JOAN Clarke, the second daughter of the former Bishop of Oxford, Kenneth Kirk, has died at the age of 83.

Born Joan Kirk on February 11,1924, her father, Dr Kirk, subsequently became the Bishop of Oxford from 1937 to 1954.

Mrs Clarke was brought up in Oxford, living first in Norham Road, then in Christ Church and finally on Boars Hill.

She was educated at the Dragon School, which at that time admitted sisters of existing boy pupils.

Her father persuaded the headmaster to take Mrs Clarke and her two sisters on the promise that boys would follow.

Subsequently she went with her sisters to Queen Margaret's School, Scarborough, which was evacuated at the outset of the Second World War to Castle Howard.

At Oxford she did a two-year war degree in classics as a member of the Society of Home Students, now St Anne's College.

During this time she was involved in excavations carried out by Richard Atkinson and by the Oxford University Archaeological Society.

Following university she served in the WRNS at Bletchley Park, leaving in 1946 to do a social services diploma at Oxford.

The diploma was never completed since in 1947 she was recruited by Donald Harden to be an assistant keeper in the Department of Antiquities of the Ashmolean Museum.

Her first substantial publication, in 1949, was of surface finds from the Romano-Celtic temple site at Woodeaton, collected over many years by various fieldwalkers.

In 1952, with Richard Goodchild she co-directed the first excavation of the site.

Mrs Clarke was elected a Fellow of the Oxford University Archaeological Society in 1952, when still only in her late twenties.

In 1956 she married David Tyrwhitt-Drake Clarke, then keeper of antiquities at Leicester Museum, having first met him when they were digging in Canterbury in 1947.

They moved to Colchester in 1963 when he became curator of the Colchester and Essex Museum.

This meant leaving the Ashmolean and she gave up full-time employment to focus on bringing up four children.

She retained a keen interest in archaeology and contributed to educational works such as the book on Camulodunum (co-authored with her husband) in the educational series on Roman towns developed by Ginn & Company in the early 1970s.

Following her husband's retirement from the Colchester and Essex Museum in 1988, they moved back to Oxfordshire, settling at Combe, near Woodstock, in 1990.

For the rest of her life, she maintained a strong interest in things archaeological, being much involved with the Oxford Architectural and Historical Society.

Mrs Clarke passed away on October 13.