Forde, (Cyril) Daryll (1902–1973), anthropologist, was born on 16 Mar 1902 in Tottenham, Middlesex, the son of the Revd. John Percival Daniel Forde, schoolmaster, and his wife, Caroline Pearce Pittman. He went to Middlesex county school at Tottenham and then to the geography department of University College, London, from where he graduated in 1922. There, in 1923 he was appointed a lecturer in geography, and in 1928 was awarded a PhD in prehistoric archaeology. At this time, both geography and anatomy at University College had research interests in ethnography and archaeology, and Forde found himself welcome in both disciplines. He was also in the student set associated with the Bloomsbury group. Though he was intellectually closer to the archaeologist Gordon Childe, it was through Sir Grafton Elliot Smith in anatomy that Forde met both the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers (for whose posthumously published books Forde drew the maps) and the distinguished Californian anthropologist R.H. Lowie. Forde spent 1928–1930 as Commonwealth Fellow in anthropology with Lowie at Berkeley, working on American Indian economies. He wrote Habitat, Economy and Society (1934). He was already recognised as an innovative archaeologist with his study on Welsh megaliths; at Aberystwyth, he pioneered 'anthropology at home' by initiating ethnographic studies of Welsh villages and towns. However, his reading had shown him how little was really known about African economies. With the recently established International Institute for African Languages and Culture sending out researchers like Meyer Fortes to an acephalous community in northern Gold Coast (Ghana), and S.F. Nadel to a complex state in northern Nigeria, in 1935 Forde opted instead for something in between; a 'village' of 10,000 Yakö in south-eastern Nigeria, whose kinship system ('double unilineal descent') was particularly interesting for lineage theorists. Forde's work was interrupted by the Second World War. His curtailed fieldwork on Yakö marriage was nonetheless published in 1941. In the same year, he was posted to the Foreign Office research department (then in Oxford), heading the section on the USA. He returned to Aberystwyth in 1943. In 1944, Forde was appointed to the post of part-time director of the renamed International African Institute in London; in 1945, he was appointed to the chair of the newly established Department of Anthropology at University College, London. From 1957 to 1960, he analysed Yakö ritual and belief, publishing Yakö Studies (1964). More importantly, he raised funds from the Ford Foundation for a series of international seminars, bringing together in different African countries scholars from America, Europe, and Africa.