archaeology. One was the University of Oxford, although Clark was unsuccessful in attaining a scholarship to attend St John's College, Oxford. Turning to the University of Cambridge, he applied to join Peterhouse and while they too turned him down for a scholarship, they admitted him as a "pensioner", or a student who pays for their own tuition. He began his degree in 1927, and during his first two years was enrolled on the history tripos. He attended lectures by economic historians like Michael Postan, which would influence his later archaeological approach to the economies of prehistoric societies. During these years he had continued his research into archaeology on an independent basis, producing articles on prehistoric stone tools that were published in the journals Sussex Archaeological Collections and the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia. In 1928, Clark began his studies in archaeology, which was then taught alongside physical anthropology and social anthropology within the university's anthropology department. 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. 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. Although the Cambridge syllabus did not provide opportunities for excavation, Clark assisted the non-professional archaeologist Eliot Curwen during his excavations of the Whitehawk Neolithic causewayed camp near Brighton and then The Trundle, an Iron Age hillfort and Neolithic causewayed enclosure near Chichester. It was at the latter that he befriended two fellow excavators, Stuart Piggott and Charles Philips, who became lifelong friends. He also visited a number of Mortimer Wheeler's excavations, although never worked on them. Clark graduated in 1930 with a first-class honours degree. Clark then registered as a doctoral student, being awarded a Hugo de Balsham studentship at Peterhouse from 1930 to 1932, and then a Bye Fellowship from 1932 to 1935. At Burkitt's suggestion, he devoted his thesis largely to the Mesolithic—or 'Middle Stone Age'—period of British prehistory. At the time little was known about Mesolithic Britain as few scholars had paid attention to it, and most of the archaeological evidence for it consisted of scattered flint tools. Burkitt served as his supervisor, although largely left Clark to his own devices. Clark initially familiarised himself with the evidence for Mesolithic society in continental Europe