Bob Clarke (historian)

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Bob Clarke (born 1964 in Scarborough) is an English archaeologist and historian. He earned a PhD from the University of Exeter in 2017, supervised by Oliver Creighton and Stephen Rippon. His thesis argues that Cold War archaeology can map how humans change the landscape, using an “Order and Chaos” idea to predict what kinds of objects appear on highly organized sites.

Education and training
He studied archaeology with mentors Mick Aston and Julian Richards and earned an honours degree in post-compulsory education from the Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford.

Career
Clarke was the QinetiQ Archaeologist at Boscombe Down from 1996 to 2008 and returned to the post in 2013. In 2017 he joined Wessex Archaeology as Research Manager and he is also a visiting archaeology tutor at the University of Bath.

Research interests
His work covers prehistoric and Roman Wiltshire and 20th-century British military architecture (airfields and nuclear bunkers). He discovered Broad Town Man, a Saxon execution burial in Wiltshire.

Publications and other work
Clarke has written several books, including Four Minute Warning: Britain's Cold War (2005), Ten Tons for Tempelhof: The Berlin Airlift (2007), The Archaeology of Airfields (2008), The Jet Provost: A Little Plane With a Big History (2008), The Illustrated Guide to Armageddon (2009), Remember Scarborough (2010), Prehistoric Wiltshire: An Illustrated Guide (2011, with Wiltshire Heritage Museum), Royal Wootton Bassett (2013), and Devizes. He has published papers on topics such as Cold War bunkers, Bronze Age metalwork, Roman building techniques, earthworks near Stonehenge, and Saxon executions. He has served as Honorary Review Editor for the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine since 2006 and joined the Editorial Board of Ex Historia in 2011 as an archaeology specialist.