R. A. Stewart Macalister

Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister (8 July 1870 – 26 April 1950) was an Irish archaeologist.

Macalister was born in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Alexander Macalister, then professor of Professor of Zoology, University of Dublin. His father was appointed professor of anatomy at Cambridge 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. However, in most respects Macalister's work in Biblical archaeology is considered to have been a failure, due to the poor quality of his excavation techniques and his shoddy record-keeping. Because Macalister was the only professional archaeologist involved in the excavation, managing a project of such complexity was essentially an impossible task.

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