ABSTRACT
Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister (1870–1950) was a man who brought out the opposites not just in himself, but also in those with whom he came into contact (Fig. 1). He was an industrious archaeologist, but an awful excavator; he was very intelligent, but had a terrible temper; he had loyal friends and sworn enemies. 1 Basically, Macalister was a person admired by the scholarly community at large, but also at the same time intensely disliked by quite a few of his contemporaries. The American scholar William Foxwell Albright in his book The Archaeology of Palestine described Macalister as ‘brilliant’, but at the same time thought his Gezer excavations a disgrace (Albright 1960, 30–31). Portrait of R. A. S. Macalister from 1916 from the Elspeth Horne family album. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315084305/114d7757-b822-4801-8f74-471866355590/content/fig4_1_OC.jpg"/> (Courtesy: PEF Archives)
