Ruth Tringham facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ruth Tringham
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Tringham in 2010
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| Born | 14 October 1940 Aspley Guise, Bedfordshire
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| Education | Girls' Day School Trust |
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh |
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| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
Ruth Tringham (born October 14, 1940) is an anthropologist and archaeologist. She studies the Neolithic period (New Stone Age) in Europe and Southwest Asia. She is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She also helps lead a non-profit group called the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA). Before Berkeley, she taught at Harvard University and University College London.
Professor Tringham is well-known for her work at several important archaeological sites. These include Selevac and Opovo in Serbia, Podgoritsa in Bulgaria, and the famous site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey.
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Early life and interests
Ruth Tringham was born on October 14, 1940, in Aspley Guise, England. She was the middle child in her family. When she was five, her family moved to London. There, she went to primary school.
Later, she won a scholarship to an all-girls high school. Her family then moved to Hampstead. In high school, she learned Latin and Greek. She also joined children's clubs at the Natural History Museum. This is where she first learned about proper research methods. Her mother always encouraged her to ask questions and think for herself. This advice helped her develop new and creative ideas in her work.
Ruth started playing the violin at age nine. She played until she was about eighteen. In college, she played the guitar and sang folk songs. She collected these songs from different countries she visited. Later, she began choral singing. In 1984, she joined the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. With them, she helped record several CDs. One of these was a Grammy Award-winning song, Carmina Burana.
She also enjoyed many sports and hobbies. These included fencing, volleyball, racquetball, skiing, hiking, and oil painting. She was even part of Great Britain's women's Olympic volleyball team in 1972.
Education and archaeological journey
Ruth Tringham knew she wanted to be an archaeologist by age sixteen. She first helped with an excavation at the Natural History Club when she was thirteen.
She studied archaeology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. She chose Edinburgh because it looked at archaeology from a wide European view. In her first year, her professor, Stuart Piggott, told her to write to the National Museum of Denmark. She asked if she could help with any field projects. She was then invited to help at an Iron Age bog site in Ejsbøl, Denmark.
After this, she surveyed along the Pasvik River in Norway. This was near the border with the USSR. She was planning to specialize in Scandinavian archaeology. However, a trip to Czechoslovakia during her junior year changed her path. There, she excavated the Neolithic site of Bylany. She worked with Bohumil Soudsky. This experience made her very interested in the archaeology of Eastern Europe. This region is still her main focus today.
She wrote both her college thesis and her Ph.D. paper on Eastern Europe. Her college thesis was about Neolithic clay figures from Eastern Europe. Her Ph.D. paper was about the early Neolithic period in Central Europe. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1966.
Professional work and ideas
Throughout her career, Ruth Tringham has brought many new ideas to archaeology. She often challenges old ways of thinking. She wants to improve how archaeologists study the past. This helps us understand ancient people better.
Her interests include:
- Prehistoric archaeology (studying times before written history).
- European prehistory.
- How archaeology is shown in popular culture.
- The study of ancient buildings and how gender roles fit into prehistory.
Recently, she has focused on the "life history" of buildings. This means studying how buildings were built, used, and changed over time.
In her first book, Hunters, Fishers, and Farmers: 6,000-3,000 B.C., she said archaeologists should stick to scientific analysis of artifacts. She thought they should avoid making guesses about ancient societies. However, she now believes this strict scientific approach has limits. She argues that we should use social theories to understand prehistory better.
Tringham also uses a feminist archaeological approach. This means she looks at gender roles and households in ancient times. She believes that traditional archaeology often overlooks the small, everyday parts of life, like households. This can make the role of women in ancient societies seem less important. She now says that studying the household is key to understanding both gender relations and archaeology as a whole.
While she has feminist views, she also keeps an open mind. For example, she and Margaret Conkey worked together on a project. It challenged the Goddess movement, which tries to show the past as being led by women. They felt this movement was based too much on a modern feminist viewpoint.
Important excavations
Çatalhöyük, Turkey
Çatalhöyük is a very well-preserved Neolithic and Chalcolithic site in Turkey. It is one of the oldest known cities. People lived there from about 7100 BCE to 5600 BCE. Professor Tringham leads the Berkeley Archaeologists of Catalhoyuk (BACH) team at this site. She believes Çatalhöyük is important because it makes archaeologists think carefully about their work. It also helps make feminist archaeology a reality.
Selevac, Serbia
The book Selevac: A Neolithic Village in Yugoslavia is based on her excavations there. This was a team project with Harvard, Berkeley, and the National Museum of Belgrade. It took place between 1976 and 1978. The site shows the Vinča culture that lived there from 5,000 to 4,400 BCE.
The project had four main goals:
- To study the timeline and changes of Neolithic cultures.
- To look at how early farming societies changed their economy and social life.
- To compare different settlement patterns of the Vinča culture.
- To study the settlement patterns in the wider region.
Tringham wanted to see how the village changed once farming began, making it a permanent settlement.
Opovo-Ugar Bajbuk, Serbia
Opovo-Ugar is in Vojvodina, Serbia. People lived there between 4700 and 4500 BCE. It belongs to the Vinča-Pločnik culture. This site also gives information about social and economic changes during the Neolithic period. The excavations in the 1980s focused on new ways of digging and studying building technology. The project wanted to see how long houses were used. They also wanted to understand how the household became an important social unit over time. This connects to her later interest in gender relations and small-scale aspects of archaeology.
Teaching methods
Ruth Tringham is very interested in using digital media to teach archaeology. This led her and Margaret Conkey to create the Multimedia Authoring Center for the Teaching of Anthropology (MACTiA) at Berkeley. For this new way of teaching, Ruth Tringham and her colleagues won Berkeley's Educational Initiatives Award in 2001.
She also received the Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Teaching in 1998. This award recognized her use of multimedia in teaching archaeology.
Tringham is one of the people who started the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA). This non-profit group began in 2011. CoDA helps archaeologists "capture, preserve, and share digital content."
Awards
- 1998: Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Teaching
- 1998: Chancellor's Cybersemester Award
- 2001: Educational Initiatives Award
See also
In Spanish: Ruth Tringham para niños
