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Born
and raised in Devon, Moore gained early experience of archaeological
fieldwork as a teenage volunteer on excavations of sites of many periods
in the West of England. At Oxford he read Modern History, and participated
in digs organized by the Oxford University Archaeological Society of
which he became President. In 1966 he joined Kathleen Kenyon's excavation
in Jerusalem, his first experience of fieldwork in the Middle East.
Postgraduate
studies in archaeology at the University of London, where he studied
under Professor John Evans, provided opportunities to participate in
surveys and excavations in Italy, Malta, and at Knossos on Crete. Moore
then returned to Oxford to pursue doctoral work with Kathleen Kenyon.
His interests lay in the beginning of farming and settled life in the
Middle East. Supported by a Randall MacIver Studentship and a Wainwright
Fellowship from Oxford among other honors, he embarked on extensive
research of sites and museum collections across the Middle East. His
doctoral thesis entitled The Neolithic of the Levant was completed in
1978.
In
1971 Moore was invited by the Syrian authorities to select a prehistoric
site for excavation in the sector of the Euphrates Valley threatened
by the construction of a new dam. He chose Abu Hureyra. The results
of the excavation were potentially so significant that, in partnership
with Hillman and Legge, he has devoted much of his subsequent career
to exploring the implications of the data from Abu Hureyra for the transition
from foraging to farming. That research has decisively demonstrated
that agriculture began much earlier in the Euphrates Valley that had
been suspected and that Abu Hureyra played a key role in its development.
The site has illuminated the dramatic immediate results of the adoption
of farming with unusual clarity.
Moore's
archaeological interests span the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and
Europe. His research has concentrated on the advent of agriculture and
sedentary life in Western Asia and their spread to adjacent continents,
but he also works on the development of complex societies and town life
in the Middle East. In recent years Moore has conducted field research
in Turkey and Iraq as well as in Syria. His interests extend through
the theory and practice of archaeology and the application of advances
in the natural sciences to understanding the past. His current project
is at Jericho in the Jordan Valley where he is conducting a landscape
survey.
Moore has
taught archaeology in the departments of anthropology at the University
of Arizona and Yale University. At Yale he also served as Associate
Dean in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Currently, Moore is
Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
 Hillman
started his career working in nursery gardening, the family business,
but he was already a committed naturalist with a detailed knowledge
of the British flora. He joined the United Kingdom's Nature Conservancy
at their Alston Moor nature reserve, and thereafter the Botany Department
of London's Natural History Museum where he worked for five years on
European floras. His university education was in agricultural botany
at the University of Reading where he developed his special interests
in evolutionary genetics and plant taxonomy.
It
was his interests in the evolution of wheat that first led him into
archaeology. Following research training in archaeobotany at the University
of Mainz, Germany, and the Romisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, he became
Research Fellow at the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara where
he worked on early agriculture, field experiments to measure domestication
rates in wild cereals under primitive cultivation, and ethnographic
studies of traditional systems of crop husbandry. It was in Ankara that
he first met Andrew Moore who invited him to participate in the Abu
Hureyra project from its outset.
There
followed 25 years of research on the Abu Hureyra plant remains and on
associated ecological studies in Syria and other areas of Southwest
Asia where there were wild plant communities, complete with key plant
foods, analogous to those likely to have existed at Epipalaeolithic
Abu Hureyra. During this time, Hillman worked in the Botany Department
of University College, Cardiff, Wales, and served as Archaeobotanist
to the Welsh Archaeological Trusts. Later, he joined the Department
of Human Environment at the Institute of Archaeology, University College
London, which allowed a period of unbroken research on the Abu Hureyra
plant remains and related laboratory and field ecological studies. At
the Institute of Archaeology Hillman taught courses in archaeobotany
(palaeo-ethnobotany) and related areas. Now in retirement, he continues
as Visiting Professor in Archaeobotany. His particular interest is in
hunter-gatherer ethnobotany in temperate and arid zones world wide.
With the survival expert Ray Mears, he is currently researching probable
past patterns of use of wild plant foods in aboriginal (pre-agrarian)
Britain.
 Tony
Legge began work as a technician in a research laboratory that was concerned
with the environmental physiology of domestic mammals. A brief spell
of military conscription during the time that the Berlin Wall went up
induced a determination to spend the future working on the past - an
increasing interest. In 1966 he joined Eric Higgs' excavation at the
Asprochaliko shelter in Epirus, Greece, and then later that year he
entered Churchill College, Cambridge as a mature student. During his
undergraduate years Legge continued to excavate with Eric Higgs in Epirus
each summer and, after graduation in 1969, he joined the research project
on the early history of agriculture at Cambridge University, which was
funded by the British Academy, with Eric Higgs as Director. However,
his suggestion that the project name be changed to Economic and Socio-Historic
Investigations of Grain Growing Societies (ESHIGGS) was not adopted.
Legge was
jointly responsible for conducting the excavations at the site of Nahal
Oren near Haifa, and with the development of water flotation and sieving
methods for the recovery of charred plant remains with other members
of the Cambridge research project. These techniques were used extensively
at sites in Britain and elsewhere, showing how charred plant remains
were preserved in abundance at most sites - even in those of the enigmatic
British Neolithic period. About this time meetings with Andrew Moore
and Gordon Hillman laid the foundations for the future excavation and
retrieval strategy at Abu Hureyra. Work on the faunal remain from this
site have been his long-standing and major interest, and much work remains
for this unique collection.
In 1974
Legge joined the staff of the University of London extension division,
shortly after to be merged with Birkbeck College of London University,
where he is now Professor of Environmental Archaeology. Legge's other
research interests have centered on early farming societies in Cyprus,
Serbia, and Spain, and on early Neolithic and other prehistoric sites
in Britain. He has a particular interest in the relationship between
foraging and early farming communities. With Peter Rowley-Conwy (University
of Durham) he published a new study of the faunal remains from the site
of Star Carr in Yorkshire, England.
A native
of Cambridge, he now lives in a nearby village and goes fishing.
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