Dr. Adolf Mahr

Abstract

THE Court of the University of Edinburgh at a meeting held on March 22, appointed Dr. Adolf Mahr to be the Robert Munro lecturer in anthropology and prehistoric archaeology for 1938–39. This lectureship was founded in memory of Dr. Robert Munro, most distinguished and widely-known of Scottish archæologists, whose work on palaeolithic man and on the lake dwellings of Europe placed him in the front rank of the students of prehistory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The choice of Dr. Mahr as Munro lecturer at the present juncture is peculiarly appropriate. Born and educated in Vienna, after holding an appointment on the staff of the Imperial (now State) National Museum of Vienna, when he specialized in studies of the Hallstatt period of the Iron Age, Dr. Mahr in 1934 was appointed director of the National Museum of Ireland and keeper of Irish antiquities. In virtue of his office, the responsibility has devolved upon him of adapting to the service of field archæology the State measures of the Irish Government for the relin occupation sites of all periodsef of unemployment and economic depression. A large number of men have been absorbed in the work of excavating o of Irish history from prehistoric to late historic throughout the country. A measure of these activities in archaeological research, which have been pursued under the direction of Dr. Mahr and supervised by him and his assistants, is afforded by the summary of results which formed the substance of the address delivered by Dr. Mahr as president of the Prehistoric Society in 1937, and occupies no less than 175 pages in quarto of that Society's recently published Proceedings for 1937 (3, 2).