Emyr Estyn Evans
British geographer
Emyr Estyn Evans CBE (29 May 1905 – 12 August 1989) was a Welsh geographer and archaeologist, whose primary field of interest was the Irish neolithic.
Early life
He was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the son of a Welsh Presbyterian minister, George Owen Evans. He was educated at Welshpool Intermediate (County) School in Montgomeryshire and University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he read Geography and Anthropology. Illness forced him to turn down a post at Oxford University and worked instead for geographer and zoologist H. J. Fleure, preparing contributions for the 14th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.
Career
After recovering from tuberculosis, he accepted a post in 1928 as lecturer in geography at Queen's University, Belfast, where he was responsible for establishing a new department, the Institute of Irish Studies. He was promoted to Reader in 1944 and Professor in 1945, a position he held until his retirement in 1968. He was a key founder of the Ulster Folk Museum.
His academic activities focused initially on relationships between prehistoric and proto-historic communities and their natural environment. In 1931 he was awarded an MA (Wales) for a thesis entitled A Study of the Origins and Distributions of some Late Bronze Age Industries in Western Europe. In 1938 he was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and in 1939 awarded a DSc for published work.
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This entry incorporates text from “Emyr Estyn Evans” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.