ABSTRACT
Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister was born in Dublin in 1870, the son of a distinguished professor of anatomy at Cambridge University, where he himself took an MA degree. Macalister was a man of many talents: a skilled draftsman; an accomplished linguist; a composer of hymns and long-time organist and choirmaster at the Adelaide Road Church in Dublin; a prolific writer of books ranging from Celtic archaeology to the history of stained glass windows and ecclesiastical vestments; and a popular reviewer and lecturer. When he retired from Gezer in 1912, he became Professor of Celtic Archaeology in University College, Dublin — the first chair of national archaeology established in any major European university. Although he lived until 1950, he never returned to Palestine except for a brief campaign with J. C. Duncan on the hill of the Ophel in Jerusalem in 1923–1925. While at University College, where he taught until 1943, he excavated many Irish sites and became a recognized authority on European prehistory, even though his field methods were not highly regarded. When Macalister, always impatient, could not locate the entrance to the great Irish passage-grave at Knowth — virtually a national shrine — he dynamited it and came in from the top! Macalister was impatient with his critics as well, and he would write endless letters to the editors of a newspaper or magazine whenever his books were negatively reviewed. Beneath the charm, and Macalister’s capacity for hard work, was a certain pride, which could easily appear as arrogance. This may have been partly compensation: this ‘giant of Palestinian archaeology’, as he came to be regarded, was in physical stature scarcely over five feet. And it may also have been due in part to the fact that Macalister was lonely, something of an ‘outsider’. He never married, and in Roman Catholic Dublin he remained a staunch Presbyterian. These and other personal facts about Macalister I learned in 1969 when I met with his successors in the Department of Archaeology at University College in Dublin and heard with fascination their reminiscences of the man whose ‘ghost’ I had lived with all those years at Gezer, but never met. One of his successors, George Eogan, told me that Macalister was widely regarded in Ireland as an egotistical ‘buffoon’ (his term).
