In 1937 Clark became the curator of
Northern Rhodesia's
Rhodes-Livingstone Museum (now known as the Livingstone Memorial Museum). A year later he married
Betty Cable née Baume, who would accompany him on a number of expeditions throughout his life. Clark served in the military during
World War II with the East Africa Command forces in Somalia and Ethiopia, being subsequently attached to the British Military Administration, when he managed to find time to carry out archaeological fieldwork in the
Horn of Africa. Following the war, he returned to Cambridge, completing his PhD in 1947. In 1948 he founded the Northern Rhodesian National Monuments Commission.), and became Professor of
Anthropology (subsequently Emeritus) at the
University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until his retirement in 1986. Under his guidance, the programme became one of the world's foremost in
paleoanthropology. In 1965, he was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the
Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement in 1988 from the
Archaeological Institute of America. Clark continued working until his death, including a 1991 dig in China that was the first to be led in that country by foreign archaeologists in more than 40 years. Clark died of
pneumonia in
Oakland in 2002, having published more than twenty books and over 300 scholarly papers on paleoanthropology and African prehistory in the course of his career. His wife survived him by only two months. He is survived by his children, Elizabeth and John. Over the course of his career, Clark compiled a large scholarly library of scientific books and articles which he donated to his former students, archaeologists
Nicholas Toth and
Kathy Schick, at the
Stone Age Institute where the collection is now housed as the Desmond Clark Memorial Library. ==Honours==