Sir Harry Godwin, FRS[2] (9 May 1901 – 12 August 1985) was a prominent English botanist and ecologist of the 20th century.
It was at this time that he first made friends with the ecologist Sir Arthur Tansley who was to be an important influence on Godwin for many years.
[6] In the early 1930s Harry and his wife Margaret were "dynamic botanists" who, together with the archaeologist Grahame Clark, led a small group of young academics at the University of Cambridge which aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the environment of past societies by integrating archaeological knowledge with new scientific techniques in geology and plant sciences, instead of the traditional archaeologists' study of artefacts in isolation.
He was the founder and first director of the Subdepartment of Quaternary Research at the University of Cambridge in 1948, where he supervised pioneering work on the new technique of radiocarbon dating.
[citation needed] Authors Rydin and Jeglum in Biology of Habitats described the concept of peat archives, a phrase coined by Godwin in 1981.