Subsequent got here postdoctoral fellowships and analysis alternatives with France’s Fyssen Basis and the College of Oklahoma. Whereas co-authoring papers on the early harnessing of fireside — a central function of the rising human dwelling — Clark additionally broadened the geographical scope of her analysis. “I had thought rather a lot concerning the variations between Neanderthals and fashionable people,” she defined. “What I actually need to know is how fashionable people developed — what occurred in Africa that caused these modifications.”

This impressed her present involvement with two excavations in Morocco, each positioned in an understudied space alongside the southwestern Atlantic coast (and each spared by the current earthquake). A type of websites is Jorf el Hamam, a Center to Late Stone Age rockshelter excavation the place Clark serves as co-director. Unearthed there final 12 months was a sequence of cemented hearths, all lined up towards the again of the construction.

At this time, Clark is settling into her first semester as an assistant professor following three years as a School Fellow and lecturer. In 2020, she launched the favored course “Sport of Stones: The Archaeology of Europe from Handaxes to Stonehenge.”

She’s additionally set about writing a e book on human dwelling areas. “Archaeologists are type of scared to say phrases like ‘dwelling,’” she famous. “We don’t need to put an excessive amount of which means in them.”

That modified for Clark throughout the pandemic, amid the lengthy months of socially isolating together with her companion and two kids. Abruptly she noticed a chance to articulate the house’s defining position throughout human historical past.

Really, the e book will return additional than that.

“Primates construct sleeping platforms — a chimpanzee, for instance, will make a type of nest within the tree,” Clark defined. Our hominid ancestors additionally slumbered on excessive branches. Clark will begin the story there in exploring how the character of dwelling modified alongside on a regular basis life. When did people begin sleeping on the bottom? When did we begin consuming and sleeping in a single place? At what level did houses assume their essential familial and social position?

As a result of houses are so carefully related to ladies, Clark argues, they had been too usually “demoted” by previous generations of teachers. Her mission is to alter that for future anthropologists and archaeologists, inspiring recent curiosity and new traces of inquiry. As she put it, “I’m working to raise the house and its significance to human evolution.”