Other livesAnthropologyObituaryNicholas David obituary
My brother Nicholas David, who has died aged 85, was a leading figure in the field of ethnoarchaeology who undertook important research in west Africa and became professor of anthropology and archaeology at the University of Calgary.
Long after he retired in 2002 Nic continued to receive funding to carry out his research. He developed and maintained a website about the people of the Sukur in the Mandara mountains of Cameroon, and he contributed to adding the Sukur cultural landscape to the Unesco World Heritage list. In 2014, when Sukur was attacked by Boko Haram, Nic set up the Boko Haram Victims fund and website.
Born in Cambridge, to Nora (nee Blakesley), a city councillor and from 1978 a Labour life peeress, as Lady David of Romsey, and Richard David, publisher and head of the Cambridge University Press, Nic was the eldest of four children. He was sent to Horris Hill preparatory school aged eight, and, as I was seven years younger, we only ever spent the school holidays together. Summers were spent in Polzeath, north Cornwall, where our grandparents had a holiday house, and I always remember the chocolate cake baked for him by our grandmother on his birthday.
After leaving Winchester college (where his grandfather was a housemaster), he spent two years in national service, which included a spell as a junior officer in the Nigeria Regiment, before returning home to Cambridge University to read archaeology and anthropology at Trinity College.
I was 13 when Nic went to Trinity, and, as the only child not sent to boarding school, it was wonderful to have an older brother living so close. My memories are of him teaching me to listen to jazz, playing the LP of Carmen Jones with the amazing picture of Dorothy Dandridge on the cover, and teaching me how to jive.
From there he moved to Harvard for a doctorate in the palaeoanthropology of south-western France, followed by a teaching job at the University of Pennsylvania (1967-71), during which he returned to west Africa to pursue the groundbreaking research on the material culture, ancient and modern, of Cameroonian communities that remained a central passion for the rest of his life.
After brief spells at University College London (1971-74) and the University of Ibadan in Nigeria (1974-78), he moved to the chair at Calgary that he occupied for the rest of his working life (1980-2002).
He had three children with his first wife, Hilke Hennig. The marriage ended in divorce, as did his subsequent marriage to Iva Hynes. His third wife, Judy Sterner, an anthropologist he met at the University of Calgary in 1980 and married five years later, became his partner and colleague in the west African project.
Nic is survived by Judy, his children, Ivo, Branwen and Til, three grandchildren, and his siblings, Sebastian, Eliza and me.
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