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 |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Doctoral students | Sonya Atalay |
Ruth Tringham was born on October 14, 1940. She is an anthropologist who studies the past through archaeology. Her main focus is on 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 the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA), which is a group that works with digital tools in archaeology. Before Berkeley, she taught at Harvard University and University College London. Ruth Tringham is well-known for her archaeological work at sites like Selevac and Opovo in Serbia, Podgoritsa in Bulgaria, and Çatalhöyük in Turkey.
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Ruth Tringham's Early Life and Hobbies
Ruth Tringham was born in 1940 in a village called Aspley Guise in England. She was the middle child in her family. When she was five, her family moved to London. She went to primary school there.
Later, she won a scholarship to a high school for girls in north London. 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. There, she learned how to do proper research. Her mother always encouraged her to ask questions and think for herself. This helped her come up with new ideas in her work.
Music and Sports
Ruth started playing the violin at age nine and continued 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 Boston. She then sang with the California Bach Society.
In 1984, she joined the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. With them, she helped record several CDs. She even contributed to a Grammy Award-winning song, Carmina Burana. Besides music, she enjoyed fencing, volleyball, racquetball, skiing, and hiking. She was even part of Great Britain's women's Olympic volleyball team in 1972!
Ruth Tringham's Education
Ruth Tringham first helped with an excavation at age thirteen. By the time she was sixteen, she knew she wanted to be an archaeologist. She studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. She chose Edinburgh because it looked at archaeology across all of Europe.
In her first year, her professor, Stuart Piggott, told her to write to the head of the National Museum of Denmark. She asked if she could help with any field projects. She was invited to help dig at an Iron Age site in Denmark.
Discovering Eastern Europe
After her work in Denmark, she explored along the Pasvik River in Norway. She was planning to specialize in Scandinavian archaeology. However, a trip to Czechoslovakia changed her path. There, she excavated a Neolithic site called Bylany. She worked with Bohumil Soudsky.
This experience made her very interested in the archaeology of Eastern Europe. Even today, her research often focuses on this region. She wrote her college thesis and her Ph.D. paper about Eastern Europe. Her Ph.D. was about the early Neolithic period in Central Europe. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1966.
Ruth Tringham's Career in Archaeology
Throughout her career, Ruth Tringham has brought many new ideas to archaeology. She often challenges old ways of thinking. She wants archaeologists to use methods that help us understand the past better. Her interests include prehistoric archaeology, European prehistory, and how architecture and gender relate to ancient times. Recently, she has studied the "life history" of buildings. This means looking at how buildings were built and used over time.
Changing Ideas on Artifacts
In her first book, Hunters, Fishers, and Farmers: 6,000-3,000 B.C., she said archaeologists should focus on scientific analysis of artifacts. She thought they should avoid making guesses about ancient societies. However, she later changed her mind. She now believes that using social theories helps us understand prehistory better.
Feminist Archaeology
Ruth Tringham 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 daily lives of people, especially women. She thinks studying the household is very important for understanding ancient societies.
She has worked with Margaret Conkey on projects that explore different views of the past. They challenge ideas that might be based only on a feminist agenda.
Important Excavations
Ruth Tringham has led or been part of many important archaeological digs.
Çatalhöyük, Turkey
Çatalhöyük is a very old and well-preserved site in Turkey. It was a large settlement from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods. People lived there from about 7100 BCE to 5600 BCE. Ruth Tringham directs the Berkeley Archaeologists of Catalhoyuk (BACH) team at this site. For her, Çatalhöyük is special because it encourages archaeologists to think deeply 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 in Serbia. This was a joint project between Harvard, Berkeley, and the National Museum of Belgrade from 1976 to 1978. The site was home to the Vinča culture between 5,000 and 4,400 BCE.
The project had four main goals. They wanted to study the timeline and changes in Neolithic cultures. They also looked at how early farming societies changed their economy and way of life. Another goal was to compare different types of Vinča settlements. Finally, they wanted to understand how settlements were spread out in the region. She tried to see how the village grew once farming began, making it a permanent home.
Opovo-Ugar Bajbuk, Serbia
The Opovo-Ugar site in Serbia was occupied between 4700 and 4500 BCE. It belongs to the Vinča-Pločnik culture. This site gives us more information about how societies developed during the Neolithic period. The excavations in the 1980s focused on new ways of digging and analyzing ancient buildings.
They wanted to find out how long houses were used. They also studied how the household became an important social unit and how it changed over time. This connects to her later interest in gender roles and daily life in 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 their new ideas in digital education, Ruth Tringham and her colleagues received an award in 2001.
She also received an award in 1998 for her teaching methods. She was recognized for using multimedia in her archaeology classes. Tringham is also one of the founders of the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA). This group helps archaeologists "capture, preserve, and share digital content."
Selected Publications
- 1971 Hunters, Fishers and Farmers of Eastern Europe 6,000-3,000 B.C.
- 1972 Man, Settlement, and Urbanism (with Peter Ucko).
- 1990 Selevac: A Neolithic Village in Yugoslavia. (with Dusan Krstic).
- 1991 "Households with Faces: The Challenge of Gender in Prehistoric Architectural Remains" in Engendering Archaeology: Women in Prehistory.
- 1995 Conkey, Margaret and Tringham, R. "Archaeology and the Goddess: Exploring the Contours of Feminist Archaeology" in Feminisms in the Academy: Rethinking the Disciplines.
Awards and Recognition
- 1998: Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Teaching
- 1998: Chancellor's Cybersemester Award
- 2001: Educational Initiatives Award
See also
In Spanish: Ruth Tringham para niños
