My wife, Ruth Megaw, who has died suddenly aged 74, reinvented herself several times in a distinguished academic career that crossed disciplines and continents.
She was born Madeline Ruth Miller, in Kilsyth, Stirlingshire, to a Welsh teacher and a Scottish minister of the Kirk; was dux (top student) of Hutchesons' girls' grammar, Glasgow, and went on to obtain a first-class honours degree in history at Glasgow University. Then, in 1959, she sat the civil service examination and was placed second in the whole of the UK; she became the youngest third secretary in the Foreign Office.
In 1961, Ruth and I were married by her father in Helensburgh. Her first experience of archaeology in the raw was during our engagement, when she visited Charles Thomas's famous Gwithian excavations in Cornwall, on which I had been working since the 50s. We also spent our honeymoon in Gwithian; it rained every day.
As a result of our marriage, Ruth had to resign from the Foreign Office, and soon afterwards we made our first major move, to Sydney. Ruth juggled bringing up baby – our son, Jonathan – with the demands of a postgraduate scholarship and completed a PhD on the early days of US-Australian relations, becoming a pioneer in the study of early Australian film. We returned to the UK in 1972 when I was appointed to the chair of archaeology at Leicester University.
During a decade in the East Midlands, Ruth established a new and highly successful American studies department at what was then Nene College and is now Northampton University. She also decided to assist me out of something of a writing block and thus, with Early Celtic Art in Britain and Ireland (1986), we began some 25 years of collaborative publication. Ruth and I returned to Australia, this time to Flinders University in Adelaide, where we developed a joint interest in Aboriginal Australian art, while continuing to publish widely in the field of early Celtic art.
Following the publication in 1989 of our Celtic Art from Its Beginnings to the Book of Kells – with more than half the text written by Ruth – she announced: "Now we should do something serious." This was a proposal for a supplement to Paul Jacobsthal's magisterial Early Celtic Art which had first appeared in 1944; the delegates of Oxford University Press received the proposal with enthusiasm but the project awaits completion.
Some 10 years ago, the tell-tale signs of short-term memory loss appeared and, just over a year ago, Ruth had to be moved into a nursing home. Elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1997, she remained an honorary visiting fellow in archaeology at Glasgow, confirming that you don't need a degree in archaeology to be a successful archaeologist.
Ruth is survived by Jonathan and myself.