Ruth Tringham

Ruth Tringham (born 14 October 1940) is an anthropologist, focusing on the archaeology of Neolithic Europe and southwest Asia.

She is a Professor of the Graduate School (Anthropology) at the University of California, Berkeley and Creative Director and President of the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA), a recently established non-profit organization.

Before going to Berkeley, she taught at Harvard University and University College London.

Tringham was born on 14 October 1940 in the village of Aspley Guise in Bedfordshire, England.

She was the middle sibling with two older brothers and a younger brother and sister.

When she was five years old, her family moved to London where she attended primary school until she was eleven.

After she won a scholarship to an all-girls high school, part of the Girls Public Day School Trust in north London, her family moved to Hampstead.

During high school she learned Latin and Greek and was active in children's clubs at the Natural History Museum in London, where she was introduced to proper research methods.

As she was growing up, her mother encouraged her to question authority and realize the contexts in which these authorities are based.

This early advice would lead to some of her innovative ideas and methods.

She started playing violin at age nine and kept playing until around the age of eighteen.

Throughout her college career she played the guitar and sang folk songs that she had collected from the various countries she visited.

Later on in life she began choral singing in Boston and then sang in the California Bach Society.

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.

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.

She was a member of Great Britain's 1972 women's Olympic volleyball team.

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.

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.

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.

Tringham is probably best known for her work at Selevac (1976–1979) and Opovo (1983–1989), Serbia, at the Eneolithic tell settlement of Podgoritsa, Bulgaria (1995), and at the well-known site of Çatalhöyük (1997-), Turkey.

After a few years she joined the San Francisco Symphony Chorus in 1984 where she has helped record several CDs and a Grammy Award-winning song of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

Other hobbies growing up included fencing, volleyball, racquetball, skiing, hiking, and oil painting.