A hundred years on from the beginnings of more intellectually rigorous and scientifically based approaches to the study of prehistory, it is not surprising to find that there is a burgeoning interest in its historiography. This ranges from studies of particular traditions of thought to those concerned with the wider social context, from those studies that focus upon the contribution of individuals to those that trace social currents that influenced the direction of scholarly endeavours. Such works as have so far been published represent this breadth of approach, and two examples relevant to the present review are Brian Fagan’s study of Grahame Clark’s contributions to the framing of a ‘modern’ prehistory (Reference Fagan2001) and Adam Stout’s colourful outline of contested views of the proper study of the early inhabitants of Britain (Reference Stout2008). However, what have been lacking are more detailed and closely documented surveys that bring together a wealth of documentary material and oral testimony that move research on beyond reliance upon secondary sources and anecdotal evidence. It is in this context that Pamela Smith’s fascinating study (the first, we hope, of many) of prehistory at Cambridge before 1950 needs to be appreciated and valued.

The volume extends the author’s previous research on the organization of the Fenland Research Committee (Smith Reference Smith1994 and Reference Smith1997) to look at the broader canvas of the institutional development of prehistory at Cambridge University through the more intimate lens of the biographies of three of its early protagonists: Miles Burkitt, Dorothy Garrod and Grahame Clark. In doing so, Smith takes us on a journey that encompasses both the heights of Mount Carmel, where Garrod excavated between 1929 and 1934, and the cosiness of the departmental tea-room.

Any account of the development of prehistory at Cambridge in the period after this study, between 1950 and at least 1970, is necessarily dominated by Sir Grahame Clark (Disney Professor of Archaeology, 1952–74), and he was in no doubt as to the significance of his own legacy (Clark Reference Clark1989). However, what Smith skilfully manages in this volume is to set Clark’s innovations of the pre-war years into a Cambridge University setting strongly influenced (at least intellectually) by Burkitt and Garrod. Smith is not only concerned with dominant personalities: she shows also how it was the fostering of communities of scholarship supported by many ‘minor’ figures that enabled Cambridge to exercise such a pre-eminent role in the development of prehistory in Britain before 1950. And it is only through the kind of careful and inclusive research that she has undertaken that such figures can be rescued from obscurity and celebrated by the rising generation. Although Smith is not alone in the drive to undertake such research, hers is an important contribution, both because it has introduced some important perspectives and approaches deriving from the history of science and because it has established some clear evidential and procedural baselines for such work.

While the main text, drawn from Smith’s PhD thesis, is 110 pages long, another whole dimension to the work is provided by the ninety-six-page appendix that provides sixteen transcripts from interviews with archaeologists. Nine of these archaeologists throw important light on post-Second World War world archaeology, and especially upon Africanist archaeology, and although they take the volume as a whole in a slightly different direction, they provide interesting material towards subsequent accounts of Cambridge-influenced prehistoric studies worldwide.

In the first of three principal chapters, Smith uses the life and work of the gentleman-scholar of private means, Miles Burkitt, as the primary lens through which to gain an understanding of the social and institutional dynamic of archaeology at Cambridge in the years after 1915 and before 1935. He personified a world view sponsored by Haddon and Ridgeway at Cambridge, in which God and Empire were closely entwined with the study of the remote past. Smith cites personal testimonies and correspondence to argue that Burkitt’s approach to prehistory and scholarship was none the less a fundamentally congenial, sharing and humane one.

It would perhaps be too easy to see Burkitt’s PhD student, Grahame Clark, as the former’s opposite – the ambitious self-made man of science. Smith skilfully uses oral testimony to argue in the second principal chapter that it was, however, Clark’s scholarly brilliance and his championing of the ‘project’ of Cambridge prehistory, and not his somewhat frosty personality, that brought gifted students there. His innovative early studies of lithic industries and the methodological influence of Sir Cyril Fox (cf Fox Reference Fox1923) regarding both landscape and the writing of prehistory are subjects of comment, but it is Clark’s achievements in interdisciplinary research and in promoting studies of ‘world prehistory’ that are rightly the main focus.

The election of Dorothy Garrod to the Disney Professorship of Archaeology in 1939 as the first woman appointed to a Chair anywhere in Cambridge forms a key subject in the third principal chapter, but it is also a study of the sometimes wholly inadequate reaction of an individual to the suffocating weight of authority and ‘tradition’ in the academy.

Why is any of this important? For one thing, it illustrates that archaeology, like many another discipline before 1939, went through a definite stage of ‘professionalization’, and that the role of Cambridge in this process was to see the institutionalizing of prehistory as a subject, together with its alignment with the earth sciences. What distinguished Cambridge prehistory both before and after 1950 was also its location within the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology which, we learn on the first page of this volume, was the ‘splendid idiosyncrasy’ of philosopher Anthony Quinton’s (Reference Quinton1987) memorable phrase.

Moreover, the ‘imperial model’ of overseas archaeological endeavour promulgated in the 1920s and 1930s can very largely be ascribed to Cambridge, for good or ill. Fast forward from 1950 to 1985 and an entirely different strand of archaeological thought and practice had been added to the repertoire and reputation of Cambridge prehistory in the wake of the work of David Clarke: but that, of course, is another story.