We have to start this week on a somber note. On the afternoon of 13 January 2024, our friend and colleague Prof. Elizabeth Moore passed away at UCL Hospital in London at the age of 75. She was a luminary in the field and her contributions have immensely enriched our understanding of Southeast Asian archaeology from the moated sites of northeastern Thailand to the archaeology of Myanmar, which she devoted most of her life to. Her passing leaves a void in our academic community, especially with our Burmese colleagues. I have had the good opportunity to interact with her many times professionally, and in the last decade she worked tirelessly to mentor and provide opportunities for younger colleagues, both from Myanmar and from the SOAS Alphawood scholars. I know she is missed by many in our field, and she is a model of scholar and mentor that we should all emulate. If you have any tributes for Prof. Moore, you are welcome to add them to the comments or contact me directly so that I can add it to this post.
BBC Burma’s obituary: ‘‘ကျယ်ပြောသောပုဂံ’’ စာအုပ်ရေးတဲ့ အဲလစ်ဇဘက်မိုး ကွယ်လွန် | BBC Burma, 14 Jan 2024
From Angela Chiu, via Facebook:
I am very sad to say that retired SOAS Professor Elizabeth Moore passed away yesterday, 13 January, at University College London Hospital after a struggle with cancer. She was much loved by the numerous students who benefited from her generous sharing of expertise in Southeast Asian archaeology, and no less, from her deep compassion and caring for them. She tirelessly supported and promoted the academic work of her students, especially in Myanmar, where she did research for over 2 decades. After her retirement from SOAS several years ago, she shipped her valuable collection of archaeology and art history books from London to Yangon to establish a small library open to all. She organized seminars and conferences in Myanmar that enabled her former students there to share their scholarship and develop the academic community of art historians and archaeologists.
Elizabeth was my PhD supervisor at SOAS from 2007-2011. I also was TA for 2 of her courses. We spent many hours together talking about my research but also lots of other various, unrelated things; typically, my supervision sessions would exceed 2 hours. It was a real delight to spend time with such an interesting, insightful, and kind person. I remember someone said that good supervisors don’t treat all of their students the same way; they adapt their supervision style to the needs of the student. In that light, I hope that I was not too much of a burden to her. I was so fortunate to have such an assiduous and perceptive advisor, and friend.
I’m afraid I don’t have the exact dates for Elizabeth Moore’s biography, but here are a few facts I recall from memory. Her grandfather had been an American missionary in Burma. Elizabeth was born in the late 1940s (1949?), I think in Washington, DC. She attended a Quaker private high school and then Pomona College in California, where she studied art and was involved in dramatics. Some time after graduation, she lived in Indonesia, where she taught primary school. I think she may also have spent time living in Singapore. Her growing interest in Southeast Asian art led her to pursue a PhD in archaeology with Professor Ian Glover at UCL. Her work on the moated sites of Northeast Thailand was published in the Oxford BAR series and became a classic. She also did research in Cambodia, including working on an early NASA-related effort to use LIDAR for archaeological research. But she soon began to focus on Myanmar. At SOAS, she had a long career including at least two periods as Head of the Department of Art and Archaeology. Elizabeth also won prestigious visiting posts at Kyoto CSEAS and ARI at NUS. After her retirement, she continued to support SOAS with its Alphawood-endowed scholarship program for Southeast Asian art. And of course, she continued to research and publish.
I’m sure others will fill out Elizabeth’s biography in the coming days. In the meantime, my heart is heavy realizing that she’s no longer here. But we have all that we learned from her and all that she shared with us, and will hopefully see her in the next existence.
The image above is shared by her student Victoria Theint Theing Aung, who was by her side to the end. She adds:
She is proud of herself and she wants me to share her doctors and nurses that she was retired as Professor and Head of HAA… I would like to share her last exhibition visit to The Floyle Special Collections Gallery at Brunei Gallery, SOAS on the 11th October. We visited together opening ceremony of this exhibition because she wants me to see her donation to SOAS in this exhibition. That’s was a very last memory of her to see her objects.
The following is an obituary by Prof. Peter Sharrock of SOAS:
After Elizabeth retired as Professor and Head of HAA she took her personal library to Yangon to help the Alphawood alumni in Myanmar, where the importation of books had been banned for many decades. It is still lodged at the university. To her students she was sayamar, ‘teacher’. Her writing projects with the alumni include a catalogue for the new Museum in Bagan and a chapter in the 3rd volume of the SAAAP anthology The Creative South, on the new style of Buddhist architecture and ritual, developed after Bagan collapsed under Mongol threat, from Mandalay to Lanna in northern Thailand.
She left Yangon as the junta rounded up supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi and when she heard that exiting the airport was becoming increasingly difficult. From London she set up links with the alumni in Myanmar and keep constantly in touch, helping them in any way she could. Several had lost their jobs and had their passports confiscated.
Of late Elizabeth was planning to move to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand where she hoped to be of even greater assistance to the alumni across the border in Myanmar. Chiang Mai University had invited Elizabeth to join them as a Visiting Research Fellow engaged on the Buddhist landscape of the Shan country between Mandalay and Lanna.
Late last year, we were somehow inspired to record Elizabeth’s extraordinary contribution to aerial and satellite archaeology in a booklet presented to Fred Eychaner as a token of our thanks for a new donation to SOAS. This tribute should be installed in the SOAS Library with the ‘Williams-Hunt’ WWII collection of aerial photography over the temples of Angkor, Thailand and Myanmar. The photographs were key to Elizabeth’s PhD at the UCL Archaeology Institute with Ian Glover, and she saved them from destruction at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, where nobody could grasp the importance of the large and completely unannotated collection. Elizabeth persuaded the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. to turn the Space Shuttle for take radar images of Angkor Wat. This led directly to the later LiDAR research that was to show that Angkor had a population of 800,000 in 1280 – the same size as the Chinese capital – and far bigger Paris’s population of 20,000 when Notre Dame was constructed.
Throughout her illustrious career, Professor Moore dedicated herself to the meticulous exploration and profound understanding of the rich archaeological tapestry of Southeast Asia, with a special emphasis on the cultural treasures of Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia. Her academic journey commenced with doctoral research at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London under the tutelage of Ian Glover in the early 1980s, focusing on circular moated sites in northeastern Thailand—a monumental endeavor that she completed in 1988. In 2014, Elizabeth served as the Chair of the SOAS Southeast Asia Centre.
Professor Moore’s scholarly contributions extended far beyond the confines of academia. Her seminal works, including “Ancient Capitals of Thailand” co-authored with P. Stott (1996), “Shwedagon: Golden Pagoda of Myanmar” (1999), “Early Landscape of Myanmar” (2006), and “The Pyu Landscape: Collected Articles” (2012), stand as testaments to her unwavering commitment to advancing our understanding of the region’s rich history and cultural heritage. Prior to her passing, she triumphantly completed her final opus, “Wider Bagan: Ancient and Living Buddhist Traditions” (ISEAS, 2023), a collaborative effort with Myanmar authors.
Source: In Memoriam: Prof. Elizabeth Howard Moore (1949-2024) – A Stalwart of Wisdom in Southeast Asian Archaeology | SEAMEO SPAFA
Professor Moore’s scholarly contributions extended far beyond the confines of academia. Her seminal works, including “Ancient Capitals of Thailand” co-authored with P. Stott (1996), “Shwedagon: Golden Pagoda of Myanmar” (1999), “Early Landscape of Myanmar” (2006), and “The Pyu Landscape: Collected Articles” (2012), stand as testaments to her unwavering commitment to advancing our understanding of the region’s rich history and cultural heritage. Prior to her passing, she triumphantly completed her final opus, “Wider Bagan: Ancient and Living Buddhist Traditions” (ISEAS, 2023), a collaborative effort with Myanmar authors.
Beyond the lecture halls of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where she served as a beacon of knowledge and inspiration for decades, Professor Moore extended her passion for education to actively support and facilitate the academic pursuits of numerous students under her guidance. She served as a visiting professor at the University of Yangon, Department of Archaeology, from 2003 until recently. In 2013, she assumed a visiting professorship at the Kyoto University Center of Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University (ICPR-CSEAS), and was previously associated with the Open Society Initiative at Yangon University.
Source: In Memoriam: Prof. Elizabeth Howard Moore (1949-2024) – A Stalwart of Wisdom in Southeast Asian Archaeology | SEAMEO SPAFA
မြန်မာ့ယဉ်ကျေးမှုသမိုင်းနဲ့ ရှေးဟောင်းသုတေသနလုပ်ငန်းတွေကို ဆောင်ရွက်ခဲ့တဲ့ လန်ဒန်တက္ကသိုလ် အရှေ့တိုင်းနဲ့ အာဖရိကပညာသင်ကျောင်းက အသက် ၇၅ နှစ်အရွယ် ရှေးဟောင်းသုတေသနပညာရှင် ဂုဏ်ထူးဆောင်ပါမောက္ခ အဲလစ်ဇဘတ်မိုးဟာ မနေ့က လန်ဒန် စံတော်ချိန် ညနေ ၅ နာရီ မိနစ် ၂၀ မှာ လူကြီးရောဂါနဲ့ ကွယ်လွန်သွားပါတယ်။
ပါမောက္ခ မိုးက လွန်ခဲ့တဲ့ ၁၉၈၉ ကာလများကတည်းက ရှေးဟောင်းသုတေသနဆိုင်ရာ လုပ်ငန်းတွေကို မြန်မာနိုင်ငံနဲ့ ပူးပေါင်းဆောင်ရွက်ခဲ့တာ ဖြစ်ပါတယ်။
ပျူရှေးဟောင်းမြို့တော်တွေနဲ့ ပုဂံယဉ်ကျေးမှုအမွေနှစ်ဒေသကို ကမ္ဘာ့အမွေနှစ်စာရင်း တင်သွင်းရာမှာ အဆိုပြုလွှာအတွက် အဓိကပါဝင်ရေးသားပေးခဲ့ပြီး ဟန်လင်း၊ ဗိဿနိုး၊ သရေခတ္တရာ ပျူမြို့ဟောင်းတွေအပြင် ပုဂံလည်း ကမ္ဘာ့အမွေနှစ်စာရင်းဝင်အဖြစ် သတ်မှတ်ခံခဲ့ရပါတယ်။
Source: မြန်မာ့ရှေးဟောင်းသုတေသနအတွက် အကူအညီများပေးခဲ့သူ ပါမောက္ခ အဲလစ်ဇဘတ်မိုး ကွယ်လွန် | DVB, 14 Jan 2024
ISEAS mourns the passing of Prof Elizabeth Moore
Prof Elizabeth Moore was a Visiting Senior Fellow at the former Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre (NSC) from 2016 to 2018 where she worked on the 9th-13th century Bagan period. She later became Associate Fellow at NSC from 2018 to 2021. Prof Moore was not only a leading authority on Burmese archaeology and art history, she was also one of the gentlest souls one could hope to meet. She always had time for fellow scholars, researchers, and students. Prof Moore participated in NSC’s Archaeology and Art History Field School (22 July – 11 August 2018) in Trawas, East Java. There she enthralled undergraduate students from all over the world with her lecture on Southeast Asian material culture in the Singapore leg of the Field School.
In 2023, ISEAS had the pleasure of publishing her manuscript entitled Wider Bagan: Ancient and Living Buddhist Traditions. I recall the numerous discussions we had over the ideas and importance of the book as she prepared it for print. Her enthusiasm was inspiring. I know how hard she worked to get this book published and I am glad she saw it come to fruition. She will be greatly missed.
Terence Chong, Director, Research and Deputy Chief Executive Officer, ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute
I first met Emeritus Prof. Elizabeth H. Moore when she became a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre (NSC) at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute (ISEAS) in Singapore, in 2016. She has had a long history with Singapore, having taught at the Tanglin Trust and the American School in Singapore in the 1970s. One of her earliest published articles was on Singapore, entitled “Peranakan Silver in Singapore” for Arts of Asia in 1982.
As she went to do her PhD at the Institute of Archaeology at the University College London, eventually publishing her thesis on Moated sites in early north east Thailand, her research focus quickly shifted from insular to mainland Southeast Asia and she went on to work on projects in Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar. Although she is perhaps best known for her 2007 book Early Landscapes of Myanmar (among several others), her most ambitious was perhaps her most recent book.
At NSC, I remember her strong work ethic as she worked on her book project “The Localisation of Buddhism in the Wider Landscape of Bagan” (it has since been published as a book by ISEAS entitled Wider Bagan: Ancient and Living Buddhist Traditions in 2023). I remember Prof. Moore spent long hours at her desk organizing her survey data, keeping to a very simple lunch and working into the night as she lived within walking distance of ISEAS at the time. During the early stages of this project, I remember chatting with her about GIS software as she hoped that it would give her the analytical tools with which to look at the wider landscape.
Prof. Moore was rather prolific during her stints in Singapore – she was one of the organizers of the 2016 NSC Workshop on the Heritage of Ancient and Urban Sites. She also helped to translate Burmese archaeological reports from Beikthano and Pinle so that they could be accessible to international scholars; as with many scientific fields, language accessibility is often a barrier that creates a two-world problem. Prof. Moore also gave a talk on The Mon Cities and Myanmar Cultural Heritage at the Asian Civilisations Museum during its exhibition on Cities and Kings: Ancient Treasures from Myanmar and later published a journal article on Mokti in 2019. She also co-contributed several articles for the NSC Highlights newsletter, which included “Uncovering a Hidden Temple: Ta Mok Shwegugyi, Kyaukse,” “Buddhism on the Shan Plateau: Bawrithat and Intein” and “Pots in Unexpected Places: Public Awareness of Ancient Ceramics in Lower Myanmar.”
2019 would unfortunately be the last time I saw her in person; this was at the SEAMEO-SPAFA conference on Southeast Asian Archaeology in Bangkok. Usually surrounded by a group of scholars or students during the breaks at such events, I will remember her gentle demeanor as she kindly introduced me to a Myanmar scholar who she thought I could collaborate with after my own presentation. Encouraging with her many students and generous with her time when she was able to, she will be sorely missed by those of us who knew her in Singapore.
Foo Shu Tieng, formerly a Research Officer at the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute
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