Ruth Tringham

Education

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. 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. In her first year the head of the department, Stuart Piggott, encouraged Tringham to write to the head of the National Museum of Denmark to ask if there were any field projects she could assist in excavating. She was subsequently invited to assist at Mogens Orsnes' excavation of an Iron Age bog site in Ejsbøl, Denmark.

Following the Ejsbøl excavation she surveyed along the Pasvik River in Norway, near the border with the USSR. She was on her way to becoming specialized in Scandinavian archaeology. 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. 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.

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.

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.

Tringham uses a feminist archaeological perspective when it comes to discussing her interests in gender relations and households. 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." To her, the masculine standpoint in archaeology overlooks the microscale (domestic) aspect, therefore devaluing the role of women in ancient societies. 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.

Notable excavations

Çatalhöyük, Turkey

Çatalhöyük is a tell of an extremely well preserved Neolithic and Chalcolithic site located in the Konya-Karaman Plain in modern day Turkey. Çatalhöyük is one of the oldest cities on record archaeologists, and it was inhabited from around 7100 BCE to 5600 BCE. Tringham is the Director of the Berkeley Archaeologists of Catalhoyuk (BACH), which is under the overall director of operations, Ian Hodder. To Tringham, Çatalhöyük 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.

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. She tries to trace the evolution of the village once food technology is introduced and making it a permanent, sedentary village.

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.

Pedagogical methods

Tringham has an interest in using digital media, specifically multimedia, to record and teach archaeology. This interest led to her and Margaret Conkey founding of the Multimedia Authoring Center for the Teaching of Anthropology (MACTiA) 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.

She was awarded the Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Teaching in 1998 for her approach to incorporating multimedia techniques in teaching archaeology.

Tringham is one of the founders of the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA), a non-profit company founded in April 2011. CoDA was created to help archaeologists and cultural resource and heritage managers "capture, preserve, and share digital content."

Awards

• 1998: Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Teaching
• 1998: Chancellor's Cybersemester Award
• 2001: Educational Initiatives Award