Ruth Tringham

Last updated

Ruth Tringham
Ruth Tringham.jpg
Tringham in 2010
Born (1940-10-14) 14 October 1940 (age 83)
Aspley Guise, Bedfordshire
Academic background
Education Girls' Day School Trust
Alma mater University of Edinburgh

Having first excavated in the Natural History Club at age thirteen, she knew she wanted to be an archaeologist by the time she was sixteen. [1] She received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Edinburgh in the Department of Archaeology. She chose Edinburgh for its pan-European perspective. The head of the department, Stuart Piggott, encouraged Tringham to excavate at an Iron Age bog site in Denmark. Following this excavation she surveyed along the Pasvik River in Norway. She was on her way to becoming specialized in Scandinavian archaeology.[ citation needed ] However, there was a major changing point in her career during her junior year as a result of a trip to do fieldwork in Czechoslovakia. While here, she excavated the Neolithic site of Bylany with Bohumil Soudsky. It was here where she became fascinated with the archaeology of Eastern Europe and her research interests, although altered to a certain extent, still remain in that region. She wrote both her senior B.A. thesis and Ph.D. dissertation on Eastern Europe. The former was on Neolithic clay figurines of Eastern Europe, while the latter was called The Earlier Neolithic in Central Europe: A Study of the Linear Pottery Culture and their Relationships with the Contemporary Cultures of South-East Europe. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1966. [5] Five years later she dedicated her first book, Hunters, Fishers, and Farmers: 6,000-3,000 B.C, to V. Gordon Childe, Stuart Piggott, Bohumil Soudsky, and Peter Ucko. [1] [6]

Professional career

Research and theoretical interests

Throughout her career, Tringham has brought many innovative ideas to archaeology and challenged its traditional perspectives. She attempts to influence the methods used by archaeologists, thus giving more identity to the past. Some of her specific interests include prehistoric archaeology, European prehistory, archaeology and popular culture, and architecture and gender aspects in prehistory. Lately, her research has been on the life history of buildings and the construction of built space. [1]

In her first book Hunters, Fishers, and Farmers: 6,000-3,000 B.C. she asserted that archaeologists should stick to the more scientific analyses of artifacts. She argues one should stay away from formulating speculative social interpretations from the artifacts. However, she now feels that this strict scientific approach is a weakness and argues that one should utilize social theory to try and construct a prehistory.[ citation needed ]

Tringham uses a feminist archaeological perspective when it comes to discussing her interests in gender relations and households. [7] In her own words, "How to express the complexities of a feminist practice of archaeology-multiple interpretations of archaeological data at multiple scales, allowing multiple voices from past and present to be heard." [1] To her, the masculine standpoint in archaeology overlooks the microscale (domestic) aspect, therefore devaluing the role of women in ancient societies. [8] Earlier in her career she avoided defining gender relations, but now she states that studying the household in archaeology is crucial to not only gender relations, but also archaeology as a whole. Although she has feminist views on certain things, such as emphasizing the importance of microscale aspects in prehistory, this does not mean that she loses her objectivity to other ideas. Margaret Conkey and Ruth Tringham have collaborated on a public multimedia device that challenges the Goddess movement, which tries to portray the past matricentrically. To them, the movement is based primarily on a feminist agenda. [9]

Notable excavations

Çatalhöyük, Turkey

Çatalhöyük, a 9,000-year-old site, is the best-preserved Neolithic site to date.[ citation needed ] Some archaeologists believe it to be the earliest town of mankind because of the complex artifacts located in this area and their social implications.[ who? ] Tringham is the Director of the Berkeley Archaeologists of Catalhoyuk (BACH), which is under the overall director of operations, Ian Hodder. To Tringham, Cataloyuk is important not only because it encourages a team of archaeologists to think and record the basis and implications of their actions, but also because it can make the practice of feminist archaeology a reality. [1]

Selevac, present day Serbia

The book, Selevac: A Neolithic Village in Yugoslavia, is based on excavations that she did at the Selevac site in former Yugoslavia. It was a cooperative project under Harvard, Berkeley, and the National Museum of Belgrade between 1976 and 1978. As a site report on Vinča cultures that occupied it between 5,000 and 4,400 BCE, this book illustrates the project's four main objectives. The first was to study the chronology and cultural evolution of the Neolithic cultures. Next, the project was investigating the socioeconomic transformation processes of early agricultural societies. Third, the book tries to study the settlement pattern variation between the unenclosed settlements and the deeply stratified settlements of the Vinča culture. The last aim was to examine the regional settlement pattern. [10] [11] She tries to trace the evolution of the village once food technology is introduced and making it a permanent, sedentary village. [10] [12]

Opovo-Ugar Bajbuk, Serbia

Located at Vojvodina in the lower valley of the Timis River, north of the Danube, Opovo-Ugar, which was occupied between 4700 and 4500 BCE, belongs to the Vinča-Pločnik culture and is another site that provides information on the socioeconomic developments during the Neolithic. The importance of this site, which was excavated in the 1980s, was the method of excavation and the analysis of architecture technology. In other words, the project wanted to investigate the degree of settlement permanence by looking at the occupation duration of the houses. Furthermore, she wanted to investigate the emergence of the household as a primary social unit and how it changes throughout history. This ties in with her future interests that deal with gender relations and microscale aspects in archaeology. However, at this time she said she was a ‘remedial’ feminist archaeologist because she believed that it was not credible to give "faces" to people of prehistory in order to "recreate" life as it actually was. [8]

Pedagogical methods

She is internationally known for her work using digital media, specifically multimedia, to record and teach archaeology.[ citation needed ] This interest led to the founding of the Multimedia Authoring Center for the Teaching of Anthropology at Berkeley. For this innovation in digital education, Ruth Tringham, along with her colleagues Margaret Conkey and Rosemary Joyce, was awarded Berkeley's Educational Initiatives Award in 2001. A similar award was the Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Teaching (1998), which she earned by incorporating multimedia techniques in teaching archaeology.

Selected publications

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Çatalhöyük</span> Archaeological site in Turkey

Çatalhöyük is a tell of a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 BC to 6400 BC and flourished around 7000 BC. In July 2012, it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neolithic</span> Archaeological period, last part of the Stone Age

The Neolithic or New Stone Age is an archaeological period, the final division of the Stone Age in Europe, Asia and Africa. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several parts of the world. This "Neolithic package" included the introduction of farming, domestication of animals, and change from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one of settlement. The term 'Neolithic' was coined by Sir John Lubbock in 1865 as a refinement of the three-age system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Mellaart</span> British archaeologist and forger (1925–2012)

James Mellaart FBA was an English archaeologist and author who is noted for his discovery of the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. He was expelled from Turkey when he was suspected of involvement with the antiquities black market. He was also involved in a string of controversies, including the so-called mother goddess controversy in Anatolia, which eventually led to his being banned from excavations in Turkey in the 1960s. After his death it was discovered that he had forged many of his "finds", including murals and inscriptions used to discover the Çatalhöyük site.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vinča symbols</span> Symbols found upon Vinča culture artifacts

The Vinča symbols or Vinča–Turdaș signs, Old European script, Danube script are a set of untranslated symbols found on Neolithic era artifacts from the Vinča culture and other related "Old European" cultures of Central and Southeastern Europe. Whether this is one of the earliest writing systems or simply symbols of some sort is disputed. They have sometimes been described as an example of proto-writing. The symbols went out of use around 3,500 BC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vinča culture</span> Southeastern European Neolithic archaeological culture

The Vinča culture (ʋîːntʃa), also known as Turdaș culture, Turdaș–Vinča culture or Vinča-Turdaș culture, is a Neolithic archaeological culture of Southeast Europe, dated to the period 5400–4500 BC. Named for its type site, Vinča-Belo Brdo, a large tell settlement discovered by Serbian archaeologist Miloje Vasić in 1908, it represents the material remains of a prehistoric society mainly distinguished by its settlement pattern and ritual behaviour.

Old Europe is a term coined by the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas to describe what she perceived as a relatively homogeneous pre-Indo-European Neolithic and Copper Age culture or civilisation in Southeast Europe, centred in the Lower Danube Valley. Old Europe is also referred to in some literature as the Danube civilisation.

Feminist archaeology employs a feminist perspective in interpreting past societies. It often focuses on gender, but also considers gender in tandem with other factors, such as sexuality, race, or class. Feminist archaeology has critiqued the uncritical application of modern, Western norms and values to past societies. It is additionally concerned with increasing the representation of women in the discipline of archaeology, and reducing androcentric bias within the field.

Sesklo is a village in Greece that is located near Volos, a city located within the municipality of Aisonia. The municipality is located within the regional unit of Magnesia that is located within the administrative region of Thessaly. During the prehistory of Southeastern Europe, Sesklo was a significant settlement of Neolithic Greece, before the advent of the Bronze Age and millennia before the Mycenaean period.

Below are notable events in archaeology that occurred in 1940.

Margaret W. Conkey is an American archaeologist and academic, who specializes in the Magdalenian period of the Upper Paleolithic in the French Pyrénées. Her research focuses on cave art produced during this period. Conkey is noted as one of the first archaeologists to explore the issues of gender and feminist perspectives in archaeology and in past human societies, using feminist theory to reinterpret images and objects from the Paleolithic Era or the late Ice Age. She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was named by Discover magazine in their 2002 article, "The 50 Most Important Women in Science".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vinča-Belo Brdo</span> Archaeological type site in Serbia

Vinča-Belo Brdo is an archaeological site in Vinča, a suburb of Belgrade, Serbia. The tell of Belo Brdo is almost entirely made up of the remains of human settlement, and was occupied several times from the Early Neolithic through to the Middle Ages. The most substantial archaeological deposits are from the Neolithic-Chalcolithic Vinča culture, of which Vinča-Belo Brdo is the type site.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prehistoric sites in Serbia</span>

The best known cultural archaeological discoveries from the prehistoric period on the territory of modern-day Serbia are the Starčevo and Vinča cultures dating back to 6400–6200 BC.

Medvednjak is an archaeological site in central Serbia, in Šumadija region, 3 km (1.9 mi) from center of Smederevska Palanka.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Burned house horizon</span> Phenomenon of presumably intentionally burned settlements

In the archaeology of Neolithic Europe, the burned house horizon is the geographical extent of the phenomenon of presumably intentionally burned settlements.

Selevac is a village in the municipality of Smederevska Palanka, Serbia. According to the 2002 census, the village has a population of 3864 people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Starčevo–Körös–Criș culture</span> Grouping of archaeological cultures

The Starčevo–Karanovo I-II–Körös culture or Starčevo–Körös–Criș culture is a grouping of two related Neolithic archaeological cultures in Southeastern Europe: the Starčevo culture and the Körös or Criș culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Gero</span> American archaeologist

Joan Margaret Gero was an American archaeologist and pioneer of feminist archaeology. Her research focused on gender and power issues in prehistory, particularly in the Andean regions of Argentina and Peru.

Shahina Farid is a British archaeologist who is best known for her work as Field Director and Project Coordinator at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. She is currently the scientific dating coordinator for Historic England.

Alexandra Bayliss is a British archaeologist and academic. She is Head of Scientific Dating at Historic England, and a part-time Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Her research focuses on the construction of exact chronologies of European Neolithic archaeological sites, through the application of Bayesian statistical modelling of radiocarbon dates.

Christine Hastorf is an archaeologist and is currently Professor in the Anthropology department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on agriculture, political complexity, gender, archaeobotany, and the archaeology of the Andes.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "Interview with Ruth Tringham". Society for California Archaeology. 2003. Retrieved 21 November 2009.
  2. ↑ Balter, Michael (16 June 2016). The Goddess and the Bull: Çatalhöyük: An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization. Routledge. p. 222. ISBN   9781315418407.
  3. ↑ Powell, Bonnie (7 July 2004). "Secret Lives of Faculty, Part 2". University of California Berkeley. Retrieved 22 November 2009.
  4. ↑ "Volleyball Ranked Most Popular Sport". Harvard Crimson. 17 March 1973. Retrieved 25 November 2020.
  5. ↑ Tringham, Ruth (1966). "The earlier Neolithic in Central Europe : a study of the linear pottery cultures and their relationships with the contemporary cultures of South-East Europe".{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  6. ↑ Tringham, Ruth (1971). Hunters, Fishers and Farmers of Eastern Europe 6,000-3,000 B.C. London: Hutchinson.
  7. ↑ Tringham, Ruth (23 October 2023). "Acknowledging Inspirations in a Lifetime of Shifting and Pivoting Standpoints to Construct the Past". Annual Review of Anthropology. 52 (1): 1–17. doi: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-062320-015836 . ISSN   0084-6570 . Retrieved 18 December 2023.
  8. 1 2 Tringham, Ruth 1991 "Households with Faces: the Challenge of Gender in Prehistoric Architectural Remains" in Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory by Gero, J. and Conkey, M. Blackwell Publishers: Oxford. pp. 93-131.
  9. ↑ Conkey, Margaret and Tringham, R. 1995. "Archaeology and the Goddess: Exploring the Contours of Feminist Archaeology" in ‘’Feminisms in the Academy: Rethinking the Disciplines’’. University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor.
  10. 1 2 Milisauskas, Sarunas. "Review of Selevac: A Neolithic Village in Yugoslavia" by Eds. Ruth Tringham and Dusan Krstic in American Journal of Archaeology 96. No. 4 (Oct. 1992): pp. 765-766.
  11. ↑ Tringham, Ruth and Dusan Krstic. Selevac: A Neolithic Village in Yugoslavia. Pg 4-5
  12. ↑ Bartel, Brad. "Review of Selevac: A Neolithic Village in Yugoslavia" by Eds. Ruth Tringham and Dusan Krstic in American Antiquity 58. No. 3 (1993): pp. 590-591.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.