Born to be an Archaeologist

• One of the most impressive finds from his main dig, Gezer, is the "Gezer Calendar," an 10th century B.C. inscribed tablet. A tourist found this in Macalister's dump.

• Finding a huge structure made of fine ashlar masonry, Macalister called it a Maccabean [!] castle [!]. Close. It's one of the three great Solomonic gates. (Maccabean = 150 B.C.; Solomon = 950 B.C.) (Castles and gates are shaped differently.)

• By cutting off the Gezer watersystem from its context, Macalister spared himself the humiliation of archaeologists ever finding out when it really dates from.

• Tombs: not to miss a chance to misdate anything, Macalister dated the Persian cist graves at Gezer to the Philistine period.

• By misdating the wall in the City of David (said it was Davidic when it was really Hasmonean), he made Warren's Shaft make no sense whatsoever.

Method

• He hired 200 untrained laborers (and one [!] foreman) and worked them year-round (taking breaks for cholera epidemics and rains) from sunrise to sunset. They dug a single trench, 40 feet wide, across the tell. When this was cleared, they dug a second trench next to it, and dumped the debris from the second into the first. In this way, he went from one end of the tell to the other, eventually turning the entire tell upside down.

• William Dever's description of Macalister at Gezer: "working resolutely alone, trying vainly to handle all of the field direction, survey, drafting, photography, recording, and all the rest, despite almost superhuman efforts, Macalister was very nearly buried under the accumulation of his own excavated material."

• Fortunately, Macalister was a better leader and unifier than excavator.  That he had nine camp cooks before he could get one to stay is irrelevant.

Kenyon's Evaluation

"The excavation of Gezer was one of the earliest large-scale excavations in Palestine, being carried out from 1902 to 1905 and 1907 to 1909. It was excavated with the greatest care by Professor R. A. G. (sic!) Macalister, and the results were very fully published" (Kathleen Kenyon, Royal Cities of the Old Testament, p. 68).

The Most Amazing Quote

"The exact spot in the mound where any ordinary object chanced to lie is not generally of great importance."  Like using sterile instruments in medicine - not so important.

A Positive Note

He published [all of the above helpful information] very quickly.

A Final Mercy

After finishing Gezer, Macalister committed the rest of his life to Celtic archaeology.