Juliet Clutton-Brock

Juliet Clutton-Brock, FSA, FZS (6 September 1933 – 21 September 2015) was an English zooarchaeologist and curator, specialising in domesticated mammals. From 1969 to 1993, she worked at the Natural History Museum. Between 1999 and 2006, she was the managing editor of the Journal of Zoology.

Early life Clutton-Brock was born on 6 September 1933 in London. She was the daughter of Alan Clutton-Brock (1904-1976), an art critic of The Times and Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, and his first wife, Sheelah Mabel Stoney Archer. In 1936, she and her brother were sent to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to live with an aunt after the death of their mother in a car-accident. There, her brother died from polio. Juliet enjoyed the wildlife in her aunt's garden, but was terrified of snakes. Having returned to England after the end of the war in 1945, she was educated at Runton Hill School, an all-girls private boarding school in Norfolk described as "icy" by Caroline Grigson. There she developed an interest in paleontology and studied the fossils in the nearby sea-cliffs. In 1976, Clutton-Brock became a member of the executive committee of the International Council for Archaeozoology during a meeting of the UISPP in Nice, and in 1982 organised a meeting of the International Council for Archaeozoology at the Institute of Archaeology on London together with Caroline Grigson. Her "Natural History of Domesticated Mammals" became the standard text-book for most zoo-archaeology courses in the UK and abroad.

Personal life Clutton-Brock married Peter Jewell (1925-1998), also a biologist and interested in zoo-archaeology, in 1958. Together, they had three daughters; Sarah, Rebecca and Topsy. She was also an elected Fellow of the Zoological Society of London (FZS). Anneke Clason, Sebastian Payne and Hans-Peter Uerpmann published a festschrift in her honour in 1993, entitled Skeletons in Her Cupboard.

Selected works