Other excavations carried out under his directorship included that of an Iron Age settlement on Micklemoor Hill, Norfolk, and the Neolithic site of Hurst Fen, Suffolk.

His career was recognised by a number of accolades, including the Dutch Erasmus Prize and a British knighthood, and he was the subject of a posthumous biography by Brian Fagan.

[8] Having familiarised himself with much of the literature on prehistory, including V. Gordon Childe's influential 1925 book The Dawn of European Civilisation,[9] in his final year at Marlborough Clark gave a talk on the subject of "Progress in Prehistoric Times".

[15] The department was run by the Disney Professor Ellis Minns—whose ideas influenced Clark—while the archaeology curriculum was largely organised by Miles Burkitt, an unpaid lecturer of private means.

[16] Providing himself with a broad-based grounding in archaeology, Clark sat in on lectures given by archaeologists like Gertrude Caton Thompson, Dorothy Garrod, Leonard Woolley, and Childe.

[25] Clark initially familiarised himself with the evidence for Mesolithic society in continental Europe by travelling to Denmark and Sweden in 1929, where he had a chance meeting with Sophus Müller.

[29] Influenced by Childe, the book was rooted in the theoretical perspective of culture-historical archaeology, presenting different styles of Mesolithic tool as representations of different 'cultures', which in turn represented different peoples.

[41] In July 1935, Cambridge University's Department of Anthropology and Archaeology employed Clark as an assistant lecturer to teach a course on "geochronology and climatic history",[42] and the following year his position was upgraded to that of a faculty member.

[45] He arranged for undergraduate members of the Field Unit to assist him in his March 1935 excavations at Mildenhall Fen, where they discovered a wealth of Bronze Age material.

[49] Under Clark's lead, the new Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society published articles by prominent archaeologists like Childe, Piggott, Philips, and Glyn Daniel, and emphasised interdisciplinary examinations that took into account the work of the natural sciences.

[53] They then embarked on a honeymoon in Norway and Sweden, looking at the region's prehistoric rock art, on the subject of which Clark then produced an illustrated article for Antiquity.

[54] In Germany they spent time at the Schleswig Museum and met with Gustav Schwantes, who took them to visit Alfred Rust's excavation of a Mesolithic site at Meiendorf.

[56] In 1936, Cambridge University Press published Clark's The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe, in which he demonstrated his growing interest in ecological and environmental themes.

[66] While awaiting enlistment into the British armed forces, Clark took lessons in Russian with Minns in order to enable him to read Soviet archaeological publications.

[79] During the summer break of 1947, Clark led a team of undergraduates in the excavation of Bullock's Haste along the Car Dyke near Cottenham, revealing evidence of early Romano-British activity.

[92] An amateur archaeologist had found early Iron Age pottery on Micklemoor Hill near West Harling in Norfolk, and Clark began an excavation of the site in 1948.

[93] In 1948, Clark was informed about a Mesolithic flint scatter that had been found in peaty deposits at Seamer Carr in North Yorkshire by an amateur archaeologist, John Moore.

[124] In 1960, Clark returned to Peacock Farm to oversee a small excavation designed to recover material that could be subjected to the newly developed process of radiocarbon dating.

[115] He also grew increasingly interested in Greek prehistory, and gained a permit to excavate the Neolithic Nea Nikomedia mound near Veroia in eastern Macedonia.

[126] In early 1964, Clark made his first visit to the Antipodes as he spent time as the William Evans Professor at Otago University in New Zealand, using the opportunity to learn more about Maori prehistory.

He also visited Vincent Megaw's excavation of the Curracurrang rock shelter and was taken by Norman Tindale to witness a living hunter-gatherer society at the Papunya indigenous community.

[131] In 1968, he travelled via Moscow to Japan in order to attend the International Conference of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, using the trip to spend time in Taiwan, the Philippines, and New Zealand.

The book received few reviews, including one produced by Edmund Leach for Nature which was highly critical, arguing that Clark's functionalist and culturally evolutionary approach was outdated.

[171] Clark stayed out of the theoretical debates between the processualists and adherents of older schools of thought, although in a letter to Coles expressed "distress" at what he saw as students forcing archaeological data to fit their preconceived notions.

[184] Mulvaney, who was one of his students, noted that in supervisory meetings, the "austere and busy" Clark "wasted time with derisory gossip concerning his peers, tainted with dogmatic political assertions".

"[185] Fagan noted that Clark was one of the four men who dominated British archaeology during the 1950s and early 1960s, along with the Edinburgh-based Piggott, the Cardiff-based Roger Atkinson, and the Oxford-based Christopher Hawkes.

[190] In books like The Identity of Man, Clark promoted what he saw as the benefits of social hierarchy, viewing socio-economic inequalities as an impetus towards liberty and believing that unequal levels of consumption allowed for humanity's greatest artistic and cultural creations.

[200] Grahame Clark is remembered for his pioneering work in prehistoric economies, in the ecological approach, in the study of organic artefacts, in his initiation of science-based archaeology, in his various excavations and investigative projects, and in his world view of prehistory.

For Fagan, Clark was "one of the most important prehistorians of the twentieth century",[173] an individual whose "intellectual influence on archaeology was enormous", producing a "legacy to prehistory [that] will endure for generations".

[173] A less grandiose assessment was left by the archaeologist Pamela Jane Smith, who stated that Clark made "major contributions to the establishment of prehistory as an academic subject at Cambridge University".