences.
I went to a second one of his conferences, the one in 1965 organized
by a former colleague of mine, Bill Bishop, and Desmond Clark, which was
important in looking at the terminology in African history. This became a
handbook for all archaeologists working in archaeology. We looked at all
the different terms that were being used; we looked at what was acceptable,
what wasn t acceptable; we looked at the basis on which names had been used
for different cultural events in Africa. We decided that the word
"culture" had been overused, and we tried to put the naming of the
technologies, and so on, and industries in Africa Stone Age, Iron Age, on a
much more technical basis, on a much more precise basis, and I think
everybody appreciated the work that was done. This was greatly important
because previously new names had been given every time a new discovery had
been made, so this was very confusing to the general public. I think it
helped to open up African archaeology to African historians. We have to
remember that this was taking place at a time when a better dating
mechanism was available in Africa. We were getting isocometric dating--
that s dating by radioisotopes, like radiocarbon dating and later on,
potassium argon dating, for the very early period. This meant that we
could get a universal time line, so instead of relating different Stone Age
industries to one another on the basis of typology and what the things
437
looked like, we could put them into a universal time-line through these new
scientific techniques.
Desmond was very important by working closely with the scientists at
Berkeley, like [Garniss] Curtis, and with working together with many other
people, not only for getting these new techniques accepted, but also for
publicizing them. By publicizing them, people began to realize how much
more valuable these techniques were. This meant that the funding agencies
were much more liable to give us aid, and I think Desmond s willingness to
serve on many of the funding agencies, like the Leakey Foundation, and
provide many of the most appropriate references for grant proposals, helped
the discipline immeasurably.
Another thing, I think, that Desmond did, and I pity his poor wife
and students some times, is he gave himself very freely to others in the
discipline. If you asked Desmond if he could give a talk in your
university he would come down and give a well-prepared talk which would
infuse your own students and your own supporters, in that university. I
remember in particular him coming down to UCLA on several occasions coming
down, talking to our volunteers. He always attracted a great audience. He
always had great slides and was very good at enthusing volunteers, in the
receptions after his talks. He loved talking about his work to people who
expressed interest.
Here I just have to mention that Desmond was always willing to trade
slides with his colleagues. This helped us a great deal because it meant
that if you were teaching archaeology you had access not only to your own
research in your own neck of the woods, but you had access to all those
places which Desmond had visited, and Desmond had visited a great number of
places. He worked actively in South Africa, in Central Africa, East
Africa, Ethiopia; he worked in the Sahara, he visited West Africa. In
1986, Desmond s students, led by Glynn Isaac, held a conference to
commemorate Desmond s retirement from Berkeley and a special t-shirt was
produced showing the travels of Desmond over Africa and practically the
whole of Africa was colored in different ways: solid colors to show places
he had worked; less solid colors to show places where he had done research,
places like Sierra Leone and so on; and other areas where he had only just
visited. Desmond knew, or probably knows Africa better than any other
scholar in our field.
One further thing about Desmond, which I should mention, because it
is important, is that from the mid-1960s, when African archaeology was in
its infancy in the States, a group of archaeologists decided that they
should get together every two years, and this is how, ultimately, the
Society of Africanist Archaeologists began as a biennial meeting of
archaeologists. The first meeting was convened by one of Desmond s
students, Charlie Keller, in Illinois in the 1960s, and many of the other
people at that meeting were also Desmond s former students. It was
Desmond s enthusiasm which ensured that a biennial meeting that started
438
less than twenty people has now grown to a gathering the last gathering was
in Cambridge, in 2000, which attracted well over 200 scholars.
It says a lot for Desmond that the discipline has grown ten-fold, and
a lot of it has been due to his training of people, who have trained other
people, and they have all wanted to keep in touch, to network, and I think
everybody s terribly pleased when they see Desmond at one of those
meetings, such as in Cambridge in 2000, even though he had been seriously
ill and was still in a rather weak state. And at all these meetings
Desmond always talks; he always has something useful to say, often now
referring to discoveries in the past. I think many young scholars don t
realize the value of the pioneer work done in the 1930 s, forties, fifties,
and so on, by scholars like Desmond Clark.
[tape interruption]
Desmond as a Teacher
I would like to continue now by talking about Desmond as a teacher.
Desmond, I think, is one of the best teachers of African archaeology that
there has ever been. He began on a personal level by teaching the people
that he worked with in Northern Rhodesia, and probably before that in
Somalia. In Northern Rhodesia he began a project which I think has paid
results in different sorts of ways, the Winter school for archaeology. It
was a two week event. He later joined hands with his assistant Ray
Inskeep , who went on to teach at Cape Town and University of Cambridge
before going to Oxford. He and Ray developed this intensive program which
brought amateur archaeologists as well as professional archaeologists
together to Livingstone. They had lectures by leading authorities from
South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and Northern Rhodesia. They tried to
intensively examine their discipline; they looked at the methodologies;
they handled material from museums; they went on a field trip. Many of the
most adventurous, most interesting, creative scholars in African
archaeology, after about the late 1950s, were products of that field school
tradition: people like Carmel Schrire, who s now at Rutgers, the late Glynn
Isaac, and many others.
People trained there, they were connected to new ideas there, but
what they principally got there was an enthusiasm for their discipline.
They received an idea of the interaction between different sources of
information. If you wanted to be a good archaeologist you had to know your
field area; you had to know your oral history; you had to interact with
people; you had to use the archival material; you had to know the natural
history, and so I think this was important. This was very different from
the European approach, and sometimes the American approach, which was
perhaps rather sterile, looking at artifacts rather than trying to put
artifacts and humanity into a broader, fuller, environment.
439
In East Africa we modeled our 1962 Winter school at Makerere
University College on Desmond s successful model. We produced a little
book entitled Prelude to East African History. This was an invaluable
experience. We had Glynn Isaac as one of our lecturers and that provided
continuity between the two school traditions.
When Desmond went to Berkeley his teaching was very informal, and
when I came as a visitor to UCLA in 1966, and Desmond invited me up to
Berkeley to meet his graduate students, what I loved is that he had his
seminars in his house, or he had at least one seminar a week in his house,
and he often had a visitor there. They drank beer, and coffee. It was an
informal, open-ended atmosphere, so that students didn t feel that they had
to be reserved. They respected Desmond, they respected his knowledge, but
he was open to them. He was their friend. I think this was terribly
important: this made it a very open discipline.
I saw that again in 1976 when I attended the Nice World Archaeology
Conference in Archaeology. It wasn t called that, it was called the Ninth
International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences. It was
held in Nice in [Sept.] 1976, and perhaps about 2,000 to 3,000 people came
together. What was very pleasing was how the Berkeley group kept together,
how they had this easy interaction with their professors, Desmond Clark and
Glynn Isaac. These were graduate students and interacted well, whereas in
France there was a great distance between the professors and their
students, same was true in Germany. I remember a glorious village square
dance with Desmond in the thick of it.
I think Desmond provided a model of how a good graduate school
approach should be: there should be informality; there should be this
knowing of every person as an individual, not just in the classroom, by
wanting to go to their field areas with them. Desmond visited many of his
students in the field. I remember one of his students who I helped to look
after, a man called Bassey Andah, who later became a distinguished
professor of archaeology at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. Desmond
came to visit him in Ghana, and he spent time with him working through his
stone tools, basically giving a seminar. He did it in a very gentle way so
that Bassey could accept this sort of careful reassessment of his material.
I think it meant a lot to these graduate students, and it meant that any
Ph.D. put out by Berkeley had the imprimatur of Desmond Clark and was a
damn good Ph.D. dissertation.
Desmond was also very helpful by serving on the committees of many
other students in the university. He was also interested in making sure
that the spirit of adventure was still alive. One of the programs that he
put his name to, and helped at a time when it was in difficulties, was the
University Research Expeditions program, run ably by Jean Colvin. This is
a program of people from the University of California running expeditions
in the biological sciences, archaeology, and ethnography, in different
parts of the world. They recruit people to go on these expeditions from
the lay world, who pay a certain amount of money, and so they become
440
sponsors of the project as well as participants in the project. The
expeditions normally last about three weeks. Desmond was one of the
enthusiastic people who gave his blessing to this type of approach to
research. Some of my own research in West Africa before I came to America
was helped by this project. He worked closely with other similar
responsive participation projects, and graduate students not only from
Berkeley but from other schools in the University of California have worked
using these funds in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America. I think
this says a lot about Desmond s confidence in the graduate student to run
their own projects. I think this is really quite important, and it s
something which is perhaps not as well remembered as some of his other
contributions .
Contributions to World Archaeology
It is perhaps important that I now say more about Desmond as an
archaeologist and his contribution as a world archaeologist. I think that
what he has done for Africa is that he has given Africa a sense of
integrity, stressing that it s a whole rather than a divided set of
regional studies. One of the things about African archaeology is we do
talk about African archaeology rather more than people in Europe, which is
a much smaller area, talk about European archaeology. He s tried to keep
it as a whole, particularly in his writings on the archaeology and
prehistory of Africa. He has also thought of Africa as an unity, so he
never cut off North Africa, as many other archaeologists have done. He s
also thought of Africa as central, not peripheral, as he discussed in his
important paper on "Africa in Prehistory: Peripheral or Paramount" [Royal
Anthropological Institute Huxley Memorial Lecture, 1974].
What he s always done is that he s tried to show that you can t think
in terms of little bits of African archaeology, you have to think of a
whole. So looking at the story of human beings, he kept in sight the idea
that you haven t got to look just at Eastern Africa, you have to look at
all the other areas. I think it s important that he s one of the few
archaeologists who has focused his attention on areas like the Sahara. He
also had students working in West Africa. I think there was a fixation
amongst early man scholars to just work in areas where the finds were much
better, particularly for bone materialin East Africa, parts of Central
Africa, South Africa, and to some extent Ethiopia. But Desmond was always
conscious of this need to look at the whole of Africa, and to look also at
this question of survival of archaeological remains. He s always supported
taphonomical studies, showing what survives and what doesn t survive, and
why it s important to try to get back to the nature of evidence. He
encouraged ethno-archaeology. He encouraged environmental studies amongst
his students, and so on, all of which gives a much better impression of the
process of site formation.
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The other thing which is important about Desmond is his attention to
detail. In his early work in Northern Rhodesia, which I think many people
now tend to overlook, he described his material; he drew sections, trying
to put it into horizontal location; he highlighted regional distributions,
all of which were very important. I think this contrasted to the much
better known scholars like Louis Leakey in East Africa who, who though he
worked in Olduvai Gorge for over twenty years, when he first published his
work on the Olduvai didn t draw a single site section in that volume which
was meant to represent twenty years of work. Whereas you could go to
Desmond s work from the 1930s and forties and he provides you with all the
data that you need.
I didn t want to go into any detail about any one of Desmond s sites,
I m sure other specialists have perhaps told you much more about that than
I can. I wasn t at any of the sites which Desmond has dug. His most
important site, I think to him, is probably Kalambo Falls, because he spent
a lot of time there, the amount of material is important, and it covers a
huge segment of time, an important site, at the frontier between Zambia and
Tanzania. It provides a link, in a way, between the famous East African
sites with their hominid remains, and the South African sites. One of the
important things about Kalambo, of course, is that he had organic remains,
which was different from many other sites. Organic in the sense of wood
remains , not much in the way of bone remains .
Another feature of Desmond s work is his idea about time and motion
studies, and I think this is because he was good teacher. He encouraged
people who had ideas, and I think of two of his finest students who carried
on some of Desmond s ideas were Glynn Isaac and Nicholas Toth. With Glynn
Isaac, Desmond established the very very best graduate program in African
archaeology the world has ever seen; no other African archaeologist has
ever done that. There was no better program in Europe, no better program
anywhere in Africa, or in North America, when the two of them were working
together. They attracted biological anthropologists to work with them, as
well as scientists working on dating techniques. They established a great
cohort of scholars so that at any one time there were a dozen to twenty
graduate students working in different parts in Africa, often working in
important groups. So one can say that many of the major discoveries in
African archaeology have been made as a result of Desmond s teaching and
passing on those ideas to other people. With Nicholas Toth and others he
explored the idea of replicating activities from the past, whether stone
tool making, cutting up the carcases of hunted species, or making use of
the detritus from tool making and animal butchery.
I think Desmond s greatest quality is his fantastic curiosity. He
knows how to ask questions. He doesn t sit still, he goes somewhere. I
remember him visiting me in Magosi, a site in Northern Uganda. He came up
to see us in 1963. He wasn t content with just looking at our site; he
went around looking at other sites and within a very short time had found a
rock art site which was under our very noses. This was the way of Desmond:
he just doesn t sitthough he loves a sort of glass of whiskey and good
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conversation when he does relax. He wanted to be on his feet looking at
places. If he was traveling anywhere and stopped for lunch he would get up
and look around him. I think this was something that he taught to his
students .
An Interest in Peoples, and People
And he wasn t just interested in archaeology, he was interested in
modern peoples. I think with the ethnographic approach, this has led him
to do work on the making of modern obsidian stone tools in Ethiopia. Very
few scholars have continued with this, with replication studies, but when
they did they excelled because of the stimulus Desmond providedNick Toth
at Indiana is perhaps the best maker of stone tools. Now he is far better
than the late Francois Bordes from France, or the late Louis Leakey from
Kenya.
Desmond didn t really do all these things himself, but he knew how to
recognize these qualities in other people and encourage them, and was
interested in their work. He was a facilitator, and I think that again is
going to be one of the things that we will value his work for. He was
always open to new ideas. He didn t stick at one thought. Though there
was the whole idea of pluvials in the 1940s and fifties, and you can see
Desmond somehow trying to fit his work in the Zambezi Valley and Victoria
Falls into that sequence. Then as soon as new ideas came along he was
willing to abandon the old pluvial hypothesis and work with the new ideas.
He s always, as it were, reinventing himself. He was never frightened to
say, "Well, this was wrong. I didn t have all the new approaches available
to me, and I m going to rethink this.." I think this is what makes him such
an exciting scholar.
On a personal level, Desmond has always been a joy to be with. I
remember several times when he stayed with us in Los Angeles: he is always
asking questions, looking around. He s got a constant interest not just in
archaeology but in university affairs, in plants that you re growing in the
house, books, colleagues, and the world in general.
I remember once when he came to Los Angeles--! can t remember the
yearand we were talking about the use of animals in Hollywood, and he was
excited to see a big lion in a cage on a trailer in front of him on the
freeway as we went down to the university. A lion in a cage, and this just
made the day for him, because we had been talking about the training of
animals, and how you get animals for films, and how they behave. I think
one doesn t quite realize how you can work in Africa and talk about Africa
and often see very little in the way of animals, but Desmond made sure that
he did see animals during his war years when he visited East Africa and was
in Somalia. These were great years for him in learning about the game of
Africa. He was very keen on birds, and fish. I think this came from his
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work on the Zambezi River as a boatman, and I think this excitement
remained with him all the time. Even now in his retirement he has
wonderful plants. It was always a joy to visit him in Berkeley, to see all
the different things that he had around him; he knew the names of plants
and could give stories about all the ethnographic items he had collected.
He and Betty were always very welcoming, they were wonderful hosts.
Even the last time when he wasn t seeing very well, Betty wasn t walking
very well, yet they have you for tea, and they bring out the cookies. The
old English charm is still there, the good manners. If you have a formal
meal it s always very elegant silver, very nice porcelain, and so on. He s
retained an English elegance in a brasher American world. In Africa he
tried to relate to Africa, and yet he retained the elegance, the dignity,
of his upbringing.
I think that perhaps is as much as I would like to say about Desmond:
he is a gentleman; he is a very fine scholar; he is a wonderful friend. He
is someone who s willing to see the future and adapt to it, and I think in
particular how he was one of the few people who accepted one of my great
friends in life, Jim Chaplin. Jim Chaplin was a homosexual who came to
Northern Rhodesia, worked for the meteorological service, but had a great
interest in archaeology. He didn t have a formal training, but Desmond
helped him along so he became the Assistant Inspector of Monuments in
Northern Rhodesia. I remember going to the Museums Conference in 1961, and
I didn t know why people weren t friendly to Jim Chaplin who had just made
a fantastic discovery at Ingombe Ilede, one of the key Iron Age sites in
Central Africa. But Desmond was always supportive, whereas other people--
I ve forgotten their names, and I won t mention themdisregarded Jim
because he was friendly with Africans, and perhaps because he was a
homosexual. Desmond respected him for his qualities as a human being, and
for his skills as a archaeologist, and was deterred from the gossip. He
wasn t a person who would be easily led to think badly by such things, or
from gossip.
All these things have endeared me to Desmond. We keep up a
correspondence. I sometimes get frightened if I see something written in
Desmond s hand because it s practically impossible to read, but it is a
sign that he regards you as a friend that he has bothered to write it in
his own hand.
I think if one evaluates Desmond in the whole world of Africanists I
would have to say that he is the foremost Africanist archaeologist of his
age; far greater than someone like Louis Leakey because of his breadth,
because he was a great teacher, because he was able to adapt to a changing
world. As a university chair, I think he s second to none. He was not
always necessarily the best lecturer because he can be long-winded and drag
a bit, but he always has a great amount of substance.
He s advanced the discipline of African archaeology in a way that
nobody else has, and the fact that we now have perhaps about sixty or
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seventy people lecturing in African archaeology in the States is due in no
small part to Desmond and his students. He has advanced African
archaeology in a way that nobody else has as a world discipline, and it s
because he has networked- -he s gone to conferences in a tireless sort of
way. He has been an ambassador for Africa, working in India, working in
China, and no other scholars have done this sort of thing.
As an archaeologist he s been willing to link with the other
disciplines. African archaeology has a place in the African Studies
Association largely because Desmond did take time to attend some of those
meetings whereas his modern counterparts don t. It is for all these sorts
of reasons that I think that Desmond is a great Californian academic; he s
a great world scholar. He s somebody who deserves to be remembered because
of his humanity, because of his dignity, his humility, and because of his
superb scholarship and his prolific achievements.
I feel honored to have been asked to participate by making this brief
recording. Thank you very much.
Merrick Posnansky, Professor Emeritus
of History and Anthropology, UCLA
Transcriber: Jessica Ross Stern
445
Martin Williams, November 30, 2001
Adelaide University, Australia
First Meeting Desmond in Carthage
In an earlier joint tape with Dr. Don Adamson we spoke about our work
in the Sudan and our work in Ethiopia. In this tape I want to backtrack to
the time when I first met Desmond, and that was on a bitterly cold, wet,
windy, miserable New Years Eve in 1969 in Carthage. A group of us had
traveled down by Land Rover from the United Kingdom. We had gone across
country through France and Spain, I believe--no to Marseille. We then
traveled on to Matta, where we collected a three-ton lorry, a rather
battered old lorry that we nicknamed Josephine, because she was incredibly
temperamental.
We then went by boat to Sicily where we tried out the vehicle, and
climbed Mount Etna on Christmas Eve, 1969, in a snowstorm and a blizzard. I
was the only one stupid enough to be wearing shorts. We then sailed from
Palermo to Tunis, and camped overnight in a closed-down hotel, so we camped
in the mud or on the veranda alongside this hotel on New Years Eve. There I
met a quiet, calm, distinguished looking gentleman wearing a brown anorak,
fawn trousers, or pale trousers; desert boots, I seem to recall; a well-
trimmed Jan Smuts goatee beard; lively, alert green-blue eyes; and he
introduced himself as Desmond Clark.
Now, we d been in correspondence for, oh, probably about two years
previous to that, because our original aim was of course to go and do some
joint archaeological, geomorphological, and surveying work in the
southeastern Libyan desert. I d worked there in the northern summer of 1962
with Captain David Hall, Royal Engineers, who was then an instructor at the
Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst. We d worked again the following year,
again the northern summer of 1963 this time. That had been an exciting
trip. We d found a significant number of archaeological sites. We d mapped
out and named a couple of hitherto quite unknown extensive sandstone
plateaus, one of them virtually the size of Tasmania, to give you some idea
of how big these were.
We d been in contact with Desmond, I think, via Professor Claudio
Vita-Finzi, then at Cambridge, who had worked in Libya and who knew
Desmond, or certainly knew of him. He had suggested that what was needed
was world-class archaeologists to come and take advantage of the fact that
here, scattered across the Sahara, was this abundant evidence of a former
human presence, multiple human presences, with wonderful rock art, with
artifactsEarly, Middle, Late Stone Age, Neolithic, and of course the
various relics from the Second World War. And yet none of this had really
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been looked at seriously. Well, it wasn t to be. King Idris, the Senoussi
king of Libya was deposed, and Colonel Khadafi came to power.
Our petrol supplies were waiting for us in Kufra Oasis, where the
Greek contractor, Katzarakis had collected them. So at very short notice we
were in the position of having a team of young servicemen from the Royal
Engineers, from the Royal Navy, all keen and eager to assist. David Hall,
now Lieutenant Colonel, I believe- -yes, I think so, at that time. Also,
with the blessing of the army, we had a group of scientists.
And Desmond at some cocktail party in Berkeley, I think, had met the
French archaeologist Raymond Mauny who said, "Ah, Adrar Bous ! That is where
you must go. However," he said, "there is no stratigraphy." But we did
just, we went to Adrar Bous.
Adrar Bous, 1970, Logistics and Adventures
We arrived in North Africa, appropriately at Carthage, the former
capital of Hannibal when he invaded Rome with his Carthaginian elephants,
and subsequently laid waste after his defeat by the Romans. Scattered
around were abundant shards and remnants of the earlier Carthaginian
empire. Here we were on what was an unusually bleak, cold start to a trip
across the Sahara. Air masses had come down from Greenland or Iceland,
torrential rain followed us all the way through to the central Sahara. I
remember we traveled through Algeria, through Tunisia first, of course,
through the mountains there. Then we came down- -quite a romantic trip,
really, through Tamanrasset, before then camping outside the Toggourt date
factory. We came through Biskra before then, and through Constantine, where
my father had been during the Second World War, reconstructing the bridges
there when he was with the sappers, the Royal Engineers.
We were constantly wet and cold and muddy, which is extraordinary
when you think here we were in the middle of the Sahara. Yet I recall that
Desmond never once railed against the elements. At every stop he would
disappear rapidly and come back with an arm full of Early Stone Age
bifaces, or other artifacts. He was obviously making excellent use of the
time when we were moving across through this wonderful terrain. We traveled
through Arak Gorge, one of the most spectacular gorges I ve ever seen,
reminiscent in many ways of the area where Lawrence with the Arab
irregulars led the attack from Wadi Rum down into Aqaba during the First
World War.
We finally reached Agadez, where we stayed in what looked like a
former French Foreign Legion fort, which was now the Hotel de 1 Air. We met
briefly with Henri Lhote (an authority on the prehistoric rock art of the
Tassili plateau), I seem to recall, and I think also with a couple of the
447
French ORSTOM team, possibly Jean Maley, but of that I m not totally
certain, and I think also the French archaeologist Jean-Pierre Roset.
We then deposited some of the gear and the three-toner, and traveled
northwards now, through the Air Mountains, incredibly rough terrain, to the
Oasis of Iferouane, with the Land Rovers. That was one main party. The
other party, led by Dr. Andrew Warren, was the dune party, and they went
off into the Tenere Desert and we then didn t see them for another couple
of months.
We reached the northeastern margin of the Air, and a little wadi.
Here the last of the half shafts of the Land Rovers gave out. They were
overloaded, the sand was soft, the terrain was rugged; we were still
relatively inexperienced in judging how best to drive overloaded Land
Rovers. So it looked as if we d come to a grinding halt. Desmond and I and
Andy Smith and Alan Pastron and David Hall looked at each other, as we were
part of the advanced party, and I can t recall whose idea it was, Andy s or
Desmond s or David s, but they found a local Tuareg who happened to have
three camels, and we hired a goumier, a former goumier who had worked as a
guide for the French army in the Saharaexcellent navigators. So we
manufactured some rope from balls of sisal, collected up some twigs for
fuel, deposited some of our unnecessary gear, took the bare minimum, and
Desmond and I and Zawi Bin Weni, our guide, with three camels, a couple of
black plastic jerry cans loaded with water, a few twigs on the back of the
camel, we set forth. That particular day was, I think, Thursday, January
the 22nd, 1970.
We set off in the afternoon, fairly late. I think it was about 3:00
P.M. We looked at and sampled a couple of alluvial terraces on the way,
including collecting some charcoal for radiocarbon dating. We made our way
the following morning up through a beautiful valley, flanked over to the
west by the main barrier of the Air Mountains, and with 100 meter, 150
meter high dunes on our right. From the flanks of the dunes there were a
series of alluvial terraces, that s to say flood plains of former rivers.
What was remarkable about those deposits were two things: one, they were
extraordinarily fine grained, at least in their upper portions, finely
laminated clays and silts, and of course that suggested a completely
different type of hydrological regime, relative to today, and climate; and,
second, there was archaeology both on the surface and within, and dateable
material.
We then cut out from the dune barrier immediately to the east of the
Air Mountains and cut across the sandy plain. Here we were traveling by
camel, and in my notebook I note that we spent a great deal more time on
foot than sitting cross-legged on these narrow, uncomfortable Tuareg
saddles, shaped in the front like a cross, where you cross your bare feet
and wrap big toe and adjacent toe around the neck of the camel, mutter
something that s meant to say, "keep going," or "halt." Then the camel does
its usual double-jointed act of suddenly going backwards rapidly and then
448
forwards rapidly and then backwards, like a concertina. Once you get used
to this it s not too bad, but it certainly takes more than a few days.
The second day meant a long day. We covered well over twenty miles. I
suspect it was probably close to thirty. It was a tiring day, but it was
very worthwhile from an archaeological perspective. We located what looked
like an abraded pot, blasted by the sand. When Desmond dug out his brushes
and dental pick and proceeded to brush away the sand Zawi watched like a
hawk, thinking that gold was about to appear. What emerged was a second
pot, beautifully decorated, slightly squashed, but otherwise complete, full
of Celtis integrifolia dried fruit, and surrounded ly bits of charcoal. I
recall there were shells of the large land snail, Limicolaria flammata,
which is an Acacia Tall-Grass Savanna snail. What we were looking at, in
fact, was one pot set above another, and I believe a burial beneath, but
that was not excavated.
From now on, the ground became progressively littered with an
abundance of this beautiful green stone, this silicified vitric tuff. We
were looking at Neolithic and older stone tools, grindstones, as we
progressed towards Adrar Bous, that we reached on day three.
We camped in what came to be known as the Valley of the Cow. Within a
very short time, Desmond and I had carried out a quick reconnaissance of
the adjacent parts of the mountain. We had located a couple of fragments of
horn core which later, when excavated, turned out to be a complete
Neolithic short-horned cow, Bos brachiceros, I seem to recall. From then
on, every day brought new finds. We realized that we were looking at an
archaeological museum; we had the Acheulean, we had the Levallois-
Mousterian, we had the Aterian, we had the Epi-Paleolithic, we had the
Neolithic, and possibly some Islamicor rather proto-Islamic would be more
correct, in the form of burials.
There was also an abandoned well, that probably dated back to the
late nineteenth century- -a circular well, over eight meters deep, that I
dug out. It took about three days. Just as I thought we were hitting pay
dirt in the form of damp sand, a sandstorm blew up and filled in the well
again. So logistically it was quite tough being at Adrar Bous, because
there was no surface water, there was no obvious means of accessing
subsurface water, there was obviously no food, there was very little
vegetation, we slept on the ground, we had the bare minimum. Yet the two
months that followed, I think, were among the most interesting and most
productive of my recollection. Despite the snakes and the scorpions and the
sandstorms, it was a very happy time.
There was one slightly grotesque incident, or a couple, in fact, when
we were briefly visited by two French travelersthree French travelers,
two men and a lady. They offered us wine. Well, it would have been churlish
to refuse, of course. I think at that stage we might have had a whisper of
whiskey left in the bottle, so that was offered in exchange. The French
lady looked contemptuously at her companions and said, "On v la des gens
449
qui ont du whisky, mais qui n ont pas de vin." "Those are people who have
whisky, but don t even have the bare necessities like wine." I can recall
the contempt with which she said it.
We had a visit from an extraordinary figure, Hugh Llewellyn Bevan-
Jones, who was an army psychiatrist. He had psyched us all and had given us
all 1Q tests before we set forth, because we were guinea pigs, in a sense.
Then he arrived. The day he arrived was a couple of days before Desmond s
birthday, or approaching his birthday. As a special surprise, he was going
to get a bottle of whisky. The rest of us, who d been dry for quite some
time, were rather hoping that the Land Rover would be loaded to the
gunwales with beer. And, of course, this chap arrived in lieu of the beer,
and proceeded to take out his black notebook.
Now I was digging in a pit. In fact, I dug a large number of pits,
some of them to the depths of nearly seven meters through what seemed at
the time a bit like concrete, but it gave us a very good record of the
depositional history that went back well in excess of half-a-million years,
albeit not continuously. So it was very, very interesting. This chap
arrived in his spats with his little ice-cream coat, pulled out his little
black book, took one look at me and said, "Ha! I know your sort: sublimated
masochism. "
Then one of the young soldiers went over to Desmond, and with what he
thought was army humor said, "Sorry Professor, didn t want to overload the
Land Rover, didn t bring the whisky." If you ve ever seen a strong man
begin to crack, that was as close as I ve ever seen it. However, it turned
out it was a practical joke, and I think there were several bottles of
whisky, at least I hope there were, because Desmond certainly deserved
them.
By the time we wrapped up, and even on the very last day when Desmond
and I went for a nostalgic tour around the seven-and-a-half-thousand year
old former lake shore, here again his eagle eye spotted in the diatomite a
bit of hippo rib cage with, if my memory serves me right, a barbed bone
harpoon point embedded in it.
So it was extremely productive, and I collected well over 350 samples
for grain-size analysis, for mineralogy, for dating, for pollen, for
shells, and so on. I must have logged something like nearly a hundred
sections, dug more pits than I care to remember, climbed many hills, and we
managed to load the essential material onto the three-tonner, packed
carefully, and that particular group from the expedition set forth across
the Sahara. That was Andy Smith and Ron, I think Ron Reeves, who was an
army mechanic, REME, Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, driving
that particular vehicle. That was later.
Before we actually left the Air Mountains, Andy Smith and I went on a
camel trip through the mountains towards Arlit looking at the magnificent
rock engravings of animals, of humans, with a Tuareg guide called Mamunta.
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And with three camels and a baby camel in tow. This was a very good
induction into some of the traditional practices of the Tuareg, because
every time we came into someone else s territory our guide would recite his
genealogy. It was an interminable process, somewhat reminiscent of the
genealogies in the Old Testament: so-and-so, the son of so-and-so, the son
of so-and-so. You were essentially establishing your credentials. It was a
bit akin to the modern equivalent of taking out of your hip pocket your
name card. This was a much more gracious process.
It also struck me at the time how free the society was in the sense
that it was quite a matriarchal society, the young women and the old women
would own their own animals, and they were in charge of the wells. It was
entirely our responsibility to make sure that we had their permission
before we could proceed into the adjacent territory.
The Work in Ethiopia. 1974
During the long desert nights at Adrar Bous, which incidentally means
the mountain of the Bous, whatever Bous might be, and we never found that
out, Desmond and I had discussed the idea of joint work in Ethiopia, and
joint work in the Sudan. In my earlier joint tape with Don Adamson I ve
explained how we found ourselves in the Sudan, and I ve explained our
meeting up with Betty and Desmond back there in 1973, and discussions that
Desmond and I had had in Addis Ababa in December of 1971 when he and I and
others presented the preliminary results of the Adrar Bous work.
Well, in the event, we did both. We prepared a substantial National
Science Foundation proposal for two-years funding in Ethiopia, and Don and
I undertook to provide the logistic support for the work in the Sudan,
which is already adequately described. So what I ll do now is say a few
words about some of the highlights of the Ethiopian work, beginning with
the January-February 1974 expedition in the Ethiopian Rift, where we were
initially based in the Awash National Park, a most beautiful campsite under
shaded acacia trees with vervet monkeys. Incredibly mischievous little
thieves, they used to come down and steal the sugar or steal anything else.
I had a tiny little plastic flask with a loose top, which had about
an inch of over-proof rum. One of these wretched vervets charged down onto
the table and right in front of Betty s nose snitched this little plastic
flask of rum, took it up into an adjacent tree, must have gotten the top
off, must have had a swig, and the next thing I hear was a plop as the
monkey landed in the Awash River. Then this bedraggled miserable looking
monkey crawled out a bit further down the stream. So obviously even drunken
vervet monkeys can still survive the crocodiles and the hippos, at least
the rudiments of swimming was there.
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That was a beautiful site, and we worked at a place called Lake
Besaka that during the first season was a somewhat brackish lake with
flamingos, with brine shrimps fed from hot springs. The local tribal people
were the Karriyu nomads, or semi-nomads. They actually took quite strong
exception to our presence there. They mistook us, I think, for Israelis who
had worked there some years earlier on the Amibara cotton plantation, which
resulted in the loss of some of their traditional grazing land. They d also
been squeezed out by the Awash National Park, so again they d lost some of
their traditional land. They let it be known that we were far from welcome,
that they were going to come and kill us and burn our vehicles.
I was doing a spot of leveling. Desmond and Steve Brandt were
excavating with Ken Williamson. I m not sure if Andy Smith was with us
then. I suspect not. He was certainly with us in Sudan. No, he wasn t with
us on that trip. My young antiquities officer from the highlands was
holding the staff, and the Karriyu were telling him vividly what they were
going to do with him, whereupon his hands began to tremble uncontrollably
and the staff was waggling around furiously. So I said, "Look, look, this
is no good," and picked upon the largest, tallest, fiercest looking Karriyu
and made him my senior staff man. He held the staff absolutely vertical,
and his surveying was excellent.
The following day the local police commissioner, or district
commissioner, came and had a quiet word, or not-so-quiet word with the
Karriyu, told them that they were carrion underfoot and that we were the
children of the emperor, the late Emperor Haile Selassie I, whom we met,
incidentally, in Addis Ababa in December, 1971, at the Pan-African
Prehistory Conference. We had been to a reception in the palace. He had
opened the conference proceedings in Africa Hall with its beautiful
stained-glass windows.
That is where Louis Leakey had the good sense or nous to go and
obtain some sort of football goalposts, and using I think the hotel sheets
from the Ras Hotel had rigged up a type of device so that for the first
time slides were visible. Previous to that, because there were no curtains
in Africa Hall, all the sun would shine through and none of the color
slides could be seen, and few of the overheads. So Louis got a standing
ovation, not only for his eloquence and for what he was talking about,
because he was an inspirational speaker, but also, of course, the fact that
we d actually seen what he was talking about. However, I digress.
Coming back to Lake Besaka. In the 1975 season, the lake level had
gone up 50 centimeters. This was really very interesting, because the
flamingos had gone and fish were appearing in the lake, and it was fresh.
This raised all sorts of interesting questions: was it rising because of a
diversion of water from the Metahara sugar plantationthe Dutch manager of
which was a great friend of ours . Metahara is the small town at the foot of
Fantale volcanic caldera in this particular portion of the Ethiopian rift.
Or was it rising for some other reason? It was important to know why, and
it was intriguing, because this was at the time of extreme aridity, it was
452
the height of the drought, and all the other lakes in Ethiopia were
dropping in level. Some of the lakes, like Lake Lyadu down in the Afar were
drying out altogether, and yet here was this lake rising. And it was rising
to the extent that it was flooding the main road from Addis Ababa down to
Dire Dawa. It was also in danger of submerging the one and only railway
line to the coast, from Addis Adaba down to Djibouti via Dire Dawa.
We excavated also during the 1975 season at the cave of Pore Epic
(French for porcupine). This particular limestone cave was located 168
meters above the valley floor, and my memory serves me well because each
morning I used to carry a loaded jerry can of wate*. (four-and-a-half
gallons, twenty-odd liters), 168 meters up this thirty-degree limestone
hillslope into the cave itself.
It was a tragic time at this time because it was the time of the
revolution, during which the late emperor, Haile Selassie I was deposed. It
was a time of settling of old scores. One particular late afternoon Desmond
and I had come down from the cave. One of our workers was down in the wadi
bottom, where he was being throttled by a local tribesman. I trust Desmond
will forgive me if I remind him and Betty of this particular story. Desmond
was on the other side of the wadi, poking around for artifacts, and this
tribesman was throttling an Ethiopian laborer. The chap, the tribesman, was
frothing at the mouth, red eyed, doubtless on some sort of local drug.
I was wondering, rather ineptly, how best to separate them when
Desmond came prancing across the wadi, not a speck of dust on him, and
prodded the tribesman in the tummy with his walking stick and said very
loudly, "Now look here, my good man! What do you think you re doing?" Quite
clearly, the tribesman thought this was the ultimate secret weapon because
he fled, he just deflated and fled and was never seen again. It was
extremely effective.
We also excavated a Middle and Late Stone Age site, which was a
beautiful site, a spring site, called Aladi Springs, where the Kota Galla
people used to load up their water skins, goat skins, and water their
cattle, and where we excavated an almost perfect stratigraphy, layer cake
stratigraphy, through some terminal Middle Stone Age, I believe, and
certainly into some excellent Late Stone Age, with a lot of dateable
material. Beautiful Melanoides tuberculata shells and other oblagate
freshwater aquatic gastropod shells. Aquatic shells is sufficient. So that
was a very happy season.
We then planned further work, and we did a reconnaissance trip up
into the highlands, up to nearly 2000 meters above sea level, to the
beautiful grassy plains of Gadeb that we ve talked about already in our
earlier joint tape with Don Adamson. Wonderful site. We had several seasons
there, very productive, excellent Early Stone Age, and a number of possible
hippo butchery sites. A possible first, which was burnt rocks heated to an
453
excess of 500 degrees Celsius, possibly early human fire, used by Homo
erectus. And excellent from the point of view of stratigraphy, you know,
step trenching, because the river itself had cut down through the welded
tuffs, through the diatomites, through the sediments that contained the
artifacts, giving these bank exposures that simply needed a bit of trimming
up, a bit of clearing, a bit of digging, to reveal the stratigraphy. That
was both productive and happy.
Following on from that the last visit there in 78, which was a tragic
time for Ethiopia. It was the year of the murder of Brigadier Tafari Bente,
who was then the head of the government, by Mengistu. But it was also the
very sad death of Bill Morton, a very close friend of Frances and myself, a
British geologist who had been the head of the geology department in Addis
Ababa. He was shot by the militia on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. This led
to some problems for Desmond s team up at Gadeb. Frances and I left about a
couple days before Bill was due to join our team, and of course he never
arrived. So that was very tragic.
The Team in the Middle Awash, 1981
Two years later we d planned to be in the Afar Rift. That didn t
eventuate. It wasn t until 1981 that we worked in the Middle Awash, and the
wonderful hominid-bearing sediments of the Afar, geologically and
archaeologically and from a paleoanthropological point of view a treasure
trove, but one of the most stark of places.
The local Afar people, I must say, I found very endearing. There was
one particular occasion when the local Balabat, the tribal chief, came
across the river, across the Awash, from one of his camps with his warriors
in tow with their rifles, AK-A7s, and castrating knives, looking suitably
fierce. He was complaining; he said, "The young men are very angry. Your
vehicles are frightening the cattle. Something must be done about it." Then
he softened slightly. I d been doing a little bit of doctoring down in one
of their camps, a baby that had fallen on the fire and got rather badly
burned. I had some basic medicines, something I always try to do when I m
in those parts.
He agreed that he could probably guarantee our safety for I think the
equivalent of about twenty cents per day. Desmond, who was nicknamed the
Gobaz Shemagle, which means the sort of noble or magnificent old man, or
the tough old man, came out of his tent where Betty was resting and said,
"What! Twenty cents?" Because this is twenty cents per man per day. Tim
White was there and a group of us, Rob Blumenschine and Carol Sussman and
Jack Harris a wonderful team.
Desmond said, "Oh no, no, no. Far too much! Offer him half." Anyway,
the chap, the Balabat understood quite clearly that his offer was being
454
turned down, and then in high dudgeon proceeded to stalk away. Whereupon
Betty rushed out of the tent and said, "Oh Desmond, you silly old man, I m
worth more than twenty cents even if you re not! Call him back!" I think
the final price was about thirty cents, and honor was restored on all
sides.
That was extremely interesting and very productive, and has been well
described, the essence of that particular initial pioneering work in the
Middle Awash in 1981 was published in a major article in Nature in 1984. Of
course, Tim White and others have been out there since, during the years
they ve been able to get back inthere s been a certain amount of
fighting, and there s been a bit of political nonsense from Antiquities and
so on. They ve always brought back excellent results.
Seasons in India. 1980 and 1982
I wasn t involved with the later work there, but I just want to say
very briefly a couple of words about something else. This was our work in
India in 1980 and 1982, again January-February--the optimum season for
working. This was in north-central India, in the valleys of the Son River
and the Belan River. The sites themselves were located along about a 70-
kilometer reach of the Son River and the Belan, about a half-a-days drive
south from Allahabad, the old city, sacred city of the junction of Mother
Ganga, the Ganges River, the Jamuna River, and the mythical Saraswati
River, an underground river. So every blue moon, every ten or fifteen
years, a great pilgrimage, the Kumbh Mela, is held at Allahabad where 10 to
20 million pilgrims converge on the sacred waters at the tributary of the
Ganges at the Jamuna. We were lucky enough to see that during one of those
two years.
The first thing is that we were working closely with the late
Professor G. R. Sharma and his team of archaeologists, one of who is now
head of that department in Allahabad University, that s Professor V.D.
Misra, who was a very tough, competent field man, and J.N. Pal, who is now
a senior lecturer in that department, and a number of others: Umesh
Chattopadhyaya, a very engaging character who went on to do a Ph.D. at
Cambridge, and his wife I think did likewise. A great team of devoted and
extremely competent assistants, laborers, surveyors.
We traveled in style, we camped in style. We had wonderful tents with
great draperies and hangings, and on one occasion we even traveled up into
the mountains by elephant to excavate a Mesoolithic rock shelter where some
of the local Bega people showed us how to make fire by twirling bits of
stick into softer wood underneath. So this was a fascinating time.
We initially had a certain mind set to overcome, because a lot of the
earlier work was in the old tradition of Paleolithic archaeology in Britain
455
before Mary Leakey had shown that there s not much point really excavating
river gravels, or excavating derived artifacts. Yet, throughout the world
there was this tradition of looking for Early Stone Age in river gravels,
where almost by definition they would be abraded, they would be
transported, they would not be in primary context, they wouldn t really
tell you very much.
So one of the first things we needed to do was to redefine the
stratigraphy, locate sites that were in primary context, persuade our
colleagues from Allahabad that working on river gravels waswell, in the
words of Desmond, "Last time I worked on gravels was in 1938." The unstated
point he was making, of course, was that they really weren t very
productive.
We were successful. We located a number of primary contact sites.
There was good Acheulean, there was excellent Middle Stone Age (Middle
Paleolithic), Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic in situ, excellent stratigraphy,
and even, as a bonus, during season one Keith Royce and I--Keith was my
assistant found the volcanic ash from the great Toba eruption. Toba was a
volcano that erupted from northern Sumatra 7 A, 000 years ago. It was
probably the greatest eruption in the last two-and-a-half million years.
What was interesting was this was the first time that any Quaternary
volcanic ash had been found in India. Of course, the moment we put it on
record in the scientific journal Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology,
Paleoecology, the India geological survey and the Indian university
geologists went out looking and it was all over India. I think the full
significance of this find has yet to seep down into archaeological circles
in India and elsewhere, because what almost certainly ensued was dramatic
global cooling, and possibly a substantial number of extinctions, plant and
animal and possibly human.
I won t go into that side of it. I ll just talk about one particular
incident in our second season there. It was night-time and there was a lot
of excitement in the camp. It had been raining, there was shouting, the
villagers came out bearing wooden torches flaming away. A bunch of dacoits,
or bandits, had apparently attacked the village not far from where we were
camped. They had gone into the house of one of the traders there, a small
trader, to get him to hand over all of his earthly wealth, whereupon his
daughter, with great presence of mind, had seized his spear and thrown it.
It got the head dacoit in the buttock, and he fled. The police were called
in and a search ensued. The next morning a rather bedraggled dacoit was
found in a ditch not too far away with a rather bloodied and battered
buttock. He said something about he d been gored by a savage cow. Well, I
suppose, in a certain sense he probably had. So that provided a little bit
of excitement.
There were two highlights that I recall, archaeologically, from that
season, that second season. One of them was that at the site of Baghor we
uncovered a complete interesting shrine, made of variegated quartzite from
the Vindhyan Hills nearby, of a type identical to that made by the local
456
Bega tribal people. What they didn t realize was that this shrine was
sitting on a deposit dated to 11,000 years before present, capped by
sediments dated to about 8,000 radiocarbon years before present, and it was
identical to the ones they were making today. As they came past they looked
at us and they said, "That s one of our shrines. You must look after it
properly.
"
Also, at one of the Baghor excavations, one of the three there, were
the footprints of the sambar deer. This was a Mesolithic site. To match it,
up in the hills in one of the rock shelters that we visited, with the rock
art showing rhinos falling into pit traps, there were beautiful color
paintings depicting the sambar deer. So that was aesthetically as well as
intellectually satisfying.
Finding at Esh Shawal. 1983
At the end of the India trip we had planned to continue our work in
the Middle Awash, back in Ethiopia. That in a sense is another story,
because we converged on Addis Ababa in late 82. We were simply told by the
authorities that we were not allowed to go and work in the Middle Awash,
end of story. So Peter Jones and Don Adamson and I--Peter was part of the
team; he d been working with Mary [Leakey] at Olduvai--decided well, we ll
go and do some work in Sudan. Peter hit upon a trove of confiscated ivory,
elephant tusks. You remember that Henry de Lumley had described the wear
marks at Terra Amata on ivory tusks, arguing they were used by humans for
digging. Well, here we had these elephants that had been killed by poachers
and they had the identical wear marks on the tusks, so obviously you didn t
have to invoke human use. That was a nice piece of applied and experimental
archaeology by Peter.
Don and I set forth in late, returned to the site of Esh Shawal,
about 350 kilometers south of Khartoum on the right bank of the White Nile.
We dug a number of pits, including two down to six meters, took some
undisturbed cores, and at this very moment, in late November, 2001, I ve
just been talking to Professor John Prescott, and we re just getting the
first of the OSL ages, luminescence ages, for these sediments. It looks as
if some of the former White Nile lake clays and sandy clays could be as old
as 300,000 years old, from depths of about five meters.
So that s about all from me, Martin Williams. I d just like to
conclude with a brief tribute to both Betty and Desmond. It has been a joy,
a privilege, an honor to work with them both, and with their colleagues; to
know them both and get to know their family. I remember staying with
Desmond s mother near Cambridge some years ago in the early 70s, and, of
course, through Elizabeth in Wollongong we ve known that side of the
family.
457
I recall with enormous pleasure Desmond s seventieth birthday in
Berkeley, the celebrations for that when there must have been nearly 5,000
people at the grand dinner when President Reagan sent a celebratory
telegram of congratulations. It was a wonderful occasion, with Phillip
Tobias giving a potted version of the life of Betty and Desmond, sung to
the various Gilbert and Sullivan tunes. So it was great fun.
Working with Desmond has been stimulating, exciting, sometimes
irritating, never dull, and almost invariably fun. God bless Desmond and
Betty, and thank you both for the privilege of working with you.
Transcriber: Jessica Ross Stern
458
Jack Harris and Robert B lumens chine, January 23, 2002
Rutgers University
Impressions of Desmond as Professor
Harris:
B lumens chine:
Harris :
B lumens chine:
I m Jack Harris. I entered the University of California,
Berkeley, African Prehistory Program, graduate program, in
1970 and I graduated in 1978 with my Ph.D.
I am Robert Blumenschine here with Jack Harris. I started in
the Berkeley African Prehistory Program under Desmond in
1979, and completed my dissertation in 1985.
We happen to be at the same institution, Rutgers University
in New Jersey. It goes without saying it s our combined
effort, Robert and my combined effort, that we ve modeled
our African Prehistory Human Origins Program after the
Berkeley program in which Desmond played such a tremendous
role. We ve also incorporated African students into our
program and created a critical mass of American students and
African students on the Berkeley model for combined efforts
in the research in human origins and in African prehistory.
My first impression in class was of this very
cultivated English voice. Here was I, coming from the
Commonwealth, but one of the lowly colonies in New Zealand.
I remember the detail that Desmond presented in class. His
encyclopedic memory, and the way he presented in a
fascinating way these sites, just captured me completely.
To be truthful, when I first went to Berkeley I really
wasn t thinking of African prehistory. I went there and I
had to do a year of undergraduate study. It was really
Desmond and Elizabeth Colson, with her contribution in
cultural anthropology of Africa, that persuaded me that I
wanted to make a career out of this field.
My first introduction to Berkeleythe first time I went
onto campus it had, I guess, been written that Desmond would
be my advisor. So I went in to meet him. In my youth I was
barefoot and long haired. I was surprised by the contrast,
as Jack just noted, with this very cultivated, immaculate,
well-spoken, British gentleman who was the father of African
prehistory. I all of a sudden felt very ashamed at my
appearance.
Harris:
Blumenschine;
Harris:
Blumenschine;
459
In that first meeting, Desmond informed me that he
was--he had hooked up with Professor G. R. Sharma in India
and was going to begin a series of field studies in India in
collaboration with the University of Allahabad with G. R.
Sharma, in order to try to introduce some of the techniques
in early-prehistoric archaeology to the Indians. The Indians
were experts in more recent time periods, beautiful
excavators, very well organized, but they had very little
experience with the lower and middle and upper Paleolithic
of India.
I was shattered when Desmond told me this initially,
because my dream of going to Berkeley was to do fieldwork in
Africa. Yet, as we ll see later, the Indian experience was
absolutely marvelous with Desmond, and he did also get me to
the African continent for fieldwork later on.
Going back to his classes. They were really a model for how
one should teach a course, because there was the necessary
course content on sites and the artifacts, and then we would
go up to Piedmont at the end of the class, and he d
demonstrate the artifacts. That, in a sense, was the time
when we all, I think, got a chance to see the more human
side of Desmond, because he was so engaging, and so
enthusiastic about the subject that you couldn t help but be
captured by his presentations of the artifacts and handling
the artifacts. His enthusiasm soon rubbed off on you. It
truly captured my imagination to think of these early
artifacts. He had such wonderful collections that ranged
from the Oldowan through to the later Stone Age. So we got
just wonderful exposure to African prehistory and it s no
wonder we finished up in this field.
I was a reader for Desmond s undergraduate African
prehistory course, a tour de force of the prehistory of the
whole continent from the very earliest archaeological traces
right up through the Iron Age. I do not believe there is
anybody in the world who can competently teach such a broad
range, broad sweep, of prehistory over such a huge area of
the world.
Jack is right, Desmond s memory is absolutely
encyclopedic. He could remember the dates of these sites. He
could remember the percentages of scrapers and hand axes.
And we had to remember these things, [laughter]
And he expected us to remember them as well. I was a reader
for this undergraduate course three times, and even the
third time through, being the person who helped him manually
Harris:
Blumenschine:
Harris :
460
run his slide presentation during lectureshe had been to
all of these wonderful sites, had very old glass slides as
well as more recent oneseven the third time through on
this course I was still taking copious notes. I don t think
anybody will ever have such a comprehensive handle on the
detail and full sweep of African prehistory as Desmond has.
And I think that s reflected in the fact that nobody has
written a text on African prehistory since Desmond s
milestone on the prehistory of Africa that came out about
1970, and still is really the only text that comprehensively
covers African archaeology. There ve been other texts, but
none of them with the level of detail and scope and
authority that Desmond commanded.
Desmond s graduate seminars were fine examples of academic
discourse in a high-level teaching situation, as well as the
social aspects of being a prehistorian. Desmond was always
like this: in everything he does he s a marvelous academic
but also a marvelous person who pays attention to the social
situation.
In his seminars he would assign copious weekly
readings to the students. This always took the form of about
a twenty-minute session at the end of each seminar where he
would read off the list of journal papers and books,
including very obscure sources, that he would be making
available to the students in the following week. We would
all be furiously copying down these spoken references in the
hope of getting it right. He knew the material backward and
forward, and again, he expected us to know it as well.
Yet the seminars were run with a wonderful civility
and social atmosphere. He often had the seminars at his
house in the evening. We would work very hard throughout the
whole three hours of the seminar, but usually toward the end
of the seminar Betty would bring in some wine and some beer
and we would be able to talk about the material in a
somewhat more relaxed manner, and of course the seminar
often spilled over into informal discussions and general
conviviality.
Some of Desmond s anecdotes--. It was also an opportunity to
get to know Desmond better because he would normally invite
a couple of students to dinner beforehand. So for starving
students, those were also a highlight of the week. It was
usually roast beef, or something like that. Betty was the
most marvelous cook. That was just a wonderful occasion
again to get to know Betty and Desmond better, and to see
what a team they were in just about every endeavor in life.
B lumens chine:
Harris:
461
Following on in terms of Rob s comments about the
seminars. Those were times when we really learned in depth
about African prehistory. They were always done in such a
convivial way.
Jack s reminiscing about dinner reminds me of my first meal
at the Clark residence. I had put on shoes and trimmed my
hair a bit and wore decent clothes this time because I knew
Betty would be there. Betty had prepared this wonderful
meat-and-potatoes meal. At the end of the meal I exclaimed
to her, as my highest compliment, that I was stuffed. She
said, "Young man, do you know what stuffed means to a
British woman?" which embarrassed me tremendously and I
never forgot it.
Between Desmond s mentorship, and Betty s hospitality
--well, they were absolutely peerless mentors of young
students getting involved in this interesting field.
My first experience of Desmond and Betty in the field was in
1974 when I went to Ethiopia. Desmond was determined to work
around the Awash Station, in the Awash Valley. I met them in
Addis. It was my first experience of how they operated as a
team, outfitting the expedition in Addis. We d work hard all
day, and the Dekkers were there, so we d sometimes go to
their place, but we d always have drinks before dinner and
talk about the day s events. Again, one saw the human side
of Betty and Desmond.
Introduction to the Middle Awash. 1979-1980
Harris: Then my first real fieldwork with Desmond was in 1979. I was
living and working in Nairobi, and Desmond invited me to go
into the Middle Awash with him on the first preliminary work
there for a couple of weeks. Betty wasn t with us at the
time, and I remember we went around the stores in Addis,
buying food and so on. Then we went out with another
student, Bill Singleton from Southern Methodist, and a
couple of Afars, all in one vehicle we went out into the
Middle Awash. That was very exciting. We saw the potential
of the area. It was only for two weeks and then I returned
to Nairobi.
Then in 1980 Desmond invited me to participate in the
first fully-fledged interdisciplinary field project in the
Middle Awash. That really was an exciting time. It was a hot
area, but it was so exciting in the sense we were doing lots
462
B lumens chine :
Harris :
B lumens chine:
of survey. I can remember, I guess I was in my late thirties
at that stage, and we were literally covering tens of
kilometers a day on foot. Desmond would be right up there
and I think that tremendously impressed me: his vigor and
stamina. And again, we worked very hard during the day and
then there was this convivial time in the evening when
people could relax, get together, discuss the day s events
with a drink before dinner.
I ll just add to that, that this was my first exposure to
fieldwork in remote areas of Africa. The Middle Awash was
truly remote. From the last tarmac road our base camp was
only about seventy kilometers from the last town, but it
took us, the first time, at least seven or eight hours to
cover that seventy kilometers to get to the Bodo area where
Desmond had decided we should set up our camp.
Things were fairly sparse, yet Betty especially
managed to arrange necessary creature comforts for us. There
was a privy. We had a cook named Haddis whom Betty would
beckon from all the way across camp: "Haddis! Haddis! Come!
Come!" And he would come. She would make sure that the
dinner would be as good as it could.
Desmond, on the outcrops, was absolutely amazing. He
was typically in the lead in the survey. There was no
outcrop that was too steep or hill that was too high for him
to climb up to the top, just to make sure that there wasn t
a wonderful handaxe occurrence or some other find to be made
up there.
And to get his sort of perspective when we were finding
these new occurrences of artifacts from his previous work in
Africa, I don t think any of us had been in an area on such
a vast scale. I d had some experiences in the Lake Turkana
Basin, but never on the scale of vastness of the exposures
in the Middle Awash, and of course this has been borne out
by the subsequent work of Desmond, Desmond and Tim White, in
the remarkable discoveries they made in the nineties that
have contributed so much to new knowledge about human
origins .
Desmond was fond of survey, but he was even more fond of
excavation, I think. For the Middle Awash project this
worked out very well because Tim White was a co-Pi on that
project and Tim would be covering a lot of ground all the
time. But Desmond would find a good archaeological
occurrence, and of course archaeologists are supposed to
dig, so we would be sitting in the sweltering sun,
excavating for hours at a time. Desmond was a real task
Harris:
463
master, but again, at the end of the day, you always knew
that if there were comforts to be had in camp that he and
Betty would provide them.
And he gave us so much responsibility in conducting these
excavations that it was just an exhilarating experience.
Rob, just on a personal note, you say I taught you to
drive on that expedition, but I never taught you to drive as
fast as you drive, [laughter]
The results of the 1980 season were just overwhelming
in terms of we found some new hominids, there was a complete
archaeological sequence there from what we thought was the
Oldowan through to the present day. It was on that basis
that Tim White and Desmond coordinated a multi-disciplinary
project which included more investigators than on this
earliest expedition in 1980.
We returned in 1981 and we were faced immediately with
permit problems, but it gives you some idea of Desmond s
persistence and perseverence that in a sense we sat there
for six weeks where he endeavored in every way to get the
group into the field. It was a great disappointment to him
that we didn t, so we returned. But again, he kept up his
enthusiasm and interest, and in the early 1990s he returned
with Tim White, with a multi disciplinary team, and it was a
model for the way one undertakes systematic work. It really
got Desmond into the earliest part of the archaeological
record, and he was co-author on some outstanding
publications that in a sense pushed our understanding of the
function of the earliest stone tools attributed to the
Oldowan, and also it gave some idea of the diet of the
earliest stone tool-using hominids about 2.5 million years
back. In a sense it was Desmond s crowning glory in his
career in African prehistory, and what a way to go out, in
the earliest part of the record.
In India with Desmond and Betty. Fieldwork and Festivals
B lumens chine: I was involved with Desmond s large-scale project in India
that he organized in collaboration with G. R. Sharma of the
University of Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. The project
involved the first systematic survey for Paleolithic sites
in the Son River valley, in Madhya Pradesh.
The University of Allahabad group had been excavating
464
Mesolithic sites with high precision throughout India, but
they called upon Desmond with his years of expertise on
Stone Age sites in Africa to help them develop a Paleolithic
field research and laboratory research program in India.
This, as far as I know, was Desmond s first major and
systematic foray outside of the African continent. It would
prove to be the beginning, I think, of his efforts to expand
the kinds of procedures and ways of thinking from the
African continent that he had been so fundamental in helping
to develop to other parts of the world, eventually including
the Nihewan Basin in China.
The fieldwork in India was a complete contrast to that
in Ethiopia. They were going on simultaneously. We worked in
India for three seasons, beginning in January of 1980, and
then returning two more times, once for another major field
season, and then the third time focusing on laboratory work
and the production of a volume in conjunction with our
colleagues at the University of Allahabad, which would
represent the first major volume or one of the first major
volumes on the prehistoric archaeology of India.
The contrast with the Middle Awash experience couldn t
have been greater. The Middle Awash was remote, very
sparsely populated, the conditions very grueling, the camp
life comfortable, but spartan. India was palatial, the camp
was an absolute palace, large tents, almost a small city
that we built, given the large field crews of talented local
excavators that the Indian colleagues had trained over the
years and who they had enlisted for this major research
effort with Desmond. Each tent was the size of the standard
university professor s office, and there were two people per
tent. Each tent had its own servant, who would bring morning
tea and hot bathing water and serve all of your domestic
needs. The meals were excellent, although I think all of us,
Desmond and Betty included, would routinely come down with
stomach problems, from the very beginning of the field
season, and it would continue through the end.
Desmond showed his remarkable energy and determination
on this field project as he did in all other endeavors that
I ve seen him involved in. Our camp was approximately four
or five kilometers away from two major excavations that we
started in India. Each day, each morning we would march out
toward the sites, literally march out with Desmond in the
lead, dressed in his clean, and it seemed somehow- -Betty
somehow managed to make it look like a pressed Safari
outfit. Desmond with his hat and the feather, walking with
his cane, leading this team at a brisk pace along the berms
465
that separated the rice patties out to the sites each
morning. We would usually come in for lunch with Desmond in
the lead and then head out again in the afternoon, out to
the excavations.
While on survey out in India one of my fondest
memories of Desmond- -indeed, he did this in the Middle Awash
as wellis walking with his cane, which he didn t really
need to steady himself except on the toughest exposures, but
the cane s main purpose, it seemed, was to flip over the
interesting artifact. Desmond was extremely fond of finding
hand axes or other very well-formed tools, flipping them
with the cane and remarking at how beautiful a piece it was.
Desmond was intrepid during the Indian work. I very
clearly remember we had one Mesolithic site, it turned out
to be, which had a series of post holes that seemed to be
demarcating a number of small huts--lean-tos, more like it.
These were exposed over an excavation area of probably over
a hundred square meters, so the only way to get a good
photograph was to somehow get up high.
Well, we were in the middle of flat agricultural land,
so Desmond and G.R. Sharma instructed our local helpers to
build a ladder of lashed pieces of bamboo strung up in a
very flimsy-looking A frame that was supported by groups of
people holding four guide wires, or ropes, which permitted
one to get at least twenty or twenty- five feet above the
excavation area so that it could be photographed.
1
Desmond,
of course, was the first person up this ladder. He scrambled
enthusiastically to the top to get a first good look, and
stayed up there for some time taking his photographs and
making his mental observations.
I remember clearly, as well from the Indian work,
Betty sitting in the tent, but right near the door, during
the daytime, with the flap open so that her table was
partially in sun. She worked all day long producing her
beautiful and accurate drawings of the stone artifacts that
we had been finding from survey and excavation. I think if
you look through many of Desmond s publications, certainly
this Indian volume, the beautiful artwork in there is
produced by Betty.
Betty would often complain. She d say, "Oh Desmond!
Not another handaxe. We ve already drawn ten of those!" She
For an illustration of this, and of the following reference to Betty
Clark in the tent, see http: //sunsite/Anthro/clark/ index. html.
466
would complain outwardly about this task, but you could tell
that she loved it and she knew she was good at it, and that
she was very proud to contribute to the science.
II
Blumenschine: Betty contributed to the science of the project, but she was
also largely responsible for keeping the project running,
certainly handling the accounts, making sure that the
domestic arrangements were such that all scientists would be
comfortable, and, I think, very much taking care of Desmond
on a day-to-day basis, much as he might have resisted her
efforts .
I will relay one more story about India. We did work
very hard, of course. Desmond was a task master, because he
knew he had a responsibility to develop a prehistory for
India, much as he had for the African continent, and we
worked very hard. But Desmond and Betty also knew how to
have fun.
I remember during one field season when we celebrated
the Hindu holiday called Holi, which is the one day in the
year when the Hindus allow the caste system to break down
such that members of different castes, including the lowest,
can interact with one another. This takes the overt form of
people dressing up in white tunics and baggy white pants,
and throwing colored water at one another. And, of course,
all of the students and most of the Indian participants on
this project were fully enthused by this celebration. We
were all getting very much tie-dyed, dominantly purple, as I
remember.
I was initially surprised, but in retrospect I
shouldn t have been, when Desmond and Betty came out to join
the celebration, dressed in their white tunics and pants,
and armed with this paint, which they were throwing at
others and gleefully receiving from others as well. The day
ended in a wonderful feast with Desmond and his co-Pi G.R.
Sharma presiding. This will remain, for me, one of the
finest examples of Desmond s talent for running an
expedition, both from the scientific point of view, but also
from the social point of view. He certainly taught me, and
I m sure a lot of other people, how to run a happy camp and
get the work done.
467
A Pioneer in Many Ways
Harris:
B lumens chine;
I think Desmond will be most remembered for his fieldwork
and his synthesis of African prehistory. Also, I think,
he ll be remembered by many of us--and this is more his
understated nature and contributions in his contribution to
the Pan-African Congress. He was there at the first meeting
in 1947. He and Betty played the major role in organizing
the Congress in Zambia. He prided himself on being at all
those Congresses. Some of the behind the-scenes roles that
he played were being on committees, organizing the articles
of the association, chairing meetings. There are many
memories of Desmond at these Pan-African Congresses--first
of all at Melka Kunture being out on the excavations that
the French team had taken, and taking a critical look at
those field sites.
But then in 1977--this was the thirty years since the
first one--his retrospective of the Congresses that had
taken place beforehand was just unique. It was a superb
presentation with slides. It was his detail of remembrances
of field excursions associated with those Congresses, the
important discoveries that were announced at those
Congresses, that live in my memory. In subsequent Congresses
there s never been such a presentation. And that just gives
an example of the eclectic and encyclopedic nature of his
mind, that he could recall these details, but he could also
synthesize it in a way that no other scholar in the field of
African prehistory is capable of.
When reviewing Desmond s career, I think one forgets
that he was a pioneer. When he first went out to Africa in
the mid- to late 1930s as a young man of twenty-one there
was only Louis Leakey working in East Africa, Thurstan Shaw
working in West Africa, and A.J.H. Goodwin and van Riet Lowe
were working in South Africa. When you think about that, and
the innovation, the creativeness throughout the whole of
Desmond s career! His magnificent excavations at Kalambo
Falls, and opening up large lateral areas of excavation.
Mary Leakey got a lot of credit for that, but in the real
sense it was Desmond that pioneered that method of
excavation. He was a pioneer in so many different fields.
Another area where Desmond really set the precedent was to
introduce into African prehistory the importance of the
ecological setting in which prehistoric hominids were
operating. When Desmond started his work in Africa, and
surely through the sixties and well into the seventies, the
dominant mode of investigation in African prehistory was to
468
construct culture histories of particular regions. Desmond
did this beautifully for south-central Africa, as Leakey and
Shaw and Goodwin and van Riet Lowe did it in other parts of
this vast continent. But Desmond additionally had an
appreciation for the environments in which he was working
and the environments that existed in the past that he was
excavating.
He had a trendsetting paper in, I believe it was 1970,
comparing some key stone artifact assemblages from different
parts of South Africa, including Twin Rivers, southern
Africa. He was contrasting the nature of the artifact
assemblages to the reconstructed paleo-environments for
these areas. He was one of the first people to appreciate
that understanding African prehistory and human origins was
not simply a matter of constructing the nature of
technological or tool evolution, but it was truly a more
holistic endeavor of trying to use the artifacts which are
the most abundant traces of the vast majority of human
prehistory, to use these artifacts in environmental
contexts, to understand the behaviors of the makers of these
tools.
I think it s fair to attribute to Desmond the
tremendous advances that have occurred in the field,
especially since the late seventies and up through the
present day, in understanding the ecology and behavior of
these human ancestors.
Harris: And following up on that, it s both from his understanding
of the ecology and animal life on the African continent, and
also his looking at the site s spatial relationships that he
began to get into the function of stone tools. One of his
seminal papers was the elephant butchery site, Mwanganda
Village. He also looked at where there were other large
animal carcases spatially associated with artifacts. He was
the first to propose this hypothesis of the use of sharp-
edged flakes in butchery practices. And he followed that up
in many ways from his observations of the African ecology
and Africans living on the continent. One of the highlights,
I think, of his career was working in Ethiopia when he
observed the use of scrapers in Ethiopia being used for
scraping hides.
In another context, it was through his life- long
interactions with Sherry Washburn, who was very interested
in non-human primate studies , that he began to use the
modeling of non-human primate studies. One of his seminal
papers uses the work of Bill McGrew, his study in Senegal of
chimpanzees in the most arid area. It shows, again,
Blumenschine :
Harris :
Blumenschine;
469
Desmond s tremendous eclectic interests that he got into
ranging patterns of hominids and using the distribution of
resources on a modern landscape to help explain the
distribution sites in an ancient setting.
In short, it s very accurate to say that some of the
leading-edge research that is being done todaynot only on
the African continent, but elsewhere, dealing with early
human originsvery much owes its roots to the pioneering
work that Desmond did, and that he started when the origins
of humanity in Africa were scarcely known.
I think the final point that Rob and I would like to make
here is how important an influence Desmond has been in our
two careers, and how his influence continues in the way that
we organize and conduct our own research and our own program
at Rutgers .
The greatest contribution I think that Desmond made in
my career is the way he carried out the Berkeley program,
the opportunities that he gave young students. Here was a
man, the most distinguished scholar in his field, and he
expounded his ideas to students and encouraged them to
conduct fieldwork to test some of his own ideas. He realized
he couldn t physically carry out all this work in a
lifetime, and I think that s the way we sort of propagate
the field of African prehistory today in our own Rutgers
program.
My final thoughts are that human origins research is known
perhaps mostly by the treachery among its practitioners,
particularly those involved with describing and interpreting
the fossil hominid finds. Desmond has managed to avoid that
his whole career, and he has taught many of us how to
practice this science in a gentlemanly manner. He is the
ultimate gentleman and a fine model for the way all of us
should conduct ourselves professionally in this field.
Transcribed by: Jessica Ross Stern
470
Excerpt from April 18, 2000 interview with J. Desmond Clark
Conversation on the Problems at the Livingstone Museum
Troy: I have an update on the situation with the Livingstone Library.
We ve been in contact with Gillian Boal, who s the rare books
conservator over here at Cal Berkeley. She had been at a workshop
and had been training with Sherelyn Ogden, who I think is at the
University of Minnesota. She s also a conservator. She had
consulted several years ago on behalf of the USIA in Zambia in the
library situation and wrote a report that strongly recommended
that the roof be repaired.
Clark: Oh, really?
Troy: Yes. Now, this rainy season has caused the ceiling to collapse.
She had predicted that this would happen in her report she is
assuming that they do mean the ceiling of the library. She hadn t
had a chance to read the Daily Telegraph article, but we re trying
to get that to her. She says that the main diaries and important
books are in the main museum, apparently moved there some time
ago. The roof of the main museum was not endangered, or showed no
obvious signs of previous water damage.
Clark: Now, you see, what this could be is that the Livingstone letters,
when we were there, were mounted between two sheets of glass with
a wooden frame on a wooden support, so that you could pull one of
these out like that from being inside a sort of box, so to speak.
You could pull a leaf out, if you see what I mean, and read both
sides of it, and you could put it back and pull the next one.
They were always in the main museum.
And the notebooks of David Livingstone that we had, they were
also on exhibit in the main historical gallery of the museum. But
all the rest of the material, including of course the maps were in
the library.
We had the maps mounted in big vertical cases, so that you
could put two maps on opposite sides and swing them round. But
they got rid of those. They mounted some of the maps on big
stands, probably six foot by four foot or something, and they
mounted them with scotch tape. And of course, what that s done is
made dreadful marks on the maps themselves. These are maps that
go back to the sixteenth century, seventeenth century, or even
older, of course.
471
Troy: She goes on to say, and this again is coming through Gillian Boal,
so I need to contact Sherelyn directly, and I ve emailed her, so
we should get a response. She was told that the damage to the
library roof was from several rainy seasons, and obviously, this
last one was the final straw.
Clark: It was certainly leaking in 1988 when I was there, and that s what
I said in my letter to the president. Did I show you that?
Troy: I didn t actually see the letter, but I know you wrote to him. Or
emailed him, yes.
Gillian goes on to say, "I was encouraged because it might not
be such a disaster as it appears." However, she says, "She
[Sherelyn] says they really do need some support and training.
They are so underfunded." She did give me Bob Barclay s name at
the Canadian Conservation Institute. He too has consulted
apparently in Zambia. And she said, "I will email him and ask
what he knows .
"
What I then did was to forward to the International Federation
of Library Associations, IFLA, the addresses that you had used,
both the president s address, President Chiluba, and also the
Katanekwa folks, both Nicholas and Vincent, and also Francis
Musonda, the National Museums Board, and simply told the gal at
IFLA to get a letter off. They may be inundated next week in
Livingstone and Lusaka with all kinds of emails and letters and
faxes.
Clark: I hope I have a copy of the letter to Francis Musonda, but I think
it went email, you see. I sent off another letter to the
president by Federal Express. Federal Express wouldn t take it at
first because it didn t have a street address. It s just, "State
House, Lusaka." I said, "It s absolute nonsense." It s rather
like asking for a street address for Buckingham Palace,
[laughter] So I made up some street address. But let me go and
see if I can find those things, because you should look at them.
Troy: [tape interruption] Desmond is showing me letters that he wrote
on April 15 to both Dr. Francis Musonda, the National Museums
Board in Zambia, and also to the president, the Honorable F.
Chiluba in Lusaka. I need to make copies of these, so as I
communicate with the people in IFLA, I ll have your wording.
My sense of it for the IFLA folks was to have them state their
concern and their willingness to be supportive, rather than being
outraged. I thought that was more diplomatic.
Clark: Yes.
472
Troy: [reading] You say, "...the international community is aware of
this situation, we have seen reports in the national press in
Britain. And I will raise the matter again," you say, "at the
meeting of the Society of African Archaeologists in Cambridge
this coming July, and representations to UNESCO, to Britain,
and to the European Union are likely to follow from this."
Good. And then, "Under my direction, the museum built up a
very valuable collection of historical documents, books,
manuscripts, and maps, as well as collections of ethnographic
materials relating to the people of Zambia, and prehistoric
collections that document the early history of Zambia s
people. At that time, the museum undertook research relating
to Zambia s past and engaged the active involvement of the
population in the villages through traveling exhibitions we
distributed from the museum. We began to develop the interest
of the people in the records preserved, and in searching for
more. This outreach was of major importance in stimulating
popular interest in Zambia s past."
These are very positive things you re saying, Desmond. This
is good. Yes, and then the business of theft, unfortunately, an
important Makishi mask stolen from the museum was found a few
years ago by Interpol in Brussels, but the museum did not even
have the funding to have it sent back to the museum. No funding
for field research, no funding to repair vehicles.
Now, my concern, Desmond, is what happened to that 250,000
pounds voted by the European Union?
Clark: Oh, well, that s for the library. I don t think it s gone yet.
It wasn t long ago that the roof collapsed. When was it, a month
ago, March, something like that? It will take probably six months
at least for whatever is left of that money to trickle through to
the museum.
Could you read that letter to Francis?
Troy: Yes, I ll read the whole letter to you.
Clark: I d like to know that I didn t say anything dreadful, but I think
Francis sent the president a copy of that as well.
Troy: I ll read it:
"Dear Francis: I hope that all goes well with you and your
family. I am very sorry to have to write to you in connection
with the tragic destruction of historical archives in the
Livingstone Museum. This is a disgraceful situation, but I
understand the reason why the roof was not repaired and
collapsed due to the museum being starved of funds for proper
473
maintenance, conservation, and most other duties of the staff.
It is dreadful that this has come about, that even the staff
are unable to carry out their duties because there is no
funding for research or routine preservation of collections.
I have written to Nicholas Katanekwa in Livingstone, to the
director of the Livingstone Museum, and I have written to the
president of Zambia. I am enclosing a copy of the letter
which sets out what I think of the situation, and I hope that
perhaps the president, if he was unaware of the deplorable
state of the museum funding, will do something to ensure this
is rectified.
The Bancroft Library at the University of California at
Berkeley is taking the matter up with the International
Federation of Library Associations, and they will be making
representations to national agencies. I will raise the matter
again at the meeting of the Society of Africanist
Archaeologists in Cambridge this coming July, and
representations to UNESCO, to Britain, and to the European
Union are likely to follow from this.
The international community is aware of the situation, and you
may have seen reports in the national press in Britain. I
have no doubt that the National Museums Board has made its own
representations, but somehow the funding does not filter down
to the museum and the people who need it. Perhaps it is now
time for a public inquiry to be made. I am sure that you must
have already raised this matter with the board members and
that they are taking active steps.
[ am much concerned, as you can understand, having spent a
large part of my life building up that museum and its
collections, and it is not good to see the deplorable state
that it is in today. I do hope that you will make every
endeavor to ensure that your board takes such steps as may be
necessary to make sure that not only the Livingstone Museum
but other museums are provided with adequate funding so their
staffs can carry out the responsibilities they have to the
people of Zambia.
Please let me know what the situation is, and I will in due
course write you again about this and other matters. With
warmest greetings and best wishes, J. Desmond Clark, Professor
Emeritus of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley."
Clark: Yes, nothing he can object to in that.
Troy: No, very diplomatic.
474
Clark: And the letter to the president.
Troy: I ll read that letter if you d like.
Clark: Yes.
Troy: "Your Excellency: It is with much distress that I write to you
concerning the destruction of priceless historic records due
to the collapse of the roof of the Livingstone Museum during
the recent rains. When I was last in the museum in 1988, the
roof was leaking and rain water was collected in tin cans in
the library floor. Nothing was done to repair the roof, with
the result of the ensuing tragedy. I do not know the extent
to which these original documents have been destroyed, but I
do know that they are extremely valuable, and some of them are
unique and cannot be replaced.
I was director of the museum from 1938 until 1961, when I came
as professor of anthropology to the University of California
at Berkeley. I have continued to take regular active interest
in the museum and the national monuments since I also was
responsible for founding the Monuments and National Heritage
Commission, and was secretary of the Victoria Falls Trust.
Under my direction, the museum built up a very valuable
collection of historical documents, books, manuscripts, and
maps, as well as collections of ethnographic materials
relating to the peoples of Zambia, and prehistoric collections
that document the early history of Zambia s people. At that
time, the museum also undertook research relating to Zambia s
past and engaged the active involvement of the population of
the villages through the traveling exhibitions we distributed
from the museum. We began to develop the interest of the
people in the records preserved, and in searching for more.
This outreach was of major importance in stimulating popular
interest in Zambia s past. Though the historic archives
contain mostly the records of explorers, missionaries, and
even government officials, these preserve the knowledge of the
people, the customs and the country as it was when they knew
it. It also, of course, provides the written oral history of
Zambia s people. Many of them are unique records of the
history of Zambia s population, and I have to say that it is a
scandalous situation, a disgrace to the country and people of
Zambia, that so much destruction should have taken place
because of the insufficient funding of the museum to enable
building, maintenance, and the proper conservation of the
collections it contains.
The staff of the museum have been starved of proper funding
for a number of years now. The building has not been
475
maintained. The security is lax, resulting in thefts and even
sales of collections, and the staff are at a standstill when
it comes to the research they need and wish to do, both in the
field and in the laboratory in the museum. An important
Makishi mask, stolen from the museum, was found a few years
ago by Interpol in Brussels, but the museum did not even have
the funding to have it sent back to the museum, no funding for
field research, no funding to repair vehicles.
I am sure that you are unaware of the deplorable situation and
would be anxious to ensure that the main archives of Zambia s
earlier history are preserved for all time in their national
museum. I spent about a third of my life building up the
Livingstone Museum, and I still retain a deep, ongoing
interest in its welfare. I would appeal to you, therefore, to
ensure that the museum can once more fulfill its obligations
to the Zambian people and make adequate financial provisions
available to the staff for the restoration of an active museum
conservation and outreach program. I have written to the
director of the National Heritage Commission and director of
the Livingstone Museum, and to the secretary of the National
Museums in Lusaka, all of whom I expect have made
representations of this kind.
I very much hope that we may rely upon you to ensure the
future of Zambia s heritage. I am, yours very sincerely, J.
Desmond Clark, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University
of California, Berkeley."
Clark: You would like to have copies of these.
Troy: I recorded all of that, and I think through this recording, I can
certainly make representation to IFLA of your concerns.
Clark: Yes, that will be very good.
476
African Archaeology at the millenium: retrospect and reaction.
By J. Desmond Clark
It was six decades ago on the sixth of January 1938 that my research
in African archaeology began. This was in Livingstone in the Zambezi
Valley, six miles from the Victoria Falls. The potential of the area was
considerable and the excitement of having one s sites at the back door, so to
speak, was all sustaining. We were ready to go and sixty years later, I am
pleased to say the excitement is as strong as ever supported by the great
discoveries and advances in the discipline of the years in between when
prehistory became science and the interdisciplinary team research has
begun to squeeze some of the blood from the stone artifacts and other
cultural evidence left by the toolmakers. These advances in methodology,
chronology, in understanding of paleo-ecology, in tracking the human
lineage and of the ability to develop meaningful databased scenarios were
undreamed of when I started off in 1938. The potential for the next decade
is even greater with the input from genetics for tracking ancestral
movements of African peoples in the more recent as well as the more
ancient past. These advances in understanding Africa s past have taken
something more than one hundred years, and appreciation of its global
contribution to humanity s ascendency in the world today.
By 1900 the French in Northwest Africa had begun to make
important discoveries of assemblages of extinct mammalian fauna of
Pleistocene and Pliocene time periods and with them the search and
discovery of stone artifacts belonging to several different time periods.
This was the time when European science was in a turmoil still following
the findings of Darwin, Wallace, and Huxley on the origins of our own
species. The depth of the record from the geologists such as Lyle also
477
provided the evidence of the human presence in relation to past climatic
and environmental events as also of course did that of the antiquarians, we
can now call them archaeologists, Bouche de Pertes, Lartet, and Christie
and many others. So by 1859 Bouche de Pertes bifaces from the Somme
River terrace gravels were vindicated by Hugh Falconer, John Prestwich,
and John Evans as to their great age and association with long extinct
animals. Thus began the forging of the framework that gave us the
Palaeolithic Age, the oldest part of the Danish "Three
Age System" for
classifying prehistoric tools. The Palaeolithic emerged from the
excavations in gravel pits, in river terraces, and the excavated stratified
sequences in the caves clarified with a nomenclature and classified in the
early years by de Mortillet for the Upper Palaeolithic stage in France. The
geomorphological sequence in the river valleys elucidated by the Abbe
Breuil for example and the Neandertal and Cro-Magnon burials in the
lower and upper stratified layers respectively in the caves provided the
means of separating a Middle and an Upper Palaeolithic stage. There was
however no reliable method of estimating time and scholars resorted
largely to guesswork, some nearer some further from the truth such as the
estimate of 500,000 years for the beginning of the Pleistocene now seem to
be nearly 4 times greater. Dating was attempted in relation to the
glacial/interglacial record of the Alps and to correlated changes in sea-level
so that at least a relative time depth was achieved by the early part of this
century. This was the background against which prehistorians began work
in Africa.
In both North and South Africa, large numbers of stone artifacts
sometimes with fossil fauna occurred on extensive sites in the open, in
river valleys, lake basins, mound springs and in caves and rockshelters.
478
These finds were classified according to the Western European
nomenclature which was strictly taxonomic. Ensuing problems with this
nomenclature resulted in new names being introduced to describe African
assemblages that differed sufficiently from European groupings (known as
"industries") to require a new identification and definition. For the Stone
Age in northern Africa and the Sahara French and English prehistorians
were able to retain the European subdivisions with their broad cultural
entities, but in southern Africa, though parallels could sometime be seen
with the European sequence, the distance from Europe was considered to
be sufficiently great and the cultural variability especially in the later
prehistory, sufficiently considerable that an independent nomenclature and
terminology was introduced in 1929 by the pioneers in Southern African
archaeology John Goodwin and "Peter" van Riet Lowe. The Stone Age
Cultures of South Africa with its later ammendments is the basis for the
terminology that is now adopted throughout the whole of the continent
south of the Sahara.
Before the 30 s there was almost no one doing any archaeology in
those vast tropical savanna regions in between the north and south on the
Stone Age and as far as I can ascertain nothing at all on the Iron Age. The
prehistoric rock art in the Sahara, first brought to light by the explorer
Heinrich Earth in 1854, and of course the Nile Valley were exceptions.
The amazing civilization along the Nile in Egypt that so impressed
Herodotus and the other Greek geographers and historians, lasted for a
thousand years with even earlier developmental stages. Its relationship to
the Levant is well known but its influence on the rest of Africa to the
south, east, and west is only now being studied more systematically for its
relationship with the indigenous peoples of those regions. The history of
479
research in Egypt, still dominated rightly by the political and social events
of Dynastic times, began with Napoleon s team of savants and architects in
1800-1802. They showed for the first time the full glory and splendor of
Egypt s past, and made even more understandable and exciting by
Champolion s decipherment of the hieroglyphic texts in 1822. This alas
soon led on to the whole scale lootings by the western world to fill their
museums and private collection? with antiquities lifted from the Dynastic
ruins. Work on the antecedent years, the Pre-Dynastic came later and are
known chiefly from Sir Flinders Petrie s classic studies of the cemetaries
and the grave goods with the burials, the ceramic s, stone artifacts and
other perishable remains, from which he developed his system of sequence
dating that gave us a relative chronology for the autochthonous farming
communities along the Nile. This method has stood up well against
radiocarbon dating with few emendments.
Systematic work on the earlier prehistory along the Upper Nile only
really began with the UNESCO s, Egypt s and the Sudan s, invited
expeditions of the 1960 s
investigating those sites and parts of the river
valley that would be flooded following the construction of the Aswan High
Dam. Major prehistoric and historic discoveries were made and priceless
finds preserved from disappearance. Fred Wendorf and his team working
with Egyptian archaeologists, that of Karl Butzer s group studies have
provided the geomorphological framework for the later Pleistocene and
Holocene sequence and the associated developing settlement patterning
recording the socio-economic changes that took place following changes in
the regimen of the Nile River, controlled as it was by climatic fluctuations
in East Africa.
In the west of northern Africa, there was much activity in Tunisia,
Algeria and Morocco, both along the Mediterranean coast and on the
plateau in the early years of the 20th century. Pallary and Arambourg laid
the foundation for the mammalian paleontological sequence, identifying
Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic faunal zones showing also the extent
to which climatic fluctuations had initiated movements of animals and men
in and out of the Sahara and the Levant. These climatic oscillations were
later seen to be of major importance for during favorable times,
encouraging trans-Saharan movements of humans from the south into
Eurasia. The western and central Sahara were regions of French
investigation in the 20 s and 30 s and the gendaramie on their camel safaris
brought back tantalizingly intrinsic stone artifacts showing the Sahara was a
rich area for investigation by prehistorians. Similarly pioneer expeditions
in the western desert of Egypt recovered rich prehistoric finds in places
now completely devoid of vegetation and water.
In both north and south Africa at this time research focused on
developing a Stone Age succession in relation to climate and environmental
change, to changing sea-levels, and to studies of the very rich rock art with
its many engraving and painting styles. Initially in South Africa,
prehistoric artifacts had been grouped into two main kinds, "Palaeolithic"
and "bushman" with the recognition that for the latter there was some
continuity with the existing KoiSan peoples. It was not until the first
trained archaeologist, John Goodwin, was appointed in 1924 to teach at
CapeTown University that systematic research really began and he set
about establishing a framework in which artifactual entities could be placed
in a relative sequence. This was very necessary as for example one English
antiquarian had said that because there were so many palaeolithic handaxes
481
lying about on the surface in South Africa, they could not be as old as the
ones in the European gravel pits and must be much more recent! So using
the geomorphological record of Pleistocene time prehistorians focused
research on collaborations with Quaternary geologists as for example at
Stellenbosch, along the Vaal and Orange Rivers and on the raised beaches
along the coast of southwest Africa thereby establishing a relative temporal
framework for the Earlier and Middle Stone Ages. Caves, rock-shelters,
and shell middens were excavated, the stratigraphy recorded and the
technologically changing stone artifact assemblages. These cultural changes
were studied also in relation to the skeletal remains from the burials which
were sometimes found in association in the rock shelter and midden
sequences. Peer s Cave at Fishoek contained Middle and Later Stone Age
and different kinds of hominids. Or Montagu Cave with its sucessive levels
of Acheulean and Middle Stone occupation. Cave sites such as that at
Matjies River yielded thick shell midden deposits with many burials and
many rich Stone Age finds were dug, usually not particularly well, and
Oakhurst Shelter represent about the first really systematic cave excavation
in South Africa dug by John Goodwin. This well excavated and recorded
sequence gave us our first real understanding of the Later Stone Age in
South Africa (1938). These studies and many others made possible
definitive descriptions and identifications of regional cultural variation.
Elsewhere in the early 30 s only in Southern Rhodesia, in Kenya, and in the
Belgium Congo was there anyone doing prehistory in the regions between
North and South Africa. Around Buluwayo Neville Jones collected
Acheulean bifaces from river gravels and Pleistocene sites in the open at
Hope Fountain Mission where the bifaces were missing. Jean Colette did the
first excavations at Gombe (Kinshasa) in 1924 and was far ahead of his
482
time for he analyzed statistically the classic sequence at that site. In Kenya,
Louis Leakey began his quest for early man in the late 1920 s and in his
Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony (1932) showed for the first time the
great time depth of the record in tropical Africa, relating his finds to
episodes of increased or decreased rainfall first recognized and described
in Uganda by E.J. Wayland as pluvial and interpluvial climatic cycles
corresponding to the glacial/interglacial cycles in high latitudes.
Before the 30 s paleontologists had few finds of early hominid fossils
from Africa, indeed from anywhere. Raymond Dart s study of the Taung
Australopithecine child in 1924 received no recognition of its importance
because Europe was mesmerized by the fake fossil from Piltdown,
providing what anatomists had expected to see, a fossil hominid with a
large brain. Homo rhodesiensis from Kabwe (Broken Hill) in Zambia in
1922 was at first misinterpreted but with beetling brow ridges tended to be
equated with Neandertals. In South Africa cave and open sites usually
found by farmers or commercial diggings produced further fragmentary
human fossils that were identified as belonging to two different
populations, large brained (Boskop) and small brained (Sand) and it was
not until the 50 s that it was shown both belonged to the same population
and the "Boskop race"
theory was finally put to rest.
From the 1930 s onward began the systematic research for its
prehistoric antecedents throughout the continent and many important
discoveries were made in Quaternary contexts. Iron Age research came
only later with the important exception of the stone wall sites in Zimbabwe,
notably at Great Zimbabwe, and in 1929 Caton-Thompson showed that this
was indeed built by and the important capital center for ancestral Shona
peoples. In North Africa, work began on the Atlantic coast of Morocco to
483 8
identify marine osscillations of high and low sea level which were
correlated with those on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria by Lamothe.
Quarries at Casablanca and Rabat gave a very important sequence of
cultural assemblages related to the geological framework of sea level
changes. Work by Pierre Biberson and others that continued into the
1960 s and is still with us today. In East Africa, Louis Leakey visited
Olduvai Gorge in 1932 and so began the unsurpassed series of discoveries
at this long continuous record of Quaternary history from two million
years ago up to the Later Stone Age. In Uganda Patrick O Brien followed
up Wayland s inital research in the Kagera Valley, in the Congo Bequaert
followed the earlier research by Menghin in 1925 on the misinterpreted
Tumbian Industry. I
began work in Zambia on the Zambezi terraces and
excavated at Mumbwa Cave. In the Orange Free State the mound spring
site at Florisbad yielded a fossil cranium and artifacts and mammalian
fauna perhaps a near contemporary of Kabwe, and van Riet Lowe
continued his studies of the Quaternary cultural sequence culminating in
The Geology and Archaeology of the Vaul River Basin (1937). Two other
important books for African prehistorians were published in the 30 s by
Louis Leakey Adam s Ancestors (1934) and Stone Age Africa (1936).
Both emphasized the importance of controlled stratigraphic excavation, the
need to understand stone technology, and the use of geomorphology and
faunal assemblages for providing regional relative chronologies that is, the
need for specialists to work in close collaboration with each other.
From 1939 during the Second World War there was not much time
for archaeology but Robert Broom and Dart continued their search for the
"Missing Link," as it was called, an adult Australopithecine. In the Sudan,
Tony Arkell excavated the site of Early Khartoum which gave us the first
484
knowledge of the ceramic pre-food producing culture along the Upper
Nile. Some on active service like Charles McBurney and myself were able
to make observations and collections that showed the prehistoric sequences
in Cyrenica and the Horn. The Abbe Breuil was able to spend two years in
South Africa and carried out important investigations of rock engravings,
and paintings in particular of those in Namibia and the Drakensberg
mountains.
By 1947 investigation began again with renewed vigor. Broom
discovered the first adult Australopithecus africanus at Sterkfontein and
Dart began work in the Makapan Valley in the northern Transvaal. Mary
Leakey found the stratified lakeside camps of Acheulean making hominids
at Olorgesailie and so began a revolution in the ways in which Palaeolithic
sites are investigated stressing the importance of isolating near primary
surfaces with evidence of human activity and detailed recording of the
positions of all finds. At the same time statistical analyses of artifact
assemblages became more generally adopted. Everything was now
collected, counted, measured, identified to provide a total analysis from the
activity areas. A pioneer in this statistical analysis was Revil Mason who
was excavating the Cave of Hearths and its long important cultural
sequence the report on which formed an important part of his book The
Prehistory of the Transvaal Mason went on later to excavate important
early Iron Age sites in the Transvaal. It was in the 1940 s also that John
Goodwin started the journal The South African Archaeological Bulletin
which has become a very important source of archaeological research in
southern Africa up to the present time. Louis Leakey brought together
prehistorians, geologists, physical anthropologists and rock art specialists at
the first Pan African Congress on Prehistory and Related Studies held in
485 10
Nairobi in 1947. Every main region of the continent was represented and
this was the first time that so many prehistorians from different regions
north and south of the Sahara had been able to get together and discuss and
exchange information about their researches. There have now been ten of
these Pan African Congresses in different parts of the continent and they
have been invaluable as clearinghouses of ongoing research, excursions to
local sites and examination of collections in the host country. This
interaction between participants has often led to important collaborative
team projects.
The excavation of near-primary living, or activity, sites on which
are preserved the relationships between stone artifacts, bone waste,
sometimes plant materials and features such as pits and stone groupings
have made it
possible to identify special activity areas and significant
associations between the different kinds of archaeological residues. So
began the methodological excavation and recording of evidence, the hard
data on which all meaningful models for hominid behavioral activities must
be based. In the late 1950 s the pluvial/interpluvial climatic framework,
based as it was on evidence from the most geologically unstable part of the
continent, was replaced by establishing regional stratigraphic Formations
and reliable correlations now made more reliable by the radiometric
chronology and with the climatic cycles recorded in the deep sea cores.
At this time also the disenchantment with established religion and the
Man-Ape discoveries in South Africa stimulated the search for human
ancestors led by Louis Leakey whose discovery of the hominoid Proconsul
with rich Miocene faunas from Kenya focused world attention on the Rift
Valley in East Africa with its
long rich stratigraphic and faunal record of
past Cenozoic history. By 1947 the scientific world had recognized the
486 11
importance of the gracile and robust South African Australopithecine
fossils and in 1959 Mary Leakey found the first robust Australopithecine in
East Africa at Olduvai Gorge.
From the 1960 s onwards many new fossils have been found in East
Africa and Ethiopia that make possible definitive description of hominid
grades and species, Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and
archaic Homo sapiens, in contexts linking them with the cultural activity
areas that reveal the technological skills of the stone artifact makers.
In the 60 s Glynn Isaac collaborating with Richard Leakey in East
Lake Turkana, following his excavations at Olorgesailie, stressed the
importance of identifying the paleo-context and reconstructing the habitat
at these activity sites; the geography, the local topography, plants and
animals, sources of water and raw materials that provide the clues to what
the hominids were doing. It was from his excavations at Koobi Fora, those
of Clark Howell and Jean Chavillon in the lower Omo, and the Lake
Baringo basin research that he developed his hypotheses of the "home base"
and "food
sharing"
as the basis of early hominid social behavior. This
received much support from the primate research pioneered by Sherwood
Washburn and Irven Devore and especially that on the Great Apes the
chimpanzee by Jane Goodall and the mountain gorilla by Dian Fossey. By
today these ongoing primate studies have produced a most important wealth
of behavioral information for suggesting models for the earliest hominid
tool makers way of life and that of the Australopithecines. In view of the
genetic closeness of the chimpanzee to ourselves these, with the fossils
themselves and associated artifacts are the sources for reconstructing
hominid behavior. A leading question today is do we in our genes most
resemble the common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, or the pigmy
487 12
chimpanzee, Pan paniscus, or do we combine genetic behavioral input from
ancestral forms of both of these. Isaac s "food
sharing" hypothesis has had
its critics, but remains a valid construct today and the focus has now moved
to identifying the diet of the early human populations, relative importance
of plant and animal food in the diet and to identifying which of several
strategies, hunting or scavenging from large carnivore kills was the main
source of their meat. The animal protein is of course what gave our
ancestors their larger brains and make us what we are today. The
argument for scavenging and minimal hunting seemed to be well supported
by the hard data but the recent discovery in a Middle Pleistocene context of
wooden throwing spears in northern Germany begins to cast some doubts
and suggest some Lower Palaeolithic groups at least were skilled hunters
by 500,000 years ago. Of course such interpretive models have to be based
on what have been called "activity studies" such as those of food getting
behavior of the large carnivores, replicating studies of stone technology
and its use in butchery as well as the taphonomic history of carcasses, the
identification of cut and percussion marks and carnivore teeth on bone that
provide the data for testing and comparing the archaeological residues on
the activity sites.
Of the greatest significance in the 1950 s and 60 s was the
development of radiometric dating and other methods of estimating time
before the present. Radiocarbon in particular for the later prehistory and
postassium-argon and the paleo-magnetic reversal chronology for earlier
periods revolutionized
understanding of the imensity of the time scale for
hominid evolution in terms of radiometric years before present and made
correlation with climatic fluctuations and between regional cultural
sequences possible. During this time it became generally recognized that
488 13
the continent of Africa was the homeland of humanity and nowhere else has
there been found any evidence of hominid species prior to the appearance
of Homo erectus 1.8 million years ago. This hominid grade is present in
both Africa and Eurasia the result of migration from Africa possibly even
as early as 1.8 million years ago. It is now apparent that there are likely to
have been several migrations out of Africa since then culminating, as Alan
Wilson s genetic data indicates, with that of anatomically modern humans
between 200-100,000 years ago and coming initially from the tropical
regions south of the Sahara.
This record of hominid history is based on much team work,
calibration, and collaboration by international and interdisciplinary
scientists and has its beginnings with field studies yielding long stratified
sequences such as those in caves, the Haua Fteah cave, Cyrenaica, and the
Cave of Hearths, or Klasies River Mouth Caves and Wonderwerk Cave,
Kuruman in South Africa, as well as the deep stratified formations in the
open from localities in the Rift Valley such as Kapturin in the Baringo
basin, or from Kalambo Falls in Zambia, or the Orange River Basin and
that of the East African lakes, and Lake Malawi. Regional distributions of
cultural industries plotting their distribution in relation to geography were
being produced at the same time, notably those by John Goodwin in the
50 s and 60 s in South Africa and we produced an Atlas of African
Prehistory in 1964 on which all known sites in the continent were plotted
and could be studied in relation to the biome, both present and hypothetical
past distributions of vegetation and animals. This Atlas has now been
brought up to date, refined and will be available shortly through computer
printouts. When more precise dating and assemblage compositions
489
becomes available such distribution maps will be important for identifying
migration routes and other movements.
To turn now to the later prehistory, that of advanced foragers and
food producers during the Later Stone Age and Iron Age. Late in time, in
sub-Saharan Africa the Iron Age is now the main focus for all interested in
the prehistoric antecedents of indigenous Africans. This includes both
prehistoric and historic studies and where continuity can be established, the
input from present day societies, linguistics and ethno-archaeology are very
important. Such continuity can nowhere be better seen than in the research
of David Lewis-Williams and his colleagues on identifying the San artists
of South Africa s unsurpassed rock art and its close connection with the
trance and rainmaking ritual. Because there is now so much more data,
behavioral patterning and social organization can be much better identified
and understood than is the case with Pleistocene societies. In North Africa
and the Sahara this record of advanced foragers and food production
begins much earlier, in the Stone Age, with ceramic cultures of the Pre-
Dynastic along the Nile in Egypt and the rich ceramic traditions in the
desert around the central Saharan lakes and streams during the earlier
Holocene (12-10 kya). These advanced foragers are associated with the
earlier rock engravings and paintings in the desert and seen as the work of
ethnic groups migrating from both North and South following the
repopulation of the Sahara by the large Ethiopian fauna. During this time
the Sahel/Savanna vegetation south of the desert moved some 600 or more
miles further north from its northern limit today and with it
presumably
there came the human population of those regions. In the mid-Holocene
amelioration the desert was populated by pastoral communities that left a
truly remarkable record of their lives in their rock art and the occupation
490
levels in the caves and shelters. There is now also strong reason to accept
that the wild cattle of North Africa Bos primogenius was domesticated in
the Sahara by the desert dwellers their diet being supplemented as it had in
earlier times by fishing, hunting and marine foods along the Atlantic coast.
The record of the ceramic foragers along the Nile is now well known, as is
the later development of plant and animal domestication and agriculture.
The domestic animals in the Nile Valley initially were sheep or goat neither
species being indigenous to Africa and cattle appear to have been
introduced later most likely by eastern Saharan pastoralists moving
westwards to the Nile under stress from increasing aridity. Such
increasing desication after 5000 BC resulted in some of the desert
pastoralists moving south into the Sahel and Savanna of West Africa where
around 3000 BC they came into contact with savanna foragers who under
stress and experimentation with the local plant foods resulted in the
successful domestication of indigneous millets, sorghum, and various root
crops in the ecotone between the savanna and the forest. The natural
richness of the west African savanna resulted in the development of ever
larger farming settlements and the establishment of large political and
economically independent societies. Researchers now study the rise of the
indigenous states south of the desert. The settlement patterning and trade
networks of these kingdoms both internal regional trade and long distance
trade with Arabs from North Africa on the one hand and Europeans from
the castles along the coasts. Much is now known about the historic period
in West Africa and up the Nile of the Meroitic civilization as well as that of
Axum on the Ethiopian plateau highlands and Red Sea and Indian Ocean
coasts. It is particularly encouraging to see that now after thirty years of
war once again archaeological and historic research are being carried out
491 16
in northern Ethiopian on the pre-Axumite and Axumite towns, villages and
domestic plants. It seems probable now that the plains of the southeastern
Sudan below the Ethiopian escarpment and the northern plateau lands of
Ethiopia formed the Land of Punt, known to and described by the dynastic
Egyptians. It remains for future research to show if indeed this is so. In
sub-Saharan Africa there is now much renewed research on the origins and
movements of the Koi pastoralists and the San foragers whose proto-
historic ancestors once populated much of eastern Africa as well though
now reduced to the southwest. The excavations at such sites as Casteelberg
and the historic Dutch post of Oudepost in the western Cape enable us to
see much better the nature of the Koi Koi societies both before and after
contact with the Dutch at the Cape. In many parts of the sub-continent,
these and other such foragers and pastoralists were replaced from around
300 AD perhaps earlier by metal using food producers speaking a Bantu
language. Before 1950 there was no considerable interest in Iron Age
archaeology because it was considered to be only comparatively recent in
time, but that year Willard Libby dated a wooden beam from Great
Zimbabwe to the 7th Century AD and thereby stimulating a new interest in
the Iron Age which with the aid of radiocarbon has now become a major
thrust for archaeologists working in the continent today encouraged not a
little by the two pioneer studies, one of Great Zimbabwe and other
Zimbabwean ruins (1929) and that at Mapungubwe in the Limpopo Valley
the hilltop settlement with rich local goldwork and glass bead imports from
the southeast coast (1937). The trade in gold, ivory and other comodities
was undoubtedly behind the establishment of the strong political centers,
states perhaps we can call them, in both southcentral Africa and west and
northeast Africa. This long distance trade from the coasts is of course of
492
great help for the imports found on the archaeological sites that make it
possible to establish connections and more precise dating of specific sites
since the dates when these products were being manufactured is precisely
known.
There is now also active investigation of mining sites for gold,
copper and iron and production methods. That on the mining of gold in
Zimbabwe is based on the pioneer work of Roger Summers, for copper in
the Transvaal on that of van der Merwe and Killick and that on the
Zambezi Congo watershed to that of Michael Bissen, Jacques Nenquin, and
Jan Vansina. Knowledge of the West African bronze casting we owe
mostly to Frank Willett, Thurstan Shaw and William Fagg. Of equal
importance also in some regions is the short and long distance trade in salt,
knowledge of that from the Sahara to West Africa we owe to Raymond
Mauney and John Alexander. For early iron production we owe much to
Bernard Fagg in Nigeria and Peter Schmidt in northeastern Tanzania.
Since the end of the second world war there has been active research on the
East African coastal towns established by Arab traders from Arabia with
indigenous Bantu inhabitants speaking Swahili so that much is now known
of this coastal trade, its chronology and impact on the African populations
in the interior. Summers and his colleagues provided important new
findings from their excavations at Great Zimbabwe in the 70 s and the
studies of the Portuguese settlements in Mashonaland have amplified
knowledge of the Roswi hegemony. Research now documents the history
of powerful political one time states in the Congo basin, their antecedents
and development, as also of other important political confederations such as
that of the Lozi in Barotseeland and their control of internal trade. Some
like those of the Lozi, Zulu, Ganda or Hima are still with us and their past
493
18
still under active investigation. In fact there are now few parts of the
continent for which archaeologists in collaboration with linguists, oral
historians and historical documentation have not been under active
investigation to record the history of the new African states.
This research has been helped considerably since the 1960 s when the
new African states were freed from colonial controls and they sought to
fund and recover the evidence on which their ethnic roots could be
constructed. At the same time the western world began training programs
in archaeology and anthropology to the professional level for African
nationals. This has met with mixed success but in general it has resulted in
a professional cadre making important contributions to knowledge for
some thirty years now and today there is active teaching of archaeology
and history in the universities and valuable team studies with overseas
specialists in the field and in the classroom. There still remain, however,
centers where logistical problems are many such as lack of research
funding, transportation, the absence of regular interaction with fellow
archaeologists and meager library facilities adding further to isolation. In
the post-colonial era there has been much re-evaluation of previous
interpretations and hypotheses concerning the nature of life in Africa south
of the Sahara that led sometimes through an Afro-centric approach to
recovering the rich and varied record of the foragers, pastoralists, farmers
and indigenous states that is known today.
The true record of the past of Africa s people and the origins of our
own species lies in interdisciplinary team work and free exchange of
information through publication and discussion meetings. Now the new
data source, genetics, has the potential in the decades that lie ahead for
solving not a few of the problems of speciation and ethnicity that are with
19
us today. It will be an exciting time for anthropologists and archaeologists
alike.
Looking back I have been priviledged to have lived and participated
in the developmental stages of African archaeology, or perhaps I should
say paleo-anthropology. A time when a great deal of data was collected
and with it a growing concern about how this should be interpreted. From
the 70 s onwards there have been many theoretical studies and much model
building, some sound, some speculative, some fanciful. All such
hypothetical models are as good as the data on which they are based.
Where the tested data are missing, we need to go back to the drawing board
for while it
may seem today that we know not a little about human origins,
we still have a long way to go to remove the doubts and uncertainties. It is
the need for more of the hard data - fossils and artifacts in context - for the
well dated and valid biological, cultural and behavioral evidence are still
not numerous and the need in the coming decades for more of this data is
perhaps greater than ever. For example, when an important new fossil is
found, taxonomic and behavioral concepts have to be readjusted, as they do
also when new technological data is introduced that makes new behavioral
interpretations necessary. Today though there sometimes seems to be a
greater tendency to theorize rather than go out, seek, find and analyze new
data from the field. It is easier to sit back but to advance understanding in
the discipline whether it be very ancient or later prehistory new data is
needed and we must provide it whether this is from Palaeolithic or Iron
Age contexts on which sounder more reliable, hypothetical scenarios can be
based. Perhaps at the millenium the most important problem is that of
identifying the changes in the behavior and events that made us what we are
today. The appearance of modern human behavior and organization is
495
recent and only some forty thousand years ago the population with the
modern genome began the rapid repopulation of the world. It has only
taken some 10,000 generations to produce the ethnic diversity that we see
today and shows the close genetic relationships we have with one another.
Let us not therefore use our technology to destroy ourselves and many
other organisms of this world.
On a personal note, let me say that I have never been happier
walking through the African bush learning from my African companions
and friends whether it be through the woodlands of the southern tropics,
the high grasslands of Ethiopia, the deserts of the north and south or the
evergreen forests of Equatoria. This was the way in which I learned a
very little about the continent and its people. I am never more grateful that
it was possible for me to do so, and in closing, I cannot refrain from
quoting Pliny s words "ex Africa semper aliquid novae - There is always
something new out of Africa."
Berkeley, 1998
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502
You are here: Past Lectures >
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PUBLISHED
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Journal..Articles_&_Chapters.m_BQ_Q.ks | by Year |
Public_Pqcuments
Scholarly Monographs
1940s-1950s
1949
1950
1952
1954
1955
1957
1958
1959
1960s-1980s
1963
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1973
1974
1977
1982
1983
1984
1949
1950
1952
1954
How (lie Victoria Falls wereformed.
Northern Rhodesia Information Department Handbook.
Lusaka: Northern Rhodesia Information Department, 1949.
Stone Age Cultures ofNorthern Rhodesia.
Cape Town: South African Archaeological Society, 1950.
Editor.
Victoria Falls and Batoka Gorge.
Livingstone: Northern Rhodesia National Monuments Commission, 1952.
Prehistoric Cultures ofthe Horn ofAfrica.
London: Cambridge University Press, 1954.
Reprinted in 1972 by Octagon Books with the addition ofa preface taking cognizance
of work done, not considerable, since thefirst printing.
1955
1957
Catalogue to the David Livingstone Centenary Exhibition, Livingstone,
Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia. 1955.
Early Man and the Stone Age in the Federation.
Salisbury: Department of Information, 1957.
Co-editor with S. Cole.
Prehistory, Proceedings ofthe Third Pan-African Congress.
London: Chatto and Windus, 1957.
1958
503
Digging Up History.
Livingstone: Northern Rhodesia Monuments Commission, 1958.
1959
Prehistory ofSouthern Africa.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959.
with R.F. Summers, C.K. Cooke, and E. Godall.
Rock Art ofthe Federation ofRhodesia and Nyasaland.
Salisbury, Rhodesia: National Publications Trust, 1959.
1963
Prehistoric Cultures ofNortheast Angola and their Significance in Tropical Africa.
Publicacoes Culturais, 62. Vol.. I-II.
Lisbon: Museu do Dundo, 1963.
1966
Distribution ofPrehistoric Culture in Angola.
Publicacose Culturais, 73.
Lisbon: Museu do Dundo, 1966.
Co-editor with F. Clark Howell.
Recent Studies in Palaeoanthropology.
American Anthropology, 1966, 68(2) Part 2, Special Issue.
1967
African Studies at Berkeley.
Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
Compiler.
Atlas ofAfrican Prehistory.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Co-editor with W.W. Bishop.
Background to Evolution in Africa.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
1968
Further Palaeoanthropolgical Studies in Northern Lunda.
Publicacoes Culturais, 78.
Lisbon: Museu do Dundo, 1968.
1969
Kalambo Falls Prehistoric Site, Vol. /.
London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
1970
Prehistory ofAfrica.
1973
504
London; New York: Thames and Hudson, Praegers, 1970.
Reprinted in 1984 by Greenwood Press, Westport, CT.
An Elephant Butchery Site at Mwanganda s Village, Karonga, Malawi, and its
Relevancefor Palaeolithic Archaeology.
Reprint Series in Archaeology.
Warner Modular Publication, Ltd., 1973.
Originally published in World Archaeology, 1970. 1(3):390-41 1.
1974
Kalambo Fall Prehistoric Site, Vol. II.
London: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
1977
1982
The Prehistory ofAfrica.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1970.
Translated into Portuguese, "A Pre-Historia da Africa,
"
Editorial Verbo, Lisbon.
Translated into Polish, "Prahistoria Afryki,
"
Bibliotaka Problemow, Warsaw, and into
Japanese and Russian.
Editor.
Cambridge History ofAfrica, Vol. I: From the Earliest Times to ca. 500 B.C.
London: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
1983
Co-editor with G.R. Sharma.
Palaeocnvironment and Prehistory in the Middle Son Valley, Madhya Pradesh,
North Central India.
Allahabah: Abinash Prakashan, 1983.
1984
Co-editor with S.A. Brandt.
From Hunters to Farmers: The Causes and Consequences ofFood Production in
Africa.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
Copyright 2002 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley. All rights reserved.
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505
You are here: Past.Lectures >
) Desmond Clark >
Published Works >
Journal Articles and Chapters in Books, 1930s-1960s
Anthropology Emeritus Lecture Series
O^at the University of California, Berke
r WELCOME
PAST
LECTURES
HOME LECTURE BIOGRAPHICAL
INFORMATION
FORTHCOMING
LECTURES
EXHIBIT
keley
PUBLISHED
WORKS
Scholarly_Monographs | JournaLArtic!es_& Chapters in Books | by Year |
Public^Documents
Journal Articles and Chapters in Books, 1930s-1960s
1930S-1 940s
1939
1942
1944
1945
1947
1948
1949
1950s
1950
1952
1954
1955
1957
1958
1959
1960s
1963
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1973
1974
1977
1970s-1990s
1930S-1940S
1939
1942
"Inception and aims of the David Livingstone Memorial Museum, Livingstone,
Northern Rhodesia."
Museums Journal, 1939, 39(1):13-17.
with H.B.S. Cooke.
"New fossil elephant remains from the Victoria Falls, Northern Rhodesia, and a
preliminary note on the geology and archaeology of the deposit."
Transactions ofthe Royal Society ofSouth Africa. 1939, 27(3):287-319.
"Stone
Age sites in Northern Rhodesia and the possibilities of future research."
Occasional Papers ofthe Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, old series no. 1
Livingstone: Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, 1939.
"Further excavations (1939) at the Mumbwa Caves, Northern Rhodesia."
Transactions ofthe Royal Society ofSouth Africa. 1942, 29:122-201.
1944
"Use of the bored stone in Abyssinia."
Man. 1944, 44(25):3 1-32.
1945
"Kenya Fauresmith factory and home site at Gondar, northern Abyssinia."
Transactions ofthe Royal Society ofSouth Africa. 1 945, 3 1
( 1 ): 1 9-27.
"Short notes on Stone Age sites at Yavello, southern Abyssinia."
Transactions ofthe Royal Society ofSouth Africa. 1945, 31(l):29-37.
1947
"Museum as a publice service."
Journal ofthe Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. 1947, 4:40-41.
506
"Notes on primitive copper production in Central Africa."
Copper Development Association Bulletin. January 1947.
"Plans for the new Rhodes-Livingstone Museum."
South African Museums Association Bulletin. 1947, 4(1):14-18.
1948
"Notes on prehistoric sites in the Rhodesias."
East Africa and Rhodesia yearbook. 1948.
1949
"In search of Bushmen."
Sphere. 1949, 1948.
1950
"David
Livingstone Memorial at Chitambo s."
Northern Rhodesia Journal. 1950, l(l):24-33.
with Oakley, Wells, and McClelland.
"New studies on Rhodesia Man."
Journal ofthe Royal Anthropological Institute. 1950, 77(l):7-32.
"Newly discovered Nachikufu Culture of Northern Rhodesia and the possible origin of
certain elements of the South African Smithfield Culture."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1950, 5(19):2-15.
"Note on the pre-Bantu inhabitants of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland."
South African Journal ofScience. 1950, 47(3):80-85.
1951
1952
"Bushmen hunters of the Barotse forests."
Northern Rhodesia Journal. 1951 l(3):56-65.
"Origin
and spelling of the name Zambezi.
"
Northern Rhodesia Journal. 1952, 1(6):69-71.
1953
"Dancing masks amongst a negroid people in Somaliland."
Man. 1953, 53(72):49-51.
"Note on Bantu iron-smelting."
Mufulira Magazine. 1953, 2(3): 10-12.
"Relics of Cecil John Rhodes in the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum."
Northern Rhodesia Journal. 1953, 2(2):49-55.
"Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, Northern Rhodesia."
Times Colonial Review. 1953, Rhodesian number.
507
1954
"Discoveries at Kalambo Falls, Northern Rhodesia."
Illustrated London News. May 29, 1954.
"Display of ethnological material in museums with particular reference to that in the
Rhodes-Livingstone Museum."
South African Museums Association Bulletin. 1954, 5(14):353-358.
"Early Upper Pleistocene site at Kalambo Falls on the Northern Rhodesia/Tanganyika
border."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1954, 9(34):51-56.
"Early
man in Northern Rhodesia."
Northern Rhodesian Journal. 1954, 2(4):49-59.
"History
and development of the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum."
South African Museums Association Bulletin. 1954, 5(15):383-388.
"Life and letters of Livingstone (Rhodes-Livingstone Museum)."
Rhodesian Annual. 1954, 1954:62-63.
"Note on experiments in photographing prehistoric rock paintings by ultraviolet light."
South African Museums Association Bulletin. 1954, 5(16):4 17-421.
"Preservation of Palaeolithic sites in the Rhodesias."
Archaeological Newsletter. 1954, 5(7):126-127.
"Provisional correlation of prehistoric cultures north and south of the Sahara."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1954, 9(33):3-17.
"Quaternary sequence in the Middle Zambezi Valley."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1954, 9(36): 1 15-130.
"Upper Sangoan Industries from northern Nyasaland and the Luangwa Valley; a case
of
environmental differentiation?"
South African Journal ofScience. 1954, 50(8):20 1-208.
1955
"Broken Hill Man."
Broken Hill School Magazine. 1955, 1955.
with M. J. Toerien.
"Human skeletal and cultural material from a deep cave at Chipongwe, Northern
Rhodesia."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1955, 10(40): 107-1 16.
"Museums and education."
Presidental address for the South African Museums Association.
South African Museums Association Bulletin. 1995, 6(l):15-22.
"Northern Rhodesia Excursion Handbook for the Third Pan-African Congress on
Prehistory."
Lusaka: Government Printer, 1955.
"Note on a wooden implement from the level of peat I at Florisbad, Orange Free
508
State."
Researches ofthe National Museum. 1955, 1(6):135-141.
"Solitary
traveler (Livingstone and the Centenary Exhibition)."
Rhodesian Annual. 1955, 1955:73-75.
"Stone Age cultures of Central Africa, part 1."
Archaeological Newsletter. 1955, 5(1 1):21 1-214.
"Stone Age cultures of Central Africa, part 2."
Archaeological Newsletter. 1955, 5(12):235-238.
1956
"David Livingstone Centenary Exhibition and a site museum at the Victoria Falls."
South African Museums Association Bulletin. 1956, 6(8):198-205.
"Prehistory in Nyasaland."
Nyasaland Journal. 1956, 9(1):92-119.
1957
"Digging up Rhodesian history."
Rhodesian Annual. 1957, 1957:50-53.
"Fact and fancy in archaeology."
Bitlawayo Chronicle. Dec. 23, 1957.
"Historical introduction to the tribes of Northern Rhodesia."
Northern Rhodesia Police Magazine. 1957, 5(2):7-9.
"Importance of distribution maps in the study of prehistoric cultures and the
compilation of an Atlas
of Prehistory for southern Africa."
South African Museums Association Bulletin. 1957, 6(12):314-320.
"Pre-European copper working in south central Africa."
Roan Antelope Magazine. 1957, 6(5): 12- 16.
. "Rowing."
Hillcrest High School Magazine. 1957, 2:22-23.
"Uncovering the past."
Mufulira Magazine. 1957, 6(3):22-27.
o Reprinted in:
Mufulira Magazine as "The
fascinating search for the past." 6(4):8-l 1 .
1958
"Certain industries of notched and strangulated scrapers in Rhodesia; their time range
and
possible use."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1958, 13(50):56.
"Chifubwa Stream Rockshelter, Solwezi, Northern Rhodesia."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1958, 13(50):21-24.
"Digging up history."
Address to Rotary International, Victoria Falls.
509
Northern Rhodesia Journal. 1958, 3(5):403-412.
"Early
man in Africa."
Scientific American. 1958, 199(l):76-83.
"Natural fracture of pebbles from the Batoka Gorge, Northern Rhodesia and its bearing
on the
Kafuan."
Proceedings ofthe Prehistoric Society, London. 1958, 24:64-77.
"Schematic art."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1958, 13(50):72-75.
"Some Stone Age wood-working tools in southern Africa."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1958, 13(52):144-151.
1959
"Further
explanations at Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia."
Journal ofthe Royal Anthropological Institute. 1959, 89(2):20 1-232.
(correspondence) "Miscellaneous notes on Broken Hill, Mapungubwe and Middle
Stone Age stratigraphy."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1959, 14(55):! 16.
"Reflections on the significance of prehistoric cultural influences in South West
Africa."
South African Museums Association Bulletin. 1959, 7(2):37-45.
"Equatorial influences in the prehistoric cultures of southern Africa."
In: Trabalhos de Anthropologia c Etnologia. Festschrift for Mendes Correa.
Sociedade Portuguesa de anthropologia e etnologia. 1959, Vol. XVII, pp. 257-265.
1960
"A note on early river craft and flishing practices in southeast Africa."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. I960, 15(59):77-79.
"Human Ecology in Pleistocene and later times in Africa south of the Sahara."
Current Anthropology. 1960, l(4):307-324.
"Research at Kariba."
South African Journal ofScience. 1960, 56(3):75.
"Zimbabwe Ruins."
Outlook. 1960, 11(4):10-14.
"The Stone Age Culture of Africa."
In: Encylopaedia Americana. 1960.
Revision published 1966.
"The
archaeology of the Horn of Africa."
In: Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1 960.
Revision published 1964. Later revised in 1971.
1961
"Bone
harpoons."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1 96 1 ,
1
6(64): 151.
510
"Fractured chert specimens from the Lower Pleistocene Bethlehem Beds, Israel."
Bulletin ofthe British Museum (Natural History). Geology. 1961, 5(4):71-90.
"Sites
yielding hominid remains in Bed I, Olduvai Gorge."
Nature. 1961, 189(4763):903-904.
1962
"Beyond South Africa -
chapter in The contribution ofC. van Riet Lowe to prehistory
in southern Africa."
Southern African Archaeological Bulletin. 1962, Supplement to 17(65):68-77.
"L Abbe H. Breuil."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1962, 17(65):21-22.
"The
problem of the pebble cultures."
Atti del VI Congresso Internazionale dello Scinze Preistoriche e Protostorie. 1962,
1:265-271.
"The
spread of food-production in sub-Saharan Africa."
Journal ofAfrican History. 1962, 3(2):21 1-228.
o Reprinted in:
A Reader on Anthropology. 2nd ed. Edited by Peter B. Hammond.
1975, pp. 284-296.
"Vegetation patterns, climate and sands in northeastern Angola."
Actes du IVe Congres Panafricain de Prehistoire et de 1 Etude de Quaternaire. Musee
royal de 1
Afrique centrale.
Sciences Humaines. 1962, 40:151-165.
"The Kalambo Falls prehistoric site: An interim report."
Actes du IVe Congres Panafricain de Prehistoire et de 1 Etude de Quaternaire. Musee
royal de 1
Afrique centrale.
Sciences Humaines. 1962, 40:195-201.
"Carbon 14 chronology in Africa south of the Sahara."
Actes du IVe Congres Panafricain de Prehistoire et de 1 Etude de Quaternaire. Musee
royal de 1
Afrique centrale.
Sciences Humaines. 1962, 40:303-313.
"Pleistocene climates and cultures in northeastern Angola."
Nature. 1962, 196(4855):639-642.
"Africa south of the Sahara."
In: Course Towards Urban Life. Edited by Braidwood and Willey.
Chicago, IL: Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, no. 32. 1962, pp 1-33.
"Archaeology in sub-Saharan Africa- its contribution and its future."
In: Proceedings ofthe Federal Science Congress.
Salisbury: Pvhodesia Scientific Association. 1962, pp. 415-520.
"Equatorial Africa, Area 12 and East Africa, Area 14."
In: Councilfor Old World Archaeology Surveys and Bibliographies, no. II to 1961.
1962.
o Reprinted in:
Councilfor Old World Archaeology, Surveys and Bibliographies, No.
H. 1961-1965. 1965.
511
1963
"Ecology and culture in African Pleistocene."
South African Journal ofScience. 1963, 59(7):353-366.
"The Fifth Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, Tenerife."
Antiquity. 1963, 148:303-306.
"The evolution of culture in Africa."
The American Naturalist. 1963, 97(892): 1-28.
A Stone Age site in the Erongo Mountains, oouth West Africa."
Proceedings ofth"
Prehistoric Society. 1963, 28:1-17.
with Gervas Clay.
"Chronology of David Livingstone."
Northern Rhodesia Journal. 1963, 5(3):26 1-267.
o Reprinted in:
David Livingstone 1873-1973. Edited by B.W. Lloyd. 1973.
"Foreword."
In: The Rock Art ofSouthwest Africa. Edited by A.R. Wilcox.
London: Nelson. 1963.
"Distribution and livelihood patterns of late Middle Pleistocene hunter-gatherers of
Sub-Saharan Africa."
In: African Ecology and Human Evolution. Edited by Howell and Bourliere.
Chicago, IL: Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, no. 36. 1963, pp. 458-533.
1964
"Stone vessels from Northern Rhodesia."
Man. 1964,2:161-183.
"The Prehistoric origins of African culture."
Journal ofAfrican History. 1964, 2:161-183.
o Reprinted in:
Peoples and Cultures ofAfrica. Edited by Elliott P. Skinner. 1973, pp.
34-58.
"The influence of environment in inducing culture change at the Kalambo Falls
prehistoric site."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1964, 19(76):93-101.
"Prehistoric culture and Pleistocene vegetation at the Kalambo Falls, Northern
Rhodesia."
Nature. 1964, 201(4923):971-975.
"Prehistoric Man at the Falls: The Native Tribes"
In: Handbook to the Victoria Falls, Revised Chaptersfor the 2nd edition. Edited by
B.M. Fagain.
Northern Rhodesia National Monuments Commission. 1964.
1965
"Changing trends and developing values in African prehistory."
African Affairs. 1965, Special Number pp. 76-95.
512
The distribution of prehistoric culture in Angola."
Actes de Ve Congres Panafricain de Prehistoire et de I Etude du Quaternaire. Museo
arqueologico de Tenerife. 1965, 5:225-309.
"The Atlas of African Prehistory: A report of progress."
Actes de Ve Congres Panafricain de Prehistoire et de I Etude du Quaternaire. Museo
arqueologico de Tenerife. 1965, 5:31 1-328.
"The later Pleistocene cultures of Africa."
Science. 1965, 160(3698):833-847.
"Charcoals, sands and channel decorated pottery from Northern Rhodesia."
American Anthropologist. 1965, 67(2):354-371.
"Culture and ecology in prehistoric Africa."
In: Ecology and Economic Development in Tropical Africa. Edited by David
Brokensha.
Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies. 1965.
"Prehistory."
In: The African World, A Survey ofSocial Research. Edited by Lystad.
London: Praeger. 1965, pp. 1-39.
"The
Sangoan culture of Equatoria: the implications of its stone equipment."
In: Miscellanea en homenaje al Abate Henri Breuil, Vol. I. Edited by E. Ripoll
Perello.
1965, pp. 309-325.
1966
"Acheulian occupation sites in the Middle East and Africa: A study in cultural
variability."
American Anthropologist. 1966, 68(2):202-229.
"Archaeology in Malawi."
Society ofMalawi Journal. 1966, 19(2): 15-26.
"Report
on the 1965 Symposium "Systematic Investigation of the African later
Tertiary and Quaternary" held at Burg Warteenstein by the Wenner-Gren Foundation."
Current Anthropology. 1966, 7(2):253-256.
with E.A. Stephens and S.C. Coryndon.
"Pleistocene fossiliferous lake beds of the Malawi (Nyasa) Rift: A preliminary report."
American Anthropologist. 1966, 68(2):46-49, 67-87.
with G.H. Cole, G. LI. Issac and M.R. Kleindienst.
"Precison and definition in African archaeology."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1966, 21, 83 (3):1 14-121.
"Notes on Pine Spring (48 SW 101) and other sites from southern Wyoming."
In: Prehistoric Occupation Pattersn in Southwest Wyoming. Edited by Floyd W.
Sharrock.
University of Utah Anthropology Papers, no. 77. 1966, pp. 21 1-215. Appendix II.
1967
"The Middle Acheulian occupation site at Latamne, northern Syria."
Annales Archeologiques de Syrie. 1967, Special number pp. 31-74.
o Reprinted in:
513
Quaternaria. 9:1-68.
"Further excavation (1965) at the middle Acheulian occupation site at Latamne,
northern Syria: General results, definitions and interpretations."
Annales Archeologiques de Syrie. 1967, Special number pp. 75-120.
o Reprinted in:
Quaternaria. 1969, 10:1-71.
"Notes on archaeological work carried out during 1966 in northern Malawi."
Society ofMalawi Journal. 1967, 20(2): 12- 16.
"Report
of the Archaeology Committee of the African Studies Association for the year
1966/7."
African Studies Bulletin. 1967, 33-38.
"The
Portuguese settlement at Feira."
Northern Rhodesia Journal. 1967, 3:275-292.
"The
position of research in African archaeology: future developments and needs."
African Studies Bulletin. 1967, 10-17.
"Archaeological Studies."
In: Africa in the Wider World. Edited by D. Brokensha and M. Crowder.
New York, NY: Pergamon Press. 1967, pp. 70-84.
"The
problem of Neolithic culture in sub-Saharan Africa."
In: Background to Evolution in Africa. Edited by Bishop and Clark.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1967, pp. 601-627.
"A record of early agriculture and metallurgy in Africa from archaeological sources."
In: Reconstructing African Culture History. Edited by W.C. Gabel and N.R. Bennet.
Boston, MA: Boston University Press. 1967, 3-24.
"Zambia."
In: Catalogue ofFossil Hominids. Edited by K.P. Oakley and E.G. Campbell.
London: British Museum of Natural History. 1967, pp. 122-125.
1968
"The Prehistoric Origins of African Culture."
Journal ofAfrican History. 1968, 5(2):161-182.
o Reprinted in:
Readings in Anthropology, 2nd ed. Edited by Morton H. Fried. New
York, NY: Corwell Co. 467-490.
Bobbs-Merrill Company.
with D.R. Brothwell, R. Powers and K.P. Oakley.
"Rhodesian Man: Notes on a new femur fragment."
Man. 1968,3(1):106-111.
"Old World Prehistoric Societies."
In: International Encyclopaedia ofthe Social Sciences, Vol. 7.
New York, NY: Macmillan and Free Press. 1968, pp. 9-15.
"Studies of hunter-gatherers as an aid to the interpretation of prehistoric societies."
In: Man the Hunter. Edited by R.B. Lee and I. DeVore.
Chicago. 1968, pp. 276-280.
1969
514
"Digging for History."
Society of Malawi Journal.
1969, 22(l):52-64.
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Journal Articles and Chapters in Books, 1970s-1990s
"An
elephant butchery site at Mwanganda s village, Karonga, Malawi and its relevance for p;
World Archaeology. 1970, 1(3):390-41 1.
o Reprinted in:
An Elephant Butchery Site at Mwanganda s village, Karonga, Malawi and its
with C.V. Haynes, J.E. Mawby and A. Gautier.
"Interim
report on palaeo-anthropological investigations in the Lake Malawi Rift."
Quaternaria. 1970, 13:305-353.
Vlth Pan-African Congress on Prehistory and Quaternary Studies, Dakar, December 1967."
In: Palaeo-ecology ofAfrica, IV. Edited by E.M. van Zinderen Bakker and Balkema.
Cape Town. 1970, pp. 109-114.
Research in African Prehistory, 1966-7 and the Programme at Berkeley."
In: Palaeo-ecology ofAfrica, IV. Edited by E.M. van Zinderen Bakker and Balkema.
Cape Town. 1970, pp. 133-136.
Human behavioral differences in southern African during the later Pleistocene."
American Anthropologist. 1971, 73(5):121 1-1236.
"Problems of archaeological nomenclature and definition in the Congo Basin."
South African Archaeological Bulletin. 1971, 26:67-78.
"Report on the present state of research in Angola and Mozambique."
Bulletin ofAfrican Studies Association ofthe United Kingdom. 1971, Special issue 6-8.
with F. Wendorf.
"The
Implications of Nile Prehistory for Africa and the Levant.
Report of a conference organized by J. Desmond Clark and F. Wendorf.
Current Anthropology. 1 97 1 , 1
2(3):408-4 1 1 .
with C.C. Davidson and R.D. Giauque.
"Two chemical groups of dichroic beads from West Africa."
Man. 1971,6(4):645-659.
516
with D.N. Hall, M.A.J. Williams, et. al.
"An
archaeological survey of northern Air and Tenere", In the British Expedition to the Air f
Geological Journal. 1971, 137(4):445-467.
"A re-examination of the evidence for agricultural origins in the Nile Valley."
In: Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, no. 37.
1971, pp. 34-79.
"Note on The Ounanien ."
In: Encyclopedic Berbere. 1971
"The
archaeological project: Preliminary report."
In: Science in the Sahara: British Expedition to the Air Mountains. Edited by D.N. Hall.
1971, pp. 9-12.
"African
Beginnings."
In: History ofAfrica.
New York, NY: American Heritage Publishing Company. 1971, pp. 16-32.
"Foreword."
In: Olduvai Gorge. Vol. III. By M.D. Leakey.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
"Foreword."
In: The Hunter-Gatherers ofGwisho. By B.M. Fagan and F.L. Van Noten.
Tervuren. Annals, no. 74.
1971.
"Opportunities for collaboration between archaeologists, ethnographers and linguists."
In: Language and History in Africa. Edited by D. Dalby.
London: Frank Cass. 1971, pp. 1-19.
1972
"Discussion and criticism on Wilkinson s Modelfor Man-Animal Relationships in Prehistory
Current Anthropology. 1972, 13(2):283-284.
"Mobility and Settlement Patterns in Sub-Saharan Africa: A comparison of late prehistoric In
In: Man, Settlement and Urhanism. Edited by P.J. Ucko and R. Tringham.
Proceedings of a meeting of the Research Seminar in Archaeology and Related Subjects, heh
London: Duckworth. 1972.
"Paleolithic Butchery Practices."
In: Man, Settlement and Urbanism. Edited by P.J. Ucko and R. Tringham.
Proceedings of a meeting of the Research Seminar in Archaeology and Related Subjects, hel(
London: Duckworth. 1972, pp. 149-156.
"Prehistoric Origins."
In: The Early History ofMalawi. Edited by B. Pachai.
London: Longman s. 1972, pp. 17-28.
1973
"Archaeological investigation of a painted rockshelter at Mwana wa Chencherere, north of D
Society ofMalawi Journal. 1973, 26(l):28-46.
(comment) On John J. Harlan and J.M.J. de Wet "On the quality of evidence for the origii
Current Anthropology. 1973, 14(l/2):56-57.
517
"Problems of archaeological nomenclature and definition in the Congo Basin."
In: Papers in the Proceedings ofthe Vlth Pun-African Congress on Prehistory and Quaterna
1973, pp. 564-582.
"The
emergence of man the toolmaker."
In: Explorations in Archaeology
-
Readings in Culture, Man and Nature. Edited by Morton F
New York. 1973, pp. 165-182.
Originally Chapter 2 o/The Prehistory of Africa, by J. Desmond Clark. New York, NY: Prae;
"Details on Malawi. Expedition to the central Sudan. Nyame Akuma."
In: The Revised Catalogue ofFossil Hominids. Edited by K.P. Oakley.
Berkeley, CA: The University of California, Berkeley. 1973, 3:56-64.
with C.V. Haynes anu J.E. Mawby.
"Paleo-anthropological investigations in the Lake Malawi Rift (1965-66): An interim report.
In: Papers in the Proceedings ofthe Vllh Pan-African Congress on Prehistory and Quaterna
1973, pp. 513-530.
1974
"James
Harvey Chaplin."
Azania. 1974, 9: vii-viii.
"Trade Wind Beads: An interim report of chemical studies."
Azania. 1974,9:75-86.
with D. Adamson and M.A.J. Williams.
"Barbed bone points from Central Sudan and the age of the Early Khartoum tradition."
Nature. 1974,249:120-123.
"Memoir of Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, 1903-1972."
In: Proceedings ofthe British Academy, LIX.
1974, pp. 3-27.
o Reprinted in:
Human Origins. Edited by G. LI. Isaac and E.R. McCown. Staples Press, W.A
with K.W. Butzer and H.B.S. Cooke.
"The
Geology, Archaeology and Fossil Mammals of the Cornelia Beds. O.F.S."
In: Memoirs ofthe National Museum, Bloemfontein OFS no 9
1974.
1975
"African in Prehistory: Peripheral or Paramount?"
R.A.I Huxley Memorial Lecture, Nov. 7, 1974.
Man, n.s. 10:175-198.
"Early domemsticated sorghum from the central Sudan."
Nature. 1975, 254(5501):588-591.
"The
Geomorphology and Archaeology of Adrar Bous, Central Sahara: A preliminary report
Quaternaria. 1975, 17(1973):245-297.
"Problems in Prehistory: North Africa and the Levant."
In: Papers presented at a Conference, December 5-8, 1973, Conference Overview. Edited by
Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press. 1975, pp. 459-462.
"Stone
Age Man at the Victoria Falls."
518
In: Mosa-oa-Tunya: A Handbook to the Victoria Falls Region, 3rd ed.
London. 1975, pp. 28-47.
Thefirst edition ofthe book was edited by J. Desmond Clark in 1952
1976
"Transvaal Heirloom Beads and Rhodesian Archaeological Sites."
African Studies. 1976, 35(2): 123- 137.
"The Pan-African Congress Commission on the Atlas of African Prehistory."
NyameAkuma. 1976,8:2-10.
"Recent archaeological research in southwestern Ethiopia: Some preliminary results."
NyameAkuma. 1976, 8:14-23.
"Prehistory and Quaternary environments in central Sudan."
Palaeoccology. 1976,9:52-53.
with J.L. Phillips and P.S. Staley.
"Ancient Egyptian Bows and Arrows and their relevance for African Prehistory."
Paleorient. 1976 (1974), 2 (2):323-338.
"A
comparison of the Late Acheulian industries of Africa and the Middle East."
In: After the Australopithecines. Edited by L.W. Butzer and G. LI. Isaac.
World Anthropology Series.
Mouton: The Hague. 1976, pp. 605-659.
"African Origins of Man the Toolmaker."
In: Human Origins. Edited by G. LI. Isaac and E.R. McCown.
Staples Press, W.A. Benjamin Inc. 1976, pp. 1-53.
"Miles Crawford Burkitt, 1890-1971."
In: Proceedings ofthe VHth Pan-African Congress on Prehistory and Quaternary Studies, At
Addis Ababa. 1976, pp. 21-22.
"Epi-palaeolithic aggregates from Graboun Wadi, Air and Adrar Bous, northwestern Tenere,
In: Proceedings ofthe Vllth Pan-African Congress on Prehistory and Quaternary Studies, At
Addis Ababa. 1976, pp. 67-78.
"Pore
Epic Cave, Dare Dawa."
In: L Ethiopie avant I Histoire, Vol. I.
CNRS. 1976, pp. 79-80.
"Prehistoric populations and pressures favoring plant domestication in Africa."
In: Origins ofAfrican Plant Domesticates. Edited by J.R. Harlan, J.M.J. de Wet and A.B. Ste
Mouton: The Hague. 1976, pp. 67-105.
"The domestication process in sub-Saharan Africa with special reference to Ethiopia."
In: Origins de I elevage et de la domestication.
Nice: Pretirage, Colloque XX. IXe Congress Pre- and Proto-historical Sciences, 1976.
1976, pp. 56-115.
"Foreword."
In: Large Mammals and a Brave People: Subsistence Hunters in Zambia. By Stuart A. Mark;
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976.
with H. Kurashina.
"New Plio-Pleistocene Archaeological Occurrences from the Plain of Gadeb, Upper Webi Sh
In: Les Plus Anciennes Industries en Afrique: The Earlier Industries ofAfrica. Edited by J.D.
Nice: Pretirage, Colloque V. IXe Congresse Pre- and Proto-historical Sciences, 1976.
519
1976, pp. 158-216.
"Prehistory and Quaternary Environments in southern Afar and on the Arussi-Hara Plateau, I
In: Palacoecology ofAfrica, Vol. IX. Edited by E.M. van Zinderen Bakker.
Cape Town. 1976, pp. 98-100.
"Adrar Bous and African Cattle."
In: Proceedings ofthe Vllth Pan-African Congress on Prehistory and Quaternary Studies, At
Addis Ababa. 1976, pp. 487-493.
1977
(comment) On "Archaeological Clasrification ^nd Ethnid Groups, by Randi Haaland."
N.A.R. 1977, 10(1/2): 18-20.
"Prehistoric arrow forms in Africa as shown by surviving examples of the traditional arrows
Palarient.
1977, 1977(1975/6):127-149.
with M.K. Kleindienst and C. Lee.
"Amino acids in fossil woods."
Nature. 1977,267:468.
"Bone tools of the earlier Pleistocene."
In: Memorial Volumefor Moshe Stekelis. Edited by B. Arensburg and Ofer Bar-Yosef.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 1977, pp. 23-27.
with K.P. Oakley, P. Andrews, L.H. Keeley.
"A
Re-appraisal of the Clacton Spearpoint."
In: Proceedings ofthe Prehistoric Society, no. 43.
1977, pp. 13-30.
1978
"Recent
archaeological research in south-eastern Ethiopia (1974-1975): Some preliminary re;
Annales d Ethiopic. 1978, 9:19-44.
"Palaeolithic research and human origins with particular reference to Africa: Where do we g(
In: Anthropologyfor the Future. Edited by D.B. Shimkin, Sol Tax, J.W. Morrison.
Urbana. 1978, pp. 48-56.
"The
legacy of prehistory: An essay on the background to the individuality of African cultun
In: The Cambridge History ofAfrica, Vol. II. From c. 500 BC to AD 1050. Edited by J.D. Fa;
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1978, pp. 1-86.
with M.A.J. Williams et al.
"Plio-Pleistocene environments in south-central Ethiopia."
In: Palcoecology ofAfrica and the Surrounding Islands. Edited by E.M. Van Zinderen Bakk<
1978, 10/11: 145-149.
1979
"Memorial to Robert Fleming Heizer (1915-1979)."
Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology. 1979, l(2):240-245.
"Use wear on Later Stone Age microliths from Laga Oda, Haraghi, Ethiopia and possible fun
Azania. 1979, 13:101-110.
"An
analysis of Earlier Stone Age bifaces from Gadeb (Locality 8E), Northern Bale Highlam
520
South African Archaeology Bulletin. 1979, 34:93-109.
"Hominid occupation of the east-central highlands of Ethiopia in the Plio-Pleistocene."
Nature. 1979, 282:33-39.
"Radiocarbon dating and African archaeology."
In: Radiocarbon Dating. Edited by R. Berger and H.E. Suess.
University of California Press. 1979, pp. 7-31.
1980
. "Obituary, Robert Fleming Heizer, 1915-1979."
Nature. 1980,283:118.
"Raw material and African lithic technology."
Man and Environment. 1980, 4:44-55.
"The middle Stone Age: The antiquity of Man."
L.S.B. Leakey Foundation News. 1980, 16:1 & 16.
"Early
human occupation of savanna environments in Africa with particular reference to the
In: Human Ecology in Savanna Environments. Edited by D.R. Harris.
Academic Press. 1980, pp. 41-71.
"Human populations and cultural adaptation in the Sahara and Nile during prehistoric times."
In: The Sahara and the Nile. Edited by M.A.J. Williams and H. Faure.
Rotterdam: Balkema. 1980, pp. 527-582.
. "The Pan-African Congress, 1 947- 1 977."
In: Proceedings ofthe 8th Pan-African Congress on Prehistory and Quaternary Studies, Nail
Nairobi. 1980, pp. 3-5.
"Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, 1903-1972: A memoir."
In: Proceedings ofthe 8th Pan-African Congress on Prehistory and Quaternary Studies, Nail
Nairobi. 1980, p. 12.
"The Plio-Pleistocene environmental and cultural sequence at Gadeb, northern Bale, Ethiopia
In: Proceedings ofthe 8th Pan-African Congress on Prehistory and Quaternary Studies, Nail
Nairobi. 1980, pp. 189-193.
"The
origins of domestication in Ethiopia."
In: Proceedings ofthe 8th Pan-African Congress on Prehistory and Quaternary Studies, Nail
Nairobi. 1980, pp. 3-5.
with H. Kurashina.
"New Plio-Pleistocene Archaeological Occurrences from the Plain of Gadeb, Upper Webi Sh
In: Homo erectus and his time, Vol. I. Edited by J. Jelinek.
Brno: Anthropos Inst. Moravian. 1980, pp. 161-187.
with M. Barbetti, P.M. Williams and M.A.J. Williams.
"Palaeomagnetism and the search for very ancient fireplaces in Africa."
In: Homo Erectus and His Time, Vol. I. Edited by J. Jelinek.
Bmo: Anthropos Inst. Moravian Museum. 1980, pp. 299-304.
1981
"Ethno-archaeology in Ethiopia and its relevance for archaeological interpretations."
In: Festschriftfor Professor L. Balout. Edited by H.J. Hugot.
Paris. 1981, pp. 69-79.
521
"Ethnographic archaeology and a possible use for the stone bowls of the East African Neolitl
In: Melanges Manny, Festschriftfor Professor R. Mauny. Edited by J.-P. Chretien et. al.
Paris. 1981, pp. 143-154.
"Prehistory in southern Africa."
In: General History ofAfrica. Edited by J. Ki-Zerbo.
Paris: UNESCO. 1981, pp. 487-529.
with H. Kurashina.
"Ethno-archaeology in Ethiopia: A case study and its relevance for archaeological interpretat
In: Material Culture. Edited by R. Gould, M. Schiffer, W. Rothje, and P. Motenon.
Academic Press. 1981, pp. 303-321.
(review) "Archaeo ogy in retrospect and prospect." Review of A short history ofArchaeoh
Nature. 1981,294:45-46.
1982
"Our roots in tmie: Significant new hominid discoveries."
L.S.B. Leakey Foundation News. 1982,23:1 & 17-19.
"Report
on a visit to Palaeolithic sites in Korea."
Munwhajai (Cultural Properties). 1982, 15:127-33 (Korean text); 134-40 (English text).
with Getaneh Assefa and M.A.J. Williams.
"Late Cenozoic history and archaeology of the Upper Webi Shebele basin, east-central Ethio]
SINET: Ethiopian Journal ofScience. 1982, 5(l):27-46.
"Charles Brian Montagu McBurney, 1 9 1 4- 1 979."
In: Proceedings ofthe British Academy, LXVI (1980): 455-461.
1982.
"The transition from Lower to Middle Palaeolithic in the African continent."
In: The Transition from Lower to Middle Palaeolithic and the Original ofModern Man. Editc
Oxford: BAR International Series. 1982, pp. 235-255.
Proceedings ofan international symposium to commemorate the 50th anniversary ofexcavat
"The cultures of the Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age."
In: Cambridge History ofAfrica, Vol I: From the earliest times to c. 500 BC.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1982, pp. 248-341.
1983
"Burning questions" (Man s first use of fire) in Japanese.
Asahi Science Magazine. 1983, 11:32-35.
"Results of archaeological research in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia
- 1981 field season."
NyameAkuma. 1983,22:6-9.
with J.M. Kenoyer, J.N. Pal and G.R. Sharma.
"An
Upper Palaeolithic shrine in India?"
Antiquity. 1983, 57:88-94.
with J.M. Kenoyer, J.N. Pal and G.R. Sharma.
"Baghor I: A possible Upper Palaeolithic shrine in central India."
Anthroquest. 1983,25:1, 11-14.
"New men, strange faces, other minds: An archaeologist s perspective on recent discoveries r
522
In: Proceedings ofthe British Academy, LXVII (1981): 163-192.
1983.
"The
significance of culture change in the early Later Pleistocene in norhtern and southern S;
In: The Mousterian Legacy. Edited by Erik Trinkaus.
BAR International Series. 1983, 164:1-11.
1984
"1981 Middle Awash Discoveries" (in French)
L Anthropologie. 1984, 88(1): 129- 130.
"Old Stone tools and recent knappers: Late Pleistocene stone technology and current flaking
Journal of the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe. 1984, Special number in ho
"The 9th pan-African Congress on Prehistory and Related Studies, Jos, Nigeria, 11-17 Decen
NyameAkuma. 1984,23:1-4.
o Reprinted in:
Anthroquest. 1984, 28:20
The way we were: speculating and accumulating; new approaches to the study of early huma
Anthroquest. 1984, 30:1 & 18-19.
. with B. Asfaw, G. Assefa, J.W.K. Harris, H. Kurashina, R.C. Walter, T.D. White and M.A.J.
"Paleoanthropological discoveries in the Middle Awash Valley, Ethiopia."
Nature. 1984, 307:423-428.
with K.D. Williamson, J.M. Michels and C.A. Marean.
"A Middle Stone Age occupation site at Pore Epic cave, Dire Dawa (east-central Ethiopia)."
The African Archaeological Review. 1984, 2:37-71.
"Cultural evolution in the Plio-Pleistocene: A review of the African evidence."
In: Volume d hommage au gcologue G. Zbyszewski, Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations.
Paris. 1984, pp. 343-351.
"Prehistoric cultural continuity and economic change in the central Sudan in the early Holoct
In: From Hunters to Farmers: The Causes and Consequences ofFood Production in Africa.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1984, pp. 113-126.
"The domestication process in northeast Africa: Ecological change and adaptive strategies."
In: Origin and Early Development ofFood-Producing Cultures in North-Eastern Africa. Edii
Poznan: Polish Academy of Sciences. 1984, pp. 25-41.
"Epilogue."
In: Origin and Early Development ofFood-Producing Cultures in North-Eastern Africa. Edii
Poznan: Polish Academy of Sciences. 1984.
"Foreword."
In: Radiocarbon Handbook. By Richard Gillespie.
Oxford. 1984.
"Foreword."
In: Man on the Kafite. By Robin Derricourt.
London: Ethnographica. 1984.
"Introduction to D.C. Grader, Hunters in Iron Age Malawi: The zooarchaeology of Chencher
Malawi Govt. Ministry of Education and Culture, Dept. of Antiquities Pub. 1984.
1985
523
"Mary Leakey: A tribute."
Anthroquest. 1985,31:12-13.
"Fire and its roles in early hominid lifeways."
The African Archaeological Review. 1985, 3:3-27.
"Leaving no stone upturned: Archaeological advances and behavioral adaptation."
In: Hominid Evolution: Past, Present and Future. Edited by P. V. Tobias.
New York, NY: Liss. 1985, pp. 65-88.
"Speculations on the origins of cereal cultivation in northeast Africa."
In: Studi di Paletnologia in onore di Salvatore M. Puglisi. Edited by M. Liverani, A. Palmier
University of Rome. 1985, pp. 477-484.
"The microlithic industries of Afric: Their antiquity and possible economic implications."
In: Recent Advances in Indo-Pacific Prehistory. Edited by V.N. Misra and P. Bellwood.
Oxford; Oxford IBM Publishing Co. 1985, pp. 95-104.
1986
"Glynn Isaac, 1937-1985."
Antiquity. 1986, 60(228):55-6.
1989
"Charles Brian Montagu McBurney (1914-1979): An appreciation."
In: Stone Age Prehistory. Edited by G.N. Bailey and P. Callow.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1986, pp. 7-25
(review) Academic Freedom and Apartheid: The Story ofthe World Archaeological Congi
American Antiquity. January 1989, 549(1):213.
(review) Recent Archaeological Discoveries in Pakistan, by A. H. Dani.
Antiquity. September 1989, 63(240):639.
1991
"Retrospective and Perspective."
Journal ofAnthropological Research. Summer 1991, 47(2):279.
1992
(review) The Rock Paintings ofthe Upper Brandberg (Africa Praehistorica 1), by Harald 1
Antiquity. March 1992, 66(250):279.
(review) Forschungen zur Umweltgeschichte der Ostsahara (Africa Praehistorica 2), edite
Antiquity. March 1992, 66(250):281.
1993
"Distinguished Lecture: Coming into Focus."
[PDF]
American Anthropologist. December 1993, 95(4):823.
1996
"The record of evolution at Olduvai Gorge." [PDF]
524
American Anthropologist. June 1996, 98(2): 400-403.
1997
"African
prehistory."
In: History ofPhysical Anthropology, vol. I
Garland Publishing, 1997.
"Determining stone tool use: Chemical and morphological analyses of residues on experimen
Lcnee- Mar. 1997, 24(3):245-250.
1999
with Heinzelin, J.; White, T.; Hart, W.; Renne, P.; and others
"Environment _andi
Behaykupf 2_.5JMjUionj^leai^]d_JBoj.ijjJJominids." [PDF]
Science Magazine. April 23, 1999, 284(5414):625-629.
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1952
"Recent prehistoric research in the Somalilands."
Proceedings of the First Pan-African Congress on Prehistor, Nairobi, 1947.
Oxford: Blackwell s. 1952, pp. 146-161.
1955
"Environment and culture contact in prehistoric Africa south of the Sahara."
Proceedings of the Second Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, Algiers, 1952.
Paris: Arts et Metiers Graphiques. 1955, pp. 359-365.
"Stone ball, its association and use by prehistoric man in Africa."
Proceedings of the Second Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, Algiers, 1952.
Paris: Arts et Metiers Graphiques. 1955, pp. 403-407.
1957
"Re-examincation of the type site at Magosi, Uganda."
Proceedings of the Third Pan-African Congress, Livingstone, 1955.
London: Chatto and Windus. 1957, pp. 228-241.
"Prehistoric research in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland."
Proceedings of the Third Pan-African Congress, Livingstone, 1955.
London: Chatto and Windus. 1957, pp. 412-432.
1968
"Report to UNESCO on a survey ( 1
968) of the antiquities of Malawi and the organization of an Antiquities
Programme.
UNESCO Consultant Reports, mimeograph. 1968.
"Tools and ourselves: An African Legacy?"
1 7th Annual Raymond Dart Lecture.
Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1981.
526
INDEX--J. Desmond Clark
Abebe, Berhanou, 223, 225, 377
Adamson, Donald, [Dialogue, 393-
431], 456
Adrar Bous, Niger, 220, 242, 303-
318, 382, 389, 446-450
African Archaeological Review, 234
Air Mountains, expedition, 302-313
American Anthropological
Association, 271
Anciaux de Faveaux, Pere, 281
Andah, Bassety, 439
Angola, 155-160
Anthropological and Ethnological
Sciences Congress, New Delhi
(1979), 240
Anthroquest, 255
Arkell, Anthony John, 220, 394-395
Awash National Park, 226-236, 379-
381, 451
Bae, Kidong, 260-261, 294, 388
Baghor, site, 247-249
Bandhavgarh National Park, 252-253
barbed bone points, 394-395, 399
Barham, Larry, 89
Barotse, people, 121
Barotseland, Zambia, 21, 38, 74
Battuta, Ibn, 83
Ba Toka, people, 22
Ba Tonga, people, 160-162
Ba Twa, people, 135-136
Beit Trust, 77
Belan Valley, Uttar Pradesh,
India, 243
Berbera, Somalia, 122-123
Binford, Lewis, 262
Blanc, Alberto Carlo, 328
Bloompaas Cave, site, 413-414
Blumenschine, Robert, [Dialogue,
458-469]
Bond, Geoffrey, 96-97, 160-161
Bonnefille, Raymonde, 380-381, 403
Braddell, Harry, 64, 111
Braidwood, Bob, 176-178
Brandt, Steve, 227, 231, 243, 270,
[Dialogue, 407-431], 451
Brelsford, Vernon, 25, 54, 91
Breuil, Abbe Henri, 130-131, 142-
143, 156, 202, 232
Brew, Arthur and Ruth, 66
Brew, Joe, 145
British Museum, Bloomsbury, 16,
141, 375
British Academy, 271
British Association for the
Advancement of Science, 23
British South Africa Company, 21,
77, 79, 132
British and South African
Association for the Advancement
of Science in Pretoria, joint
meeting (1929), 89
Broken Hill, site, 54, 138-142,
221
Brown, Frank, 263, 287
Bulawayo Museum, 15, 141
Bur Eibe, Somalia, 117-119
Burg Wartenstein symposia. See
Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Burkitt, Miles, 9, 10, 30, 48, 62,
83, 126-127, 179-180, 241, 390
Burton, Richard, 122-123
Calico Hills, site, 321-326
Cambay, India, 254, 256-260
Caton-Thompson, Gertrude, 89, 159,
168, 179-180
Chaplin, Jim, 170-171, 443
Chencherie, rock shelter site, 375
China, 260-266, 387-389, 464
527
Chifubwa Stream, site, 135-136,
301
Chitambo, village chief, 55, 78
Chiwondo Beds, site, 203-209
Chongokni, site, 260
Christ s College, Cambridge, 8-11,
15-17, 41-42, 126
Clark, Betty Baume, 19, 20, 33-35,
[Dialogue, 47-72], 111, 131,
182, 214, 350, 357, 373, 376,
392, 396, 400, 419, 434, 443,
454-457, 461, 464-467
Clark, Elizabeth Anne, 35-36,
50ff-63, 65, 70-72, 127, 174,
183, 370, 405, 456
Clark, J. Desmond, death of
brother, 4-5; discusses selected
writings, 81, 103, 133, 181,
347, 181, 278; honors, Commander
of the Most Excellent Order of
the British Empire, 202, Officer
of the British Empire, 202;
marriage, 19-20; education as
child, 6-8; family of origin, 1-
6; job-hunting, 12-13, 48;
living in Berkeley, 269-270;
multi-disciplinary research,
186-188, 299, 380, 404; People s
Park, 214-215; politics in
Zimbabwe, 173-174; rowing, 7, 8,
18, 19, 35, 36, 41-43, 224-225;
students, 281-297; teaching,
276-278
Clark, John, 35, 36, 50-52, 63-64,
127, 164, 174, 183, 203, 345,
370
Clark s Glycola, 1
Clay, Gervas, 28, 65, 80, 208
Clemens, Bill, 268
Cole, Glen, 203-210
Cole, Sonia, 208
Colson, Elizabeth, 132-133, 458
Cook, Sherburne, 185-186, 268-269
Cooke, Basil, 130, 175
copper and iron smelting research,
169-172
Coryndon, Robert Thorne, 74
Court, Phillip, 36, 50
Crabtree, Don E., 341
Current Anthropology, 319
Curtis, Garniss, 188, 268,
[Dialogue, 319-339], 437
Dahlberg, Albert, 178
Daniel, Glyn, 275, 323
Dart, Raymond, 85, 89-90, 102,
130, 131, 175
David Livingstone Memorial
Exhibition (1955), 22
Diamang, people, 156-158
Dixey, Sir Frank, 15, 88, 203, 205
Dmanisi, site, 335-339
Efe Pygmies, people, 189-190
Eile, people, 112-115, 117-124
Elai, people, 114-124
Elwin, Verrier, 244-245
Evernden, Jack, 188, 268, 319-320,
328-329
Pagan, Brian, 38, 41, 75, 208, 348
Fagg, Bernard, 127-128
Fang, people, 121
First Pan-African Congress,
Nairobi, Kenya (1947), 127, 129-
130, 142, 156, 186, 467
Foster, George, 176, 178
Fourth Pan-African Congress,
Leopoldville (1959), 164-165,
432
Frere, John, 271
Gadeb, Ethiopia site, 236-239,
358, 379-381, 384-385, 401-405,
419-426, 452
Garibaldi Pass. See Kone
Garrod, Dorothy, 167-168, 185, 267
Gasse, Francoise, 381, 402, 404
Gatti, Attilio, 83, 89, 131
Ghaljal, people, 116-119
528
Goerke, Betty, 243-247
Gondar, Ethiopia, 102, 104-107,
224-225, 389
Goodwin, John, 14, 75, 87, 149,
181, 271
Graciosi, Paolo, 145
Graham, John Allen, 267
Grant, Nellie, 110-111
Haile Selassie, Yohannes, 217-219,
359-360, 373, 378
Hall, David, 302-313, 445
Hall, Sir Douglas, 19, 36, 91
Hammel, Eugene, 268
Harris, Jack, [Dialogue, 458-469]
Haury, Emil, 177, 322-326
Hay, Richard, 268, 319-321
Haynes, Vance, 203-210, 320-321
Heizer, Robert, 185-186, 267, 268,
320-321, 338-339
Hodges, John, 146-150
Hodges, Lillian, 146-151
Holi, Indian festival, 255, 416,
465
Holliday, Clayton, 76, 77, 153,
161
Hoshangabad, site, 240
Howell, Clark, 165, 176-178, 180,
216, 231, 263, 265-266, 279,
371, 436
Hundie, Girma, 108, 231
Huxley, Elspeth, 110
Huxley, Sir Julian, 110
Hyena Man, 235-236
India, 240-260, 414-417, 427-428,
454-456, 463-466
indigenous peoples, 21-22, 68, 73-
74, 90, 111-126, 135-138, 155-
158, 160-162, 193-194, 197-201,
226-227, 229, 244-245
Inskeep, Raymond, 75, 153, 161,
438
Institute for National Heritage
and Antiquities, Shijiazhuang,
263
Institute of Archaeology,
University of London, 242
Institute of Vertebrate
Paleontology and
Paleoanthroplogy, Beijing, 262
Isaac, Glynn, 83, 119, 167, 181-
182, 190, 215, 269, 275, 279,
325, 372, 401, 437-439, 441
Isha Baidoa, Somalia, 67, 114-117,
122, 412
Ituri Forest, Zaire, 119, 189-190
Janmart, Jan, 156
Java, 332-335
Jebel et Tomat, site, 220-223,
393-394, 396-399
Jebel Moya, site, 220-223, 395
Jews in Africa, 21, 31, 38, 95
Jia, Lanpo, 261-266
Jones, Neville, 14-15, 88, 130
Jones, Peter, 456
Kalambo Falls, site, 146-151, 172,
188, 211, 344-345, 346-352, 389,
441, 456, [Epilogue]
Kalb, Jon, 376-378, 426-427
Kanha National Park, Madhya
Pradesh, India, 251-252
Kariandusi, site, 338-339
Karkarichinkat, site, 313-316
Katenekwa, Vincent, 32, 192
Keith, Arthur, 267
Keller, Charles, 274, [Dialogue,
340-356], 437
Kenoyer, Mark, 247-248, 253-254,
255
Khartoum, Sudan 220-223
Kleindienst, Maxine, 203, 280,
341, 348, 358
Kone, site, 381-383
Korea, 260-261
Kunjhun II, site, 253-256
529
Kurashina, Hiro, 227, 280,
[Dialogue, 374-392], 410, 419
Katenekwa, Nicholas, 32, 192-193,
285-286
La Brea Tar Pits, site, 417-418
Laga Oda, site 144-145, 230-231,
236, 383-384
Lake Bangweolo, Zambia, 78-79, 91
Lake Besaka, Ethiopia, 226-229,
379-381, 411, 419-420
Lake Malawi, Malawi, 23-24, 155,
201, 203, 208, 353
Lake Nyasa. See Lake Malawi
Lake Rukwa, Tanzania, 209-211
Lake Tanganyika, Zambia 23, 79,
146, 155, 350
Latamne, site, 195-199
Le Gros Clark, Sir Wilfred, 138,
175
Leakey, Louis, 10, 36, 56, 87,
101, 110-111, 129, 141, 142,
149, 164-166, 167, 175, 179-180,
181-182, 186, 189, 215-216, 255,
270, 277, 321-324, 328, 330-331,
368, 441, 443, 451
Leakey, Mary, 16, 36, 56, 87, 101,
110-111, 136, 164-167, 182, 295,
324, 455-456, 467
Leakey, Richard, 295
Leakey Foundation, 212, 255, 437
Lee, Richard, 73, 348
Leopards Hill Cave, site, 154-155
Lettow-Vorbeck, Paul Emil, 99-101
Lewanika, paramount chief, 21-22,
37-38, 74
Libby, Willard, 90, 320-321
Livingstone, David, 22-25, 33, 55-
56, 68, 78-79, 162-164, 201
Livingstone Memorial, 55, 78, 79
Livingstone Museum, See Rhodes-
Livingstone
Livingstone-Bruce, Diana, 24
Lochinvar National Park, Zambia,
38
Lozi, people, 21-22
MacMillan, Hugh, 31
Macrae, F.B., 83, 85
Mad Mullah, 123-124
Madhya Pradesh, site, 415-417
Maiden Castle, site, 16-17, 348
Malawi [former Nyasaland], 195,
199-201, 203-208, 375-376, 380,
389
Malewa Gorge, site, 330-331
Mandal, Prasanta Kumar, 243-249
Marshall, Lorna, 73
Martin, Henno, 99
Martin, J.D. , 91-94, 103
Masai, people, 119-120
McBrearty, Sally, 388
McCown, Theodore, 185, 197, 267,
374
Melka Kontoure, site, 223-224
Mennell, F.P., 139-140
Middle Awash, site, 358-360, 376-
381, 450-454, 461-464
Misra, B.B., 243-250
Misra, V.N., 243-250, 427
Modjokerto Child, 331-332
Movius, Hallam, 145
Mumbwa Cave, site, 83-87, 89, 98,
137-138
Museums Association of Middle
Africa, 433-435
Nachikufu, site, 37, 134-136, 172
Napa Valley, California, 342
Narmada Valley, India, 240
National Monuments and Cultural
Heritage Commission, 78, 80,
146, 147, 150,193, 202, 285
National Science Foundation, 226,
279
National Academy of Sciences, 271
Njoro, site, 109-110, 165-167
Northern Rhodesia Journal, 25, 91,
164
Oakley, Kenneth, 153, 175, 328
Ogden, Judy, 278
530
Olduvai Gorge, 10, 164, 187, 327-
328, 337-339, 352, 360
Paleoanthropology Society, 272,
348
Pan-African Congress of Prehistory
and Quaternary Studies, 271
Pan-African Congresses. See by
sequential heading
Pastron, Allen, 282-283, 302
Phillipson, David, 203, 224, 285-
286, 348
Pitt-Rivers, Augustus, 16
Poona Conference (1979), 240-243
Pore Epic Cave, site, 224, 231-
236, 401, 452
Posnansky, Merrick, 165, 167, 277,
[Dialogue, 432-4447
potassium-argon dating, 320-321,
329-335
Potts, Richard, 387-388
Pseudo-Stillbay, industry and
site, 330-331
Quaternaria, 196, 208
Rahen Wein Confederacy, 112-124
Rangeley, Bill, 199
Reynolds, Barrie, 28, 76, 153,
161, 192
Rhodes, Cecil, 38-40, 74, 88, 201
Rhodes, Georgia and Violet, 39
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 13,
19, 83, 132-133
Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, 13, 28-
30, 37, 38, 53-55, 74-81, 131-
132, 151-153, 176, 192-194, 213-
214, 297, 299, 354, 433-436;
building problems, 77, 80-81,
132, 354, 470-475
Rhodesian Man, 138-142
Robins, Sir Ellis, 79, 132, 152
Robins Series, 79, 162
Robinson, Keith, 375, 380, 389
Rodden, Bob [R.J.], 274-276
Rowe, John Howland, 267
Royal Geographical Society, 23
Royal Society of South Africa, 271
Ruhlmann, Armand, 130
Sali, S.A., 241
Sankalia, H.D., 240-242, 260
Savage, Donald, 268
Savage, Karla, 274, 347, 375, 391
Schick, Kathy, 27, 86, 261-266,
274, 349-350, 358,
[ Introduction ]
Schrire, Carmel, 438
Scientific Council for Africa, 85,
133
Scofield, J.F., 88, 90
Seaborg, Glenn, 328
Second Pan-African Congress,
Algeria (1952), 142
Sekuti, village chief, 33
Serkama, site, 229-230, 384
Seventh Pan-African Congress,
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (1971),
223
Shabona, site, 220-223, 395
Sharma, G.R., 243-250, 254-255,
415, 427-428, 454-456, 459, 463-
466
Shiva shrine, site, 248-249, 255
Siatumbu, Joseph, 53-54, 85-87
Sililo, Ranford, 77
Simpson, Ruth, 322-326
Smith, Andrew, 222, [Dialogue 298-
318], 352, 393-401
Society of Africanist
Archaeologists, 75, 81, 348,
437-438
Society of American Archaeology,
271
Society of Antiquaries of London,
271
Somaliland, 4, 53, 111-126, 127,
301-302, 411-412, 429-430
South African Archaeological
Bulletin, 149, 170
531
Son Valley, India, 243-247, 251,
454-456, 463
South African Archaeological
Society, 271
sponge spicule pottery, 395, 397-
398
Stanley, Morton, 79
Stiles, Daniel, 222, 393-401, 419
Sudan, 220-226, 393-401
Sussman, Carol, 247, 284
Sussman, Eli and Harry, 38
Sutcliff, Tony, 141
Tenth Pan-African Congress,
Harare, Zimbabwe (1995), 32,
172, 192
Third Pan-African Congress,
Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia
(1955), 140, 150, 152, 175, 179-
180, 281, 467
Thomas, Elizabeth, 73
Thornton, Richard, 162-163
Tiananmen Square, 261, 264-266
Tiercelin, Jacques, 380
Toth, Nick, 27, 86, 261-266, 274,
276, 349-350, 441-442,
[Introduction]
Turner, Frank, 268
Twin Rivers, site, 152-153, 172
Ujiji, Africa, 23, 79
Universities Mission, 24
University of California,
Berkeley, Department of
Anthropology, 181, 184-186, 188-
189, 204, 212, 267-269, 458-461;
Doe Library, 143; Lowie [now
Hearst] Museum, 272-274, 277
University Research Expeditions,
439-440
Van Noten, Francis, 38, 203, 348
Van Riet Lowe, Peter, 130, 143,
149, 179-180, 467-468
Victoria Falls, Zambia, 15, 22,
33, 35, 94, 101, 176, 190, 192-
193
Victoria Falls Trust, 32, 66, 85,
193, 202
Vindhya Hills, site, 240-243
Vinnicombe, Patricia, 229
Washburn, Sherwood, 71, 73, 76,
175-176, 185, 267, 374, 468
Webi Shebele River, 236-239, 401-
402
Wei Qui, 261-264
Wenner-Gren Foundation, 279, 347;
conference (1961), 180-181; 177,
186; conference (1965), 436
Wheeler, Mortimer, 15-17
White, Franklin, 140
White, Tim, 219, 265-266, 280,
329, 337, [Dialogue, 357-373],
381, 454, 462-463
Whittington, Captain and Mrs.,
140-142
Wickham, Dennis, 124
Williams, Frances Dakin, 237, 401-
405
Williams, Martin, 220-222, 227-
239, 244, 302-313, 382-383, 389,
[Dialogues, 393-406, 445-467]
Williamson, Kenneth, 222, 227,
234, 393-401, 419, 451
Wilson, Godfrey, 19, 48, 83, 88,
101, 181
Wilson, Hubert, 22, 24, 55, 192
Wilson, Monica, 19, 48, 83, 181
Winterbottom, Elizabeth Anne. See
Clark, Elizabeth Anne
Winterbottom, Jack, 65
Wood, Rodney, 199-200
World War II, 2, 31, 49, 51, 61-
63, 98-110, 191, 224, 301
Wormington, Marie, 321
Worthington, Frank, 74
Wynne, David, 77
532
Xia Fei, 263
Yavello, site, 107-108, 134, 144
Young, Sir Hubert, 13, 22, 48, 80
Zambezi Boat Club, 18, 25-28, 50,
92
Zambezi River area, 18, 21, 23,
25-28, 33-35, 73, 74, 92, 99,
131, 160, 162-164, 199, 345;
Zambezi gravels, 15
Zeleke, Yohannes, 337-338
Zeuner, Frederick, 88, 240, 241
Zinjanthropus, 164-165, 187, 328,
337
January 2002
INTERVIEWS ON THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Documenting the history of the University of California has been a responsibility of the
Regional Oral History Office since the Office was established in 1954. Oral history memoirs with
University-related persons are listed below. They have been underwritten by the UC Berkeley
Foundation, the Chancellor s Office, University departments, or by extramural funding for special
projects. The oral histories, both tapes and transcripts, are open to scholarly use in The Bancroft
Library. Bound, indexed copies of the transcripts are available at cost to manuscript libraries.
UNIVERSITY FACULTY, ADMINISTRATORS, AND REGENTS
Adams, Frank. Irrigation, Reclamation, and Water Administration. 1956, 491 pp.
Amerine, Maynard A. The University ofCalifornia and the State s Wine Industry. 1971, 142 pp.
(UC Davis professor.)
Amerine, Maynard A. Wine Bibliographies and Taste Perception Studies. 1988, 91 pp.
(UC Davis professor.)
Bierman, Jessie. Maternal and Child Health in Montana, California, the U.S. Children s Bureau
and WHO, 1926-1967. 1987,246pp.
Bird, Grace. Leader in Junior College Education at Bakersfield and the University of
California. Two volumes, 1978, 342 pp.
Birge, Raymond Thayer. Raymond Thayer Birge, Physicist. 1960, 395 pp.
Blaisdell, Allen C. Foreign Students and the Berkeley International House, 1928-1961.
1968,419pp.
Blaisdell, Thomas C., Jr. India and China in the World War I Era; New Deal and Marshall
Plan; and University ofCalifornia, Berkeley. 1991, 373 pp.
Blum, Henrik. Equityfor the Public s Health: Contra Costa Health Officer; Professor,
UC School ofPublic Health; WHO Fieldworker. 1999, 425 pp.
Bowker, Albert. Sixth Chancellor, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, 1971-1980; Statistician,
and National Leader in the Policies and Politics ofHigher Education. 1 995, 274 pp.
Brown, Delmer M. Professor ofJapanese History, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley,
1946-1977. 2000,410pp.
Chancy, Ralph Works. Paleobotanist, Conservationist. 1 960, 277 pp.
Chao, Yuen Ren. Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, Composer, and Author. 1977, 242 pp.
Clark, J. Desmond. An Archaeologist at Work in African Prehistory and Early Human Studies:
Teamwork and Insight. 2002, 532 pp.
Connors, Betty. The Committeefor Arts and Lectures, 1945-1980: The Connors Years.
2000, 265 pp.
Constance, Lincoln. Versatile Berkeley Botanist: Plant Taxonomy and University Governance.
1987, 362 pp.
Corley, James V. Serving the University in Sacramento. 1969, 143 pp.
Cross, Ira Brown. Portrait ofan Economics Professor. 1967, 128pp.
Cruess, William V. A Half Century in Food and Wine Technology. 1967, 122 pp.
Davidson, Mary Blossom. The Dean of Women and the Importance of Students. 1967, 79 pp.
Davis, Harmer. Founder ofthe Institute of Transportation and Traffic Engineering.
1997, 173pp.
DeMars, Vernon. A Life in Architecture: Indian Dancing, Migrant Housing, Telesis, Design for
Urban Living, Theater, Teaching. 1992,592pp.
Dennes, William R. Philosophy and the University Since 1915. 1970, 162 pp.
Donnelly, Ruth. The University s Role in Housing Services. 1970, 129 pp.
Ebright, Carroll "Ky". California Varsity and Olympics Crew Coach. 1968, 74 pp.
Eckbo, Garrett. Landscape Architecture: The Profession in California, 1935-1940, and Telesis.
1993,103pp.
Elberg, Sanford S. Graduate Education and Microbiology at the University ofCalifornia,
Berkeley, 1930-1989. 1990,269pp.
Erdman, Henry E. Agricultural Economics: Teaching, Research, and Writing, University of
California, Berkeley, 1922-1969. 1971, 252 pp.
Esherick, Joseph. An Architectural Practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1 938- 1 996.
1996,800pp.
Evans, Clinton W. California Athlete, Coach, Administrator, Ambassador. 1968, 106 pp.
Foster, George. An Anthropologist s Life in the 20th Century: Theory and Practice at UC
Berkeley, the Smithsonian, in Mexico, and with the World Health Organization.
2000,401 pp.
Foster, Herbert B. The Role ofthe Engineer s Office in the Development ofthe University of
California Campuses. 1960, 134 pp.
Fruge, August. A Publisher s Career with the University of California Press, the Sierra Club,
and the California Native Plant Society. 2001, 345 pp.
Gardner, David Pierpont. A Life in Higher Education: Fifteenth President ofthe University of
California, 1983-1992. 1997,810pp.
Grether, Ewald T. Dean ofthe UC Berkeley Schools ofBusiness Administration, 1943-1961;
Leader in Campus Administration, Public Service, and Marketing Studies; and Forever
a Teacher. 1993, 1069pp.
Hagar, Ella Barrows. Continuing Memoirs: Family, Community, University. (Class of 1919,
daughter of University President David P. Barrows.) 1974, 272 pp.
Hamilton, Brutus. Student Athletics and the Voluntary Discipline. 1967, 50 pp.
Harding, Sidney T. A Life in Western Water Development. 1967, 524 pp.
Harris, Joseph P. Professor and Practitioner: Government, Election Reform, and the Votomatic.
1983, 155pp.
Harsanyi, John. Nobel Laureate John Harsanyi: From Budapest to Berkeley, 1920-2000.
2000, 151 pp.
Hays, William Charles. Order, Taste, and Grace in Architecture. 1968, 241 pp.
Heller, Elinor Raas. A Volunteer in Politics, in Higher Education, and on Governing Boards.
Two volumes, 1984, 851 pp.
Helmholz, A. Carl. Physics and Faculty Governance at the University of California Berkeley,
1937-1990. 1993,387pp.
Heyman, Ira Michael. (In process.) Professor of Law and Berkeley Chancellor, 1980-1990.
Heyns, Roger W. Berkeley Chancellor, 1965-1971: Tlie University in a Turbulent Society.
1987, 180pp.
Hildebrand, Joel H. Chemistry, Education, and the University ofCalifornia. 1962, 196 pp.
Huff, Elizabeth. Teacher and Founding Curator ofthe East Asiatic Library: from Urbana to
Berkeley by Way ofPeking. 1977, 278 pp.
Huntington, Emily. A Career in Consumer Economics and Social Insurance. 1971, 111 pp.
Hutchison, Claude B. The College ofAgriculture, University of California, 1922-1952.
1962,524pp.
Jenny, Hans. Soil Scientist, Teacher, and Scholar. 1989,364pp.
Johnston, Marguerite Kulp, and Joseph R. Mixer. Student Housing, Welfare, and the ASUC.
1970,157pp.
Jones, Mary C, Harold S. Jones and Mary C. Jones, Partners in Longitudinal Studies.
1983, 154pp.
Joslyn, Maynard A. A Technologist Views the California Wine Industry. 1974, 151 pp.
Kasimatis, Amandus N. A Career in California Viticulture. 1988, 54 pp. (UC Davis professor.)
Kendrick, James B. Jr. From Plant Pathologist to Vice Presidentfor Agricultural and Natural
Resources, University ofCalifornia, 1947-1986. 1989,392pp.
Kingman, Harry L. Citizenship in a Democracy. (Stiles Hall, University YMCA.)
1973,292pp.
Roll, Michael J. The Lair ofthe Bear and the Alumni Association, 1949-1993. 1 993, 387 pp.
Kragen, Adrian A. A Law Professor s Career: Teaching, Private Practice, and Legislative
Representation, 1934 to 1989. 1991, 333 pp.
Kroeber-Quinn, Theodora. Timeless Woman, Writer and Interpreter ofthe California Indian
World. 1982,453pp.
Landreth, Catherine. The Nursery School ofthe Institute ofChild Welfare ofthe University of
California, Berkeley. 1983, 51 pp.
Langelier, Wilfred E. Teaching, Research, and Consultation in Water Purification and Sewage
Treatment, University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, 1916-1955. 1982, 81 pp.
Lehman, Benjamin H. Recollections and Reminiscences ofLife in the Bay Areafrom 1920
Onward. 1969,367pp.
Lenzen, Victor F. Physics and Philosophy. 1965,206pp.
Leopold, Luna. Hydrology, Geomorphology, and Environmental Policy: U.S. Geological
Survey, 1950-1972, and the UC Berkeley, 1972-1987. 1993, 309 pp.
Lessing, Ferdinand D. Early Years. (Professor of Oriental Languages.) 1963, 70 pp.
McGauhey, Percy H. The Sanitary Engineering Research Laboratory: Administration,
Research, and Consultation, 1950-1972. 1974, 259 pp.
McCaskill, June. Herbarium Scientist, University of California, Davis. 1989,83pp. (UC
Davis professor.)
McLaughlin, Donald. Careers in Mining Geology and Management, University Governance
and Teaching. 1 975, 3 1 8 pp.
Maslach, George J. Aeronautical Engineer, Professor, Dean ofthe College ofEngineering,
Provostfor Professional Schools and Colleges, Vice Chancellorfor Research and
Academic Affairs. University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, 1949 to 1983. 2000, 523 pp.
May, Henry F. Professor ofAmerican Intellectual History, University of California, Berkeley,
1952-1980. 1999,218pp.
Merritt, Ralph P. After Me Cometh a Builder, the Recollections ofRalph Palmer Merritt.
1962, 137pp. (UC Rice and Raisin Marketing.)
Metcalf, Woodbridge. Extension Forester, 1926-1956. 1969, 138pp.
Meyer, Karl F. Medical Research and Public Health. 1976, 439 pp.
Miles, Josephine. Poetry, Teaching, and Scholarship. 1980, 344 pp.
Mitchell, Lucy Sprague. Pioneering in Education. 1962, 174 pp.
Morgan, Elmo. Physical Planning and Management: Los Alamos, University of Utah,
University of California, and AID, 1942-1976. 1992, 274 pp.
Neuhaus, Eugen. Reminiscences: Bay Area Art and the University of
California Art Department. 1961,48 pp.
Newell, Pete. UC Berkeley Athletics and a Life in Basketball: Coaching Collegiate and Olympic
Champions; Managing, Teaching, and Consulting in the NBA, 1935-1995. 1997, 470 pp.
Newman, Frank. Professor ofLaw, University of California, Berkeley, 1946-present, Justice,
California Supreme Court, 1977-1983. 1994,336pp. (Available through California
State Archives.)
Neylan, John Francis. Politics, Law, and the University ofCalifornia. 1962, 319 pp.
Nyswander, Dorothy B. Professor and Activistfor Public Health Education in the Americas
and Asia. 1994,318pp.
O Brien, Morrough P. Dean ofthe College ofEngineering, Pioneer in Coastal Engineering,
and Consultant to General Electric. 1 989, 3 1 3 pp.
Olmo, Harold P. Plant Genetics and New Grape Varieties. 1976, 183 pp. (UC Davis
professor.)
Ough, Cornelius. Recollections ofan Enologist, University ofCalifornia, Davis, 1950-1990.
1990,66pp.
Peltason, Jack W. Political Scientist and Leader in Higher Education, 1947-1995: Sixteenth
President ofthe University of California, Chancellor at UC Irvine and the University of
Illinois. 2001,734pp.
Pepper, Stephen C. Art and Philosophy at the University oj California, 1919-1962.
1963,471pp.
Pigford, Thomas H., Building the Fields ofNuclear Engineering and Nuclear Waste
Management, 1950-1999. 2001,340pp.
Pitzer, Kenneth. Chemist and Administrator at UC Berkeley, Rice University, Stanford
University, and the Atomic Energy Commission, 1935-1997. 1999, 558 pp.
Porter, Robert Langley. Physician, Teacher and Guardian ofthe Public Health. 1960, 102pp.
(UC San Francisco professor.)
Reeves, William. Arbovirologist and Professor, UC Berkeley School ofPublic Health.
1993,686pp.
Revelle, Roger. Oceanography, Population Resources and the World. 1988. (UC San Diego
professor.) (Available through Archives, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, University of
California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093.)
Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. Professor ofRussian and European Intellectual History, University of
California, Berkeley, 1957-1997. 1998, 310 pp.
Richardson, Leon J. Berkeley Culture, University of California Highlights, and University
Extension, 1892-1960. 1962,248pp.
Robb, Agnes Roddy. Robert Gordon Sproul and the University of California. 1976, 134 pp.
Rossbach, Charles Edwin. Artist, Mentor, Professor, Writer. 1987, 157 pp.
Schnier, Jacques. A Sculptor s Odyssey. 1987,304pp.
Schorske, Carl E. Intellectual Life, Civil Libertarian Issues, and the Student Movement at the
University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, 1960-1969. 2000, 203 pp.
Scott, Geraldine Knight. A Woman in Landscape Architecture in California, 1926-1989.
1990,235pp.
Shields, Peter J. Reminiscences ofthe Father ofthe Davis Campus.
1954, 107pp.
Sproul, Ida Wittschen. The President s Wife. 1981, 347 pp.
Stampp, Kenneth M. Historian ofSlavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, University of
California, Berkeley, 1946-1983. 1998, 310 pp.
Stern, Milton. The Learning Society: Continuing Education at NYU, Michigan, and UC
Berkeley, 1946-1991. 1993,292pp.
Stevens, Frank C. Forty Years in the Office ofthe President, University ofCalifornia,
1905-1945. 1959, 175pp.
Stewart, George R. A Little ofMyself.
(Author and UC Professor of English.) 1972,319pp.
Stripp, Fred S. Jr. University Debate Coach, Berkeley Civic Leader, and Pastor. 1990, 75 pp.
Strong, Edward W. Philosopher, Professor, and Berkeley Chancellor, 1961-1965.
1992,530pp.
Struve, Gleb. (In process.) Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature.
Taylor, Paul Schuster.
Volume I: Education, Field Research, and Family. 1973, 342 pp.
Volume II and Volume III: California Water and Agricultural Labor. 1975, 519 pp.
Thygeson, Phillips. External Eye Disease and the Proctor Foundation. 1988, 321 pp.
(UC San Francisco professor.) (Available through the Foundation of the American
Academy of Ophthalmology.)
Tien, Chang-Lin. (In process.) Berkeley Chancellor, 1990-1997.
Towle, Katherine A. Administration and Leadership. 1970, 369 pp.
Townes, Charles H. A Life in Physics: Bell Telephone Laboratories and WWII, Columbia
University and the Laser, MIT and Government Service; California and Research in
Astrophysics. 1994,691pp.
Underbill, Robert M. University of California: Lands, Finances, and Investments.
1968, 446 pp.
Vaux, Henry J. Forestry in the Public Interest: Education, Economics, State Policy, 1933-1983.
1987,337pp.
Wada, Yori. Workingfor Youth and Social Justice: The YMCA, the University ofCalifornia, and
the Stulsaft Foundation . 1 99 1 ,
203 pp.
Waring, Henry C. Henry C. Waring on University Extension. 1960,130pp.
Wellman, Harry. Teaching, Research and Administration, University of California, 1925-1968.
1976,259pp.
Wessels, Glenn A. Education ofan Artist. 1967,326pp.
Westphal, Katherine. Artist and Professor. 1988,190pp. (UC Davis professor.)
Whinnery, John. Researcher and Educator in Electromagnetics, Microwaves, and
Optoelectronics, 1935-1995; Dean ofthe College ofEngineering, UC Berkeley,
1950-1963. 1996,273pp.
Wiegel, Robert L. Coastal Engineering: Research, Consulting, and Teaching, 1946-1997.
1997,327pp.
Williams, Arleigh. Dean ofStudents Arleigh Williams: The Free Speech Movement and the Six
Years War, 1964-1970. 1990, 329 pp.
Williams, Arleigh and Betty H. Neely. Disabled Students Residence Program. 1987, 41 pp.
Wilson, Garff B. The Invisible Man, or, Public Ceremonies Chairman at Berkeleyfor
Thirty-Five Years. 1 98 1 ,
442 pp.
Winkler, Albert J. Viticultural Research at UC Davis, 1921-1971. 1973, 144pp.
Woods, Baldwin M. University ofCalifornia Extension. 1957, 102 pp.
Wurster, William Wilson. College ofEnvironmental Design, University of California, Campus
Planning, and Architectural Practice. 1964, 339 pp.
MULTI-INTERVIEWEE PROJECTS
Blake Estate Oral History Project. 1 988, 582 pp.
Architects landscape architects, gardeners, presidents of UC document the history of the
UC presidential residence. Includes interviews with Mai Arbegast, Igor Blake, Ron and
Myra Brocchini, Toichi Domoto, Eliot Evans, Tony Hail, Linda Haymaker, Charles Hitch,
Flo Holmes, Clark and Kay Kerr, Gerry Scott, George and Helena Thacher, Walter
Vodden, and Norma Wilier.
Centennial History Project, 1954-1960. 329 pp.
Includes interviews with George P. Adams, Anson Stiles Blake, Walter C. Blasdale, Joel
H. Hildebrand, Samuel J. Holmes, Alfred L. Kroeber, Ivan M. Linforth, George D.
Louderback, Agnes Fay Morgan, and William Popper. (Bancroft Library use only.)
Thomas D. Church, Landscape Architect. Two volumes, 1978, 803 pp.
Volume I: Includes interviews with Theodore Bernardi, Lucy Butler, June Meehan
Campbell, Louis De Monte, Walter Doty, Donn Emmons, Floyd Gerow, Harriet
Henderson, Joseph Howland, Ruth Jaffe, Burton Litton, Germane Milano, Miriam Pierce,
George Rockrise, Robert Royston, Geraldine Knight Scott, Roger Sturtevant, Francis
Violich, and Harold Watkin.
Volume II: Includes interviews with Maggie Baylis, Elizabeth Roberts Church, Robert
Glasner, Grace Hall, Lawrence Halprin, Proctor Mellquist, Everitt Miller, Harry Sanders,
Lou Schenone, Jack Stafford, Goodwin Steinberg, and Jack Wagstaff.
Interviews with Dentists. (Dental History Project, University of California, San Francisco.)
1969, 1114pp.
Includes interviews with Dickson Bell, Reuben L. Blake, Willard C. Fleming, George A.
Hughes, Leland D. Jones, George F. McGee, C. E. Rutledge, William B. Ryder, Jr.,
Herbert J. Samuels, Joseph Sciutto, William S. Smith, Harvey Stallard, George E.
Steninger, and Abraham W. Ward. (Bancroft Library use only.)
Julia Morgan Architectural History Project. Two volumes, 1976, 621 pp.
Volume I: The Work of Walter Steilberg and Julia Morgan, and the Department of
Architecture, UCB, J 904-1954. Includes interviews with Walter T. Steilberg, Robert
Ratcliff, Evelyn Paine Ratcliff, Norman L. Jensen, John E. Wagstaff, George C. Hodges,
Edward B. Hussey, and Warren Charles Perry.
Volume II: Julia Morgan, Her Office, and a House. Includes interviews with Mary Grace
Barron, Kirk O. Rowlands, Norma Wilier, Quintilla Williams, Catherine Freeman Nimitz,
Polly Lawrence McNaught, Hettie Belle Marcus, Bjarne Dahl, Bjarne Dahl, Jr., Morgan
North, Dorothy Wormser Coblentz, and Flora d llle North.
The Prytaneans: An Oral History ofthe Prytanean Society and its
Members. (Order from Prytanean Society.)
Volume I: 1 90 1
- 1 920, 1 970, 307 pp.
Volume II: 1921-1930, 1977, 313 pp.
Volume III: 1931-1935, 1990, 343 pp.
Six Weeks in Spring, 1985: Managing Student Protest at UC Berkeley. 887 pp.
Transcripts of sixteen interviews conducted during July-August 1985 documenting events
on the UC Berkeley campus in April-May 1985 and administration response to student
activities protesting university policy on investments in South Africa. Interviews with: Ira
Michael Heyman, chancellor; Watson Laetsch, vice chancellor; Roderic Park, vice
chancellor; Ronald Wright, vice chancellor; Richard Hafner, public affairs officer; John
Cummins and Michael R. Smith, chancellor s staff; Patrick Hayashi and B. Thomas
Travers, undergraduate affairs; Mary Jacobs, Hal Reynolds, and Michelle Woods, student
affairs; Deny Bowles, William Foley, Joseph Johnson, and Ellen Stetson, campus police.
(Bancroft Library use only.)
Robert Gordon Sproul Oral History Project. Two volumes, 1986, 904 pp.
Includes interviews with thirty-five persons who knew him well: Horace M. Albright,
Stuart LeRoy Anderson, Katherine Connick Bradley, Franklin M. "Dyke" Brown, Ernest
H. Bumess, Natalie Cohen, Paul A. Dodd, May Dornin, Richard E. Erickson, Walter S.
Frederick, David P. Gardner, Marion Sproul Goodin, Vemon L. Goodin, Louis H.
Heilbron, Robert S. Johnson, Clark Kerr, Adrian A. Kragen, Mary Blumer Lawrence,
Stanley E. McCaffrey, Dean McHenry, Donald H. McLaughlin, Kendric Morrish, Marion
Morrish, William Penn Mott, Jr., Herman Phleger, John B. deC. M. Saunders, Carl W.
Sharsmith, John A. Sproul, Robert Gordon Sproul, Jr., Wallace Sterling, Wakefield
Taylor, Robert M. Underbill, Eleanor L. Van Horn, Garff B. Wilson, and Pete L.
Yzaguirre.
TJie Women s Faculty Club ofthe University ofCalifornia at Berkeley,
1919-1982. 1983,312pp.
Includes interviews with Josephine Smith, Margaret Murdock, Agnes Robb, May Domin,
Josephine Miles, Gudveig Gordon-Britland, Elizabeth Scott, Marian Diamond, Mary Ann
Johnson, Eleanor Van Horn, and Katherine Van Valer Williams.
UC BERKELEY BLACK ALUMNI ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Broussard, Allen. A California Supreme Court Justice Looks at Law and Society, 1969-1996.
1997,266pp.
Ferguson, Lloyd Noel. Increasing Opportunities in Chemistry, 1936-1986. 1992, 74 pp.
Gordon, Walter A. Athlete, Officer in Law Enforcement and Administration, Governor ofthe
Virgin Islands. Two volumes, 1980,621 pp.
Jackson, Ida. Overcoming Barriers in Education. 1990,80pp.
Patterson, Charles. Workingfor Civic Unity in Government, Business, and Philanthropy.
1994,220pp.
Pittman, Tarea Hall. NAACP Official and Civil Rights Worker. 1974, 159pp.
Poston, Marvin. Making Opportunities in Vision Care. 1989, 90 pp.
Rice, Emmett J. Education ofan Economist: From Fulbright Scholar to the Federal Reserve
Board, 1951-1979. 1991,92pp.
Rumford, William Byron. Legislatorfor Fair Employment, Fair Housing, and Public Health.
1973, 152pp.
Williams, Archie. The Joy ofFlying: Olympic Gold, Air Force Colonel, and Teacher.
1993,85pp.
Wilson, Lionel. Attorney, Judge, Oakland Mayor. 1992,104pp.
UC BERKELEY CLASS OF 1931 ENDOWMENT SERIES, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,
SOURCE OF COMMUNITY LEADERS (OUTSTANDING ALUMNI)
Bennett, Mary Woods (class of 1931). A Career in Higher Education: Mills College 1935-1974.
1987,278pp.
Bridges, Robert L. (class of 1930). Sixty Years ofLegal Advice to International Construction
Firms; Tlielen, Marrin, Johnson and Bridges, 1933-1997, 1998, 134 pp.
Browne, Alan K. (class of 1 93 1
). "Mr.
Municipal Bond": Bond Investment Management, Bank
ofAmerica, 1929-1971. 1990,325pp.
Coliver, Edith (class of 1943). (In process.) Foreign aid specialist.
Cubic, Crete W. (Fruge) (class of 1935). A Career in Public Libraries and at UC Berkeley s
School ofLibrarianship. 2000, 198pp.
Dettner, Anne Degruchy Low-Beer (class of 1926). A Woman s Place in Science and Public
Affairs, 1932-1973. 1996,260pp.
Devlin, Marion (class of 1931). Women s News Editor: Vallejo Times-Herald, 1931-1978.
1991, 157pp.
Foster, George M. (class of 1935). An Anthropologist s Life in the Twentieth Century: Theory
and Practice at UC Berkeley, the Smithsonian, in Mexico, and with the World Health
Organization. 2000, 413 pp.
Foster, Mary LeCron (Ph.D., 1965). Finding the Themes: Family, Anthropology, Language
Origins, Peace ami Conflict. 2001, 337 pp.
Hassard, H. Howard (class of 1 93 1 ). The California Medical Association, Medical Insurance,
ami the Law, 1935-1992. 1993, 228 pp.
Hedgpeth, Joel (class of 1933). Marine Biologist and Environmentalist: Pycnogonids, Progress,
and Preserving Bays, Salmon, and Other Living Things. 1 996, 3 1 9 pp.
Heilbron, Louis (class of 1928). Most ofa Century: Law and Public Service, 1930s to 1990s.
1995,397pp.
Hoadley, Walter (class of 1938). Business Economist, Federal Reserve System Director, and
University of California Regent, 1938-2000. 2000, 250 pp.
Kay, Harold (class of 193 1). A Berkeley Boy s Service to the Medical Community ofAlameda
County, 1935-1994. 1994,104pp.
Kittredge, Janice (class of 1947). Volunteer and Employment Careers: University ofCalifornia,
Berkeley; Save San Francisco Bay Association, 1964-1998. 2000, 198 pp.
Koshland, Daniel E., Jr. (class of 1941) In process.
Kragen, Adrian A. (class of 1931). A Law Professor s Career: Teaching, Private Practice, and
Legislative Representative, 1934 to 1989. 1991, 333 pp.
Peterson, Rudolph (class of 1925). A Career in International Banking with the Bank ofAmerica,
1936-1970, and the United Nations Development Program, 1971-1975. 1994, 408 pp.
Reynolds, Flora Elizabeth (M.A., 1935). "A Dukedom Large Enough": Forty Years in Northern
California s Public and Academic Libraries, 1936-1976. 2000, 180pp.
Schwabacher, James H., Jr. (class of 1941). Renaissance Man ofBay Area Music: Tenor,
Teacher. Administrator, Impresario. 2001, 197pp.
Stripp, Fred S. Jr. (class of 1932). University Debate Coach, Berkeley Civic Leader, and Pastor.
1990,75pp.
Torre, Gary (class of 1941). Labor and Tax Attorney, 1949-1982; Sierra Club Foundation
Trustee, 1968-1981. 1994-1998. 1999, 301 pp.
Trefethen, Eugene (class of 1930). Kaiser Industries, Trefethen Vineyards, the University of
California, and Mills College, 1926-1997. 1997, 189 pp.
UC BERKELEY ALUMNI DISCUSS THE UNIVERSITY
Griffiths, Farnham P. (class of 1906). The University ofCalifornia and the California Bar.
1954,46pp.
Ogg, Robert Danforth (class of 1941). Business and Pleasure: Electronics, Anchors, and the
University ofCalifornia. 1989, 157pp.
Olney, Mary McLean (class of 1895). Oakland, Berkeley, and the University of California,
1880-1895. 1963, 173pp.
Selvin, Herman F. (class of 1924). The University of California and California Law and
Lawyers, 1920-1978. 1979,217pp.
Shurtleff, Roy L. (class of 1912). Tlie University s Class of 1912, Investment Banking, and the
ShurtleffFamily History. 1 982, 69 pp.
Stewart, Jessie Harris (class of 1914). Memories of Girlhood and the University. 1978, 70 pp.
Witter, Jean C. (class of 1916). TJte University, the Community, and the Lifeblood ofBusiness.
1968, 109pp.
DONATED ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
Almy, Millie. Reflections ofEarly Childhood Education: 1934-1994. 1997, 89 pp.
Cal Band Oral History Project. An ongoing series of interviews with Cal Band members and
supporters of Cal spirit groups. (University Archives, Bancroft Library use only.)
Crooks, Afton E. On Balance, One Woman s Life and View of University of California
Management, 1954-1990: An Oral History Memoir ofthe Life ofAfton E. Crooks. 1994,
211pp.
Weaver, Harold F. Harold F. Weaver, California Astronomer. 1993,165pp.
TIMOTHY TROY
Timothy Troy holds a master s degree in cultural
anthropology and has been a research librarian and
writer for twenty-five years.
He has held positions at Boston University, the
University of New Mexico, the New York Public
Library, the University of Arizona, and most
recently the San Francisco Public Library.
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U. C BERKFf cv i