Dai Morgan Evans (1 March 1944 – 1 March 2017) was a British archaeologist and academic. He is best known for his television appearances in programmes such as '' Rome Wasn't Built in a Day''. Morgan Evans was born in

West Kirby West Kirby is a resort town on the north-west corner of the Wirral Peninsula in Merseyside, England, at the mouth of the River Dee. Within the boundaries of the historic county of Cheshire, to the north-east lies Hoylake, to the east Grange ...

and grew up in Chester. Morgan Evans studied archaeology at Cardiff University from 1963 to 1966, and subsequently worked for the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings. He directed numerous excavations, worked for

English Heritage English Heritage (officially the English Heritage Trust) is a charity that manages over 400 historic monuments, buildings and places. These include prehistoric sites, medieval castles, Roman forts and country houses. The charity states that i ...

from 1977 to 1992, and then became General Secretary of the

Society of Antiquaries of London A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Soci ...

, retiring from the post in 2004. He was Chairman of the Butser Ancient Farm Trust, and a

visiting professor In academia, a visiting scholar, visiting researcher, visiting fellow, visiting lecturer, or visiting professor is a scholar from an institution who visits a host university to teach, lecture, or perform research on a topic for which the visitor ...

at the

University of Chester , mottoeng = "He that teacheth, on teaching" , former_names = , established = (gained university status in 2005) , type = Public , endowment = £395,000 (2018) , budget = £118.3 million , chancellor = Gyles Brandreth , vice_chancell ...

. In 2002 he participated in and later presented a Discovery Channel series on the reconstruction of a

Roman villa A Roman villa was typically a farmhouse or country house built in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, sometimes reaching extravagant proportions. Typology and distribution Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) distinguished two kinds of villas n ...

. The "villa urbana" erected at

Wroxeter Wroxeter is a village in Shropshire, England, which forms part of the civil parish of Wroxeter and Uppington, beside the River Severn, south-east of Shrewsbury. '' Viroconium Cornoviorum'', the fourth largest city in Roman Britain, was site ...

during the Channel 4 series ''Rome Wasn't Built in a Day'' was designed by Morgan Evans and is based on one of the villas excavated on the Wroxeter site. It opened to the public on 19 February 2011, and, by the end of the year, needed maintenance work to repair frost damageBBC News - "Wroxeter Roman villa needs maintenance work". 29 December 2011
Accessed 19 December 2014

Works

*''Rebuilding the Past: A Roman Villa'' (1993)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Morgan Evans, Dai 1944 births 2017 deaths Academics of the University of Chester British archaeologists People from West Kirby