author
Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister
1870–1950
An energetic Irish archaeologist and scholar, he helped shape early modern archaeology through excavations in both Ireland and Palestine. His work also reached a wider audience through studies of Celtic subjects and articles for the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
1 Audiobook
Ecclesiastical Vestments: Their development and history
by Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister
About the author
Born in Dublin in 1870, Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister became one of the best-known Irish archaeologists of his generation. He worked across an unusually wide range of fields, including Irish antiquities, Celtic studies, epigraphy, and the archaeology of the Near East.
He is especially remembered for his excavations at Gezer in Palestine and for his long academic career as professor of Celtic archaeology at University College Dublin. Alongside his fieldwork, he published extensively and contributed articles to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, showing the breadth of his learning as well as his talent for explaining the ancient world to general readers.
Macalister died in 1950. Even where some of his archaeological interpretations were later revised, he remains an important figure in the history of archaeology for the scale of his research and the ambition of his scholarship.