Megaw, Arthur Hubert Stanley ('Peter') (1910–2006), archaeologist, was born in Portobello nursing home in South Richmond Street, Dublin, on 20 July 1910, the second of four sons of Arthur Stanley Megaw (1873–1961), solicitor and writer, and his wife (Helen Isabel) Bertha (née Smith). Known for most of his life as Peter Megaw, he was brought up in Belfast, where he attended Campbell College, and then studied architecture in Peterhouse, Cambridge. He graduated in 1931, and, after briefly sharing a flat in London with a fellow student, James Mason, later a famous film actor, went on the Walston studentship to the British School at Athens, working on Byzantine architecture. He stayed on for another two years as MacMillan student, then was assistant director in 1935–6. His early work on art history, published by the British School, showed much ability, and his administrative skills were already evident. He was briefly acting director when two appointees died in quick succession in 1936. The following year, in Athens, he married Elektra Mangoletsi, an artist, of an Albanian family, who had been brought up in Greece and England, and who had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art; during their fifty-six happy years together, they travelled and worked together on many of Megaw's projects.
In 1936 he was appointed director of antiquities in Cyprus, then a British crown colony. His predecessor, who had had to try to deal with the results of new legislation from 1935, had resigned after a very short incumbency, having failed to cope with a complex situation and little backing. After this bad start for the new legal framework, Megaw had to establish control over excavations, museums, collectors, dealers, and officials throughout the island, and had also to unite the various agencies which had previously attempted, often in vain, to regulate the activities of collectors and to care for the island's built heritage. He quickly made his mark, encouraging the development of kite aerial photography, and establishing an efficient system to oversee the work of conservators and archaeologists in hundreds of sites. He ensured that his teams recorded the existing features of sites and buildings and restored as authentically as possible the fabric of ancient buildings from all periods of the long history of Cyprus. Sites were preserved from future destruction; on occasion land was bought and sites taken into care, and Megaw's policies and skills ensured that local cooperation was generally readily secured. His important work on the buildings of the early Christian Cypriot church was acknowledged in 1995 by the award of the Frend medal by the Society of Antiquaries of London, but at the time was scarcely known beyond Cyprus, partly because the second world war enveloped the island only a year or two after Megaw began work.
Despite considerable dangers and difficulties, Megaw stayed in Cyprus during the war, with a short secondment to Palestine (though his wife was evacuated to South Africa). After the war, the Cyprus earthquake of 1953 posed new challenges, and Megaw was recalled from furlough to help with resettlement and reconstruction of village houses; he designed houses in vernacular style to be more stable in seismic events. In the 1950s local officials took over some curatorial responsibilities and Megaw had the opportunity to start archaeological investigations on the castle at Paphos and an episcopal basilica at Kourion, and to develop his interest in Byzantine and mediaeval ceramics. However, work was interrupted by the Suez crisis of 1956, which affected security locally, and political developments in Cyprus from the mid 1950s, with threats from EOKA insurgents, further disrupted his work. Megaw had some involvement in negotiations that led to the island's independence in 1960, and was at the governor's side when the agreement ending British administration was signed in August 1960.
Thus, his having reached the age of 50, Megaw's career was threatened; he spent a short time as acting field director on archaeological investigation of Byzantine monuments of Istanbul; this was funded by Dumbarton Oaks, a museum and research institution based in Washington, DC. In the autumn of 1962, he returned to Athens as director of the British School; his efficient leadership and expertise encouraged an increased level of archaeological study throughout Greece, and the annual reports, for which the director was responsible, describe and catalogue the important sites examined during his tenure. Students and visiting scholars enjoyed his hospitable and knowledgeable support, and in Athens as in Cyprus his influence on the development of his subject was considerable. In 1966–7 he himself excavated more of the castle at Paphos.
However, from 1967 Greece had a military government, causing difficulties in the running of the British School; it seems that in the resulting uncertainty about the institution's future, the governing body in London appointed a successor to Megaw, not realising that he had in fact been willing to remain in post. The Megaws were thus obliged to leave the school, and moved between Athens, Cyprus and London, as Peter tried to complete excavations and write up results; with support from Dumbarton Oaks (1970–71) and Boston College (1981–4), he finished the excavation at Paphos, but increasingly the pressure of the work became too much for him. A younger colleague undertook the preparation of the excavation report.
The sudden death of his wife in June 1993 was a great loss, and he never recovered equilibrium; they had had no children. He managed to complete the text of the report on the excavations at Kourion, but despite assistance from colleagues and from a family friend, Mrs Shelagh Meade, was unable to correct proofs. On his 90th birthday in 2000, he was presented with a preliminary copy of a Festschrift, Mosaic, compiled by admiring colleagues. He collapsed very soon afterwards, and had to be looked after by carers twenty-four hours a day, in his home in Hampstead, London, until he died there of cancer on 28 June 2006. Dumbarton Oaks published the Kourion report in 2007. Megaw's career of seventy-five years spent in Greece and Cyprus produced important effects on the fabric of Cypriot ancient monuments, as well as greatly increasing understanding of Byzantine and Crusader archaeology and art history. He wrote 70 articles, and annual reports on the archaeology of Cyprus and Greece from 1935 to 1967. Three of his five books were unfinished when he died (two were taken over by others to finish). Four pages of bibliographical citations in Mosaic indicate the range of his interests, and though never employed in formal university education, he trained and inspired generations of students. He was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, an honorary life member of the Society for Promotion of Byzantine Studies, an honorary citizen of the city of Paphos, and was made CBE in the king's birthday honours list of 1951. In 2002 he gave his collection of books to QUB, to form part of the Benefactors' Library of materials relating to Byzantine scholarship.
His elder brother was the scientist Eric Megaw (qv). His younger brother Basil Richardson Stanley Megaw (1913–2002) was a noted archaeologist and folklife scholar.