Dai Morgan Evans

Known among his academic colleagues for his Welsh gusto and fruity language — as well as his appetite for a drink — Evans regretted his suggestion that swearing be edited out of the programme. He found his technical explanations to the builders were usually cut very short. “At its worst, they didn’t listen to me, they didn’t seem to understand what I was saying, and I got very frustrated,” he sighed.

On-screen rows included a confrontation over wheelbarrows — which, according to Evans, were not invented during Roman times. The foreman argued that he had seen pictures of ancient Egyptians using them on the internet. However, Evans insisted that they were banned: “I said, ‘You could carry things in a sedan-type litter.’ ” In between site visits he beavered away in libraries answering construction questions and finding factual sources.

Nevertheless he had largely won the team round by the end — especially after he took them on a trip to see the Roman ruins at Ephesus in Turkey, saying that he wanted them to have a concept of “the colours, the feel, the scale, the bling, the bravado”. One conceded: “The Romans were a little bit rough, but they made things look good. They were master bodgers.”

In the end the team erected an oak frame, hand-chopped 150 tonnes of sandstone and laid 300,000 chips in the mosaic floor. The result was a two-storey mansion in Wroxeter — a once thriving Roman town — complete with a bath house and a steam room that showed how a wealthy Roman merchant would have lived. To Evans’s delight, when it opened to the public in 2011 it swiftly attracted thousands of visitors.

Born in 1944 in West Kirby in Merseyside to David Morgan Evans, a solicitor, and Betty, David Morgan Evans grew up in Chester, where the remains of the Romans were all around. As a teenager he supervised some old-style “navvies” on a dig, and learnt much from them — including how to lay a “triple Yankee” bet at the racecourse.

He acquired the name “Dai” at what is now Cardiff University, where he also chaired Plaid Cymru’s student body, helping to oust Neil Kinnock from the presidency of the union. Kinnock once said of him: “You’d be a good bloke if you weren’t Plaid.”

In the late 1960s he joined the Welsh office of the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings (later English Heritage), where he was instructed to carry out “rescue excavations” ahead of modern development. The Welsh that he had learnt as an undergraduate was useful when dealing with unwelcoming landowners. He was once sent to meet the farmer who had promised to greet with gunshot the next civil servant who came to call. Evans dressed carefully in country tweeds, made sure to leave his briefcase in the car and persuaded the farmer to put aside his shotgun and talk about the ancient monument on his farm.

He moved to London as an inspector in 1977, where he worked with the Ministry of Defence on Salisbury Plain. He soon won the trust of the military, not only being invited to mess dinners as a speaker, but being offered the first-hand — and, as he admitted, terrifying — experience of trying to steer a tank around a prehistoric barrow at night.

His networking skills were famous and usually hinged on socialising. As one English Heritage colleague recalled, he was a master of the art of the long lunch, the best one ended at 7.30pm with everyone sneaking back into the office to collect their briefcases.

The annual staff meeting took place at Stonehenge and Avebury and everyone was treated to a picnic among the stones, complete with a guided tour by Evans, waving an umbrella around in imitation of an ancient weapon.

In retirement, as the general secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of London, he ensured that the cellar was opened for a drink at 5pm sharp on a Friday. A bon viveur of the highest order, he mastered lethal ancient cocktail recipes — involving bizarre ingredients such as kumquats and wormwood — for the society’s Christmas party. For Millennium eve he roasted a leg of Welsh lamb, which was served in the committee room with champagne, and he happily raced a colleague to see who could open the most wine bottles in 30 minutes. He won, with 32 to 10.

Evans’s irascible nature was just as legendary. He could often be heard shouting from the inner office, and was known to exit a bureaucratic meeting with a firm expletive. Five minutes later there was calmness again.

With his wife, Sheena, an administrative civil servant, he lived in Surbiton, southwest London. They had three children: Alix, who works in the insurance industry; Kathy, a playwright and university lecturer; and Sarah, who works in banking. He enjoyed opera, art galleries and nanotechnology, but truly switched off only when walking in the countryside or staying at the family cottage in the remote Gam Valley in Wales.

Otherwise he rarely relaxed or stopped reading — habits that perhaps contributed to his insomnia. On an earlier project to build a Roman farmhouse for a Discovery channel documentary in 2002, he had thought nothing of shouting cheerfully into the camera about flint stone techniques while the wind howled. With rain misting up his lenses, he watched as a wall crumbled down and, in the background, part of a tent came free and flew into the air. However, when the presenter asked Evans if the villa could be built in record time, he grinned: “Absolutely!”

Evans always worked best to deadlines. The book Rebuilding the Past, A Roman Villa was produced in six weeks. The more technical volume that he planned to succeed it had no deadline — thus it never appeared.

Dai Morgan Evans, archaeologist, was born on March 1, 1944. He died from cancer on March 1, 2017, aged 73