Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister (8 July 1870 – 26 April 1950) was an Irish
archaeologist.
Biography
Macalister was born in
Dublin, Ireland, the son of
Alexander Macalister, then Professor of
Zoology, University of Dublin. His father was appointed professor of anatomy at
Cambridge University in 1883, and he was educated at
The Perse School, and then studied at Cambridge University.
Although his earliest interest was in the archaeology of Ireland, he soon developed a strong interest in
biblical archaeology. Along with
Frederick J. Bliss, he excavated several towns in the
Shephelah region of
Ottoman Palestine from 1898 to 1900. Using advances in
stratigraphy building on the work of
Flinders Petrie, they developed a chronology for the region using ceramic
typology. Upon Bliss' retirement, Macalister became director of excavations for the
Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) in 1901.
From 1902 to 1909 he was responsible for the excavations at
Gezer, in the modern state of
Israel, just west of
Jerusalem. This was one of the earliest large-scale scientific archaeological excavations in the region. The
Gezer calendar found there is a very early
paleo-Hebrew calendrical inscription. Macalister also documents his findings of
child sacrifices around the High Place of Gezer, by the
Amorites, a tribe of Canaan. He associates his findings with biblical records of the sins of the Amorites, which he calls "the iniquity of the Amorites" in his 1906 publication "Bible side-lights from the mound of Gezer".[1]
Macalister left the field of Biblical archaeology in 1909 to accept a position as professor of
Celtic archaeology at
University College Dublin, where he taught until his retirement in 1943. During this period, he worked at the ancient Irish royal site at the
Hill of Tara and was responsible for editing the catalogue of all known
ogham inscriptions from Great Britain and Ireland. Many of his translations of Irish myths and legends are still widely used today. He was elected to the
Royal Irish Academy in 1910 and served as their president from 1926 to 1931.[2] He was also president of the
Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland from 1924 to 1928.
Iniquity of the Amorite "That a Canaanite altar should consist of a heap of human heads covered with earth is a new idea, though it is not inherently improbable; for it is evident from the excavations that the Canaanites showed an Aztec-like disregard of the value of human life."[3]
Thomas, Page A. (1984), "The Success and Failure of Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister", Biblical Archaeologist, 47 (1): 33–35,
doi:
10.2307/3209874,
JSTOR3209874,
S2CID165610704