Archaeology in the Realm of Ruth Tringham

        Ruth Tringham has always had an impressive body of field research and continues to break new ground in excavations today through methodology and interpretation. Most of the sites she has been involved in have been in Yugoslavia or Bulgaria, where she, with her Berkeley team, have been the first Americans to collaborate with Bulgarians on excavations. She goes into extraordinary detail of the site of Selevac in her book Selevac: A Neolithic Village in Yugoslavia, wherein she tries to trace the evolution of the village once food technology is introduced, making it a permanent sedentary society (Tringham, Selevac). By studying the resourcefulness to exploit their environment and the increasing complexity of the artifacts obtained there, she, along with Dr. Dusan Krstic (head of Yugoslav team), has traced the rise of this Vincan culture into a society of many complex networks. Another interesting site she has studied extensively is that of Opovo, a late neolithic village of Yugoslavia, in which she used "innovative methodology for excavating" (Stevenovic) and studied house societies in a collaboration with a Yugoslav team, whose work on this site will be published this year. Excavations at Opovo were an example of the "first implementation of the analysis of technology of architecture" (Stevenovic). A website has been started on the aforementioned Opovo and Selevac sites and is still under construction. Tringham has also been recently named a member of the Catalhoyuk team in Turkey, where many archaeologists predict the "first town of mankind" to have arose (Karlsruhe) because artifacts demonstrated complex social life in this area. In 1996, she and her Berkeley team (along with Turkish archaeologists) had their first excavations there. The focus of their research was "the investigation of the architectural remains and the mosaic of individual house-histories" (Holm, Ruth Tringham).

       Her current work in Bulgaria is a continuation of her former exploration of "life-histories of households" in Yugoslavia (Tringham, Bulgarian). In southeast Bulgaria, Tringham began excavation of the site of Mednikarovov in July of 1993. Here, Americans collaborated with Bulgarian archaeologists for the first time in a "practice run": "They wanted to see what it was like to excavate with Americans since no such collaboration had been experienced by the Bulgarian archaeologists" (Tringham, Bulgarian). Stratigraphy here revealed pits of the Early Bronze Age and Middle Neolithic with ceramics and clay artifacts contained within. Following the Mednikarovov excavation, Tringham worked once again with Bulgarian archaeologists to excavate Podgoritsa an Eneolithic tell site spanning 500 years of debis. Using satellite imagery and the GIS program, they had three goals in mind: "comprising landscape observations, sub-surface geophysical reconnaissance..., and excavation of the tell itself" (Holm, Podgoritsa). Excavations revealed a possible cemetary, ceramics, and clay house rubbles (Tringham, Bulgarian). This research is expected to use revolutionary theories and methodologies for excavations, proving Tringham to be amidst the ever-metamorphosizing methods in the field of archaeology.

       Throughout Ruth Tringham's career, she has been fighting to bring respect to women in archaeology, however, this is not because she feels women currently are lacking the ability to be deserving of respect. Tringham's excavation studies often focus on household archaeology, which she feels is overlooked as an important area of study, claiming that the lack of interest in microscale households denotes the "devaluation of women and their labor" due to the "masculinist standpoint in archaeology" (Tringham, Households 100). Tringham predicts a possible split in archaeology between feminists focusing on microscale aspects (domestics) and males on macroscale aspects (interaction with other settlements) of field research. In "Households with Faces: the Challenge of Gender in Prehistoric Architectural Remains," she comes to the realization that her past work at Opovo was a reflection of her " 'remedial' feminist archaeology" of the past, where she felt it was not credible to give "faces" to the people of prehistory in an effort to try and recreate what it was like because it involves very unscientific speculation, therefore, she avoided defining gender relations. The site of Opovo was researched mainly to show how the household's role changed through history, and it is a loss that she did not have her current, more open view of gender relations to enhance her exploration of the site but on one of her current projects, Podgoritsa, she is focusing on household archaeology. Tringham now insists that the study of household archaeology is not only crucial to gender relations but also to all aspects of archaeology because households effect all of history on a larger scale. Because of this importance, she points out that the schools of feminists and Marxists take opposing views: Marxists believing former matrilineal civilizations of equality as a precursor to capitalism, while some feminists believe archaeological evidence proves peace existed in this former matriarchy until the patriarchal agressive invaders came to the territory.

        Though Tringham is experienced and has been in the study of archaeology for a long time, she is not rigid about her stances and methodology and is constantly evolving by challenging and changing viewpoints, including her own. A good example of this evolution is her stance on the scientific method and its validity in archaeology. Earlier in her career, she believed it was crucial to keep inside the realm of science and not speculate about the past. In Tringham's Hunters, Fishers, and Farmers of Eastern Europe, she makes it a point to say that archaeologists should adhere to the "analyses of artifacts" (Tringham, Hunters 20 & 21) and make simple interpretions based on this evidence without actually picturing the societies she is studying, therefore, remaining objective. Later in her career she came to the realization that this scientific method "represents a devastating weakness in that it inhibits us from using the riches of modern social theory to construct prehistory" (Tringham, Households 98). It is as if she realized what she was missing out on in her own field and the possibilities to give faces to the socities she studied. She points out that hypotheses are formed and then tested by facts but hypotheses are not strictly formed from facts, therefore, archaeologists should not restrict themselves to things only inherent in the facts when forming a hypothesis. This conclusion led her to an entirely new view on the study of prehistoric history proposing material context of actions in artifacts not just "passive reflections" and now she is in a whole new realm. In addition to changing viewpoints, she is challenging them. In "Territorial Demarcation of Prehistoric Settlements," she challenges the views of territoriality by insulting the assumptions that aggression is inherently part of the human condition and says that defense is not necessarily the only reason for demarcation of settlement, leaning toward other factors such as "environment, technology and raw materials, economy, and socio-cultural factors" (Tringham Territoriality and Proxemics). She has also challenged views on sites that she has excavated herself, such as the mysterious wall of Catalhoyuk, a place where no evidence of attack has ever been found, and some archaeologists interpret this to mean they were defenders and this is the reason for the wall and no sign of attack. Tringham, however, poses a different view, claiming that it may have "never [been] threatened" and the wall may have served just to delineate their boundaries (Ucko, Tringham, Dimbleby 469).

        For the future, Tringham hopes to bring inventive features of archaeology to another realm over the web. Soon, a user will be able to experience the findings from Opovo on the Chimera Web, an interactive multimedia device that takes a user through the different interpretations of archaeological evidence, revealing that archaeologists can "create the 'facts' of prehistoric life" (Holm Ruth Tringham). The potential for graphic images and sound is promising judging by the preliminary version, which shows a giant spider on a web that can go many routes to categories of archaeology, prehistory, fire, and a house fire, always leading back to the center. Tringham had a Freshman Seminar on the Chimera Web to peak interest about learning over the web during the spring '97 semester at Berkeley. More proof for her pioneering efforts in multimedia is in the Chancellor's Cybersemester Award she was given for Educational Multimedia Development, along with her peer Conkey. Tringham has also used new technology in the excavation of her sites. As an advocate of the GIS program, she used it for "ground 'truthing'" (Holm Podgoritsa) at Podgoritsa, along with revolutionary satellite imagery. Tringham not only uses technology to make discoveries of the past, but also uses it to report her discoveries in a visually-oriented style, such as used in the Virtual Archaeological Museum for Catalhoyuk (Ruhe). As the field of archaeology changes, a woman like Tringham will not be left behind because she is constantly evolving as new ideas are presented in her field. In short, her realm spans as big as the universe.