- University of California, Berkeley, Center for Digital Archaeology, Department Memberadd
- Anthropology, Archaeology, Visual Studies, Digital Humanities, Informatics, Animation, and 13 moreInteractive and Digital Media, Digital Archaeology, Household Archaeology, Narrative Methods, Douglass Bailey, Phenomenology of Touch, Catalhoyuk, Touch, Digital Media, Virtual Heritage, Cultural Heritage, Media Archaeology, and Tim Ingoldedit
- I retired from actively teaching in 2011 and am now a Professor of the Graduate School (Anthropology) at the Universi... moreI retired from actively teaching in 2011 and am now a Professor of the Graduate School (Anthropology) at the University of California at Berkeley. I am one of the founders of the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA), a non-profit company born in 2011. Currently I am its Creative Director and its President. and a director of the UC Berkeley Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology (MACTiA). My research has focused on the transformation of early agricultural (Neolithic) societies. I have directed and published archaeological excavations in Southeast Europe and Turkey, at the site of Çatalhöyük. My current research focuses on the life-histories of buildings and the multisensorial construction of place. Much of my recent practice of archaeology incorporates the utilization of digital, especially multimedia, technology in the presentation and archiving of the process of archaeological interpretation. By now I am recognized internationally as one of the leaders of digital education, media literacy, and digital publishing in archaeology. This interest in multimedia grows out of a lifelong passion for music, puppets and cultivating illusions of reality.
website: https://www.ruthtringham.com/edit
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In this Perspective article, I am able to draw the various strands of my intellectual thinking and practice in archaeology and European prehistory into a complex narrative of changing themes. In this narrative, I draw attention to the... more
In this Perspective article, I am able to draw the various strands of my intellectual thinking and practice in archaeology and European prehistory into a complex narrative of changing themes. In this narrative, I draw attention to the inspirational triggers of these transformations to be found in works and words of colleagues and events within and outside my immediate discipline. A group of events between 1988 and 1993 disrupted (in a good way) the trajectory of my professional life and provided a convenient anchor around which my themes pivoted and regrouped with very different standpoints. But some trends in my way of working remained constant and contributed, I hope, to a career of cumulative knowledge. Along the way, I show the significance, in terms of my personal intellectual context as well as archaeological practice in general, of my published works as well as more obscure and some unpublished works that are cited here for the first time.
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Mesoamerica. Reading between the lines of Willey's paper, the discussions at the conference must have been extremely stimulating. It is unfortunate that more of the theory and interpretation discussed and the excitement generated did... more
Mesoamerica. Reading between the lines of Willey's paper, the discussions at the conference must have been extremely stimulating. It is unfortunate that more of the theory and interpretation discussed and the excitement generated did not find its way into other parts of the volume. To be just to the conferees, the lack of theory is virtually inevitable given the state of development of Lower Central American archaeology; without an understanding of basic chronology, regional developments and diversity, and other fundamental matters, it is possible to ask, but difficult to answer, interesting questions. The authors do seem to be aware of this, and several state as much. On the whole, I found the papers more satisfying the further away their topic was from my own area of specialization (Honduras), and I suspect that others will react similarly, for it is always easy to think of a wonderful unpublished report, or other such crucial documents, that an author has overlooked when it pertains to one's own area. Illustrative material is ample and, with the exception of a few poorly inked and/or reproduced maps and indistinct photos, clear and visually pleasing. Some drawings even succeed in being amusing—look for the unusual north arrows! The tables and appendices are most welcome, especially the chronological summaries, which are comprehensive, compact reference works in and of themselves. In sum, this volume should have wide utility as a reference work on the great advances made in recent decades in Lower Central American archaeology. Its deficiencies can, for the most part, be rectified only by further research in the area, but even with gaps, the volume presents interesting and significant data and interpretations, all of which should stimulate future inquiries. Unfortunately, this useful book is priced rather high for those who will need it the most—students in particular, and anyone who does not have ready access to a research library.
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Ruth Tringham received her Ph.D. from Edinburgh University in 1966 and now is assistant professor of anthropology and Assistant Curator of European Archaeology at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. She has participated in... more
Ruth Tringham received her Ph.D. from Edinburgh University in 1966 and now is assistant professor of anthropology and Assistant Curator of European Archaeology at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. She has participated in archaeological expeditions in Czechoslovakia, Russia, ...
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The idea that archaeological projects have afterlives first came to my attention in October 2010, when Karin Sanders, of the Scandinavian Department at UC Berkeley, gave a talk, “The Afterlives of Accidental Masterpieces,” that inspired... more
The idea that archaeological projects have afterlives first
came to my attention in October 2010, when Karin
Sanders, of the Scandinavian Department at UC Berkeley,
gave a talk, “The Afterlives of Accidental Masterpieces,”
that inspired much of my thinking in this chapter. Her
“afterlives” referred to the rich literature written about the
prehistoric ‘Bog Bodies’ in Denmark.
This chapter is based on my personal experiences with
archaeological projects in southeast Europe and Turkey that
follow the path from ‘paperfull’ to paperless archaeology,
from born-analog to born-digital records of what we observed,
measured, and recorded during those projects. I am
interested in how our practices of publication and archiving
of the primary data documents of archaeological research
in both digital and analog media have broader implications
for their longevity and the long-term sustainability of their
afterlives. The parallel question of what happens to the vast
volumes of analog records and physical materials collected
during the thousands of archaeological projects is equally
interesting and timely, but one that I will focus on less in
this chapter, except to emphasize the importance of converting
them, where possible, into legacy digital records.
came to my attention in October 2010, when Karin
Sanders, of the Scandinavian Department at UC Berkeley,
gave a talk, “The Afterlives of Accidental Masterpieces,”
that inspired much of my thinking in this chapter. Her
“afterlives” referred to the rich literature written about the
prehistoric ‘Bog Bodies’ in Denmark.
This chapter is based on my personal experiences with
archaeological projects in southeast Europe and Turkey that
follow the path from ‘paperfull’ to paperless archaeology,
from born-analog to born-digital records of what we observed,
measured, and recorded during those projects. I am
interested in how our practices of publication and archiving
of the primary data documents of archaeological research
in both digital and analog media have broader implications
for their longevity and the long-term sustainability of their
afterlives. The parallel question of what happens to the vast
volumes of analog records and physical materials collected
during the thousands of archaeological projects is equally
interesting and timely, but one that I will focus on less in
this chapter, except to emphasize the importance of converting
them, where possible, into legacy digital records.
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This chapter is part of an ongoing process in the construction of a recombinant history about Neolithic Anatolia and Southeast Europe called Dead Women Do Tell Tales (DWdTT). It is an extraordinarily complex tangle of fragments about the... more
This chapter is part of an ongoing process in the construction of a recombinant history about Neolithic Anatolia and Southeast Europe called Dead Women Do Tell Tales (DWdTT). It is an extraordinarily complex tangle of fragments about the archaeological construction of Neolithic households, based in the records of the excavations themselves and their published interpretation and interpretive vignettes from my creative imagination. It addresses the question of how to turn this tangle of related fragments into a narrative that is both "landscaped" and "gendered"; and how to make this a narrative that is both engaging for professionals and draws our broader audiences into the glow of engaged curiosity that encourages them to participate in the enterprise of constructing gendered landscapes of the past. The response to these questions is my first step in the design of a serious game based in archaeological research. Until the last few months, and for the purposes of an earlier presentation and publication of Dead Women Do Tell Tales (Tringham forthcoming), I made use of a mind-mapping software "The Brain" 1 , knowing that this was just a stepping-stone to an interface that would be sharable with a broader audience. This "Brain" version acted as a way to visualize the network of relations between entities taken from the database Last House on the Hill and added fragments of creative imagination (Figure 1). It does not claim to be an interpretive interface. As such there is no gendering of landscapes or landscaping of gender in this entangled web. This paper is an exploration of how such an interpretive interface could be achieved from this mass of entities. PDF of Original (2013) presentation in symposium is also uploaded to Academia.edu.
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This article is a re-consideration in a new intellectual context of a theme – the ubiquitous burning of the wattle-and-daub houses of Neolithic Southeast Europe – that has engaged my research energies since the early 1980s and is a major... more
This article is a re-consideration in a new intellectual context of a theme – the ubiquitous burning of the wattle-and-daub houses of Neolithic Southeast Europe – that has engaged my research energies since the early 1980s and is a major focus of my hypermedia narrative the Chimera Web. My aim in the article, however, is to discuss the many different strands of fire as it impacts the lives of people in the past and the present (including archaeologists themselves); how fire affects their social practice, emotion, passion, myth-making, and communication on its way to becoming the medium through which houses are “killed”. I had to rein in this article, like the presentation, because it started to take on the form of a hydra (or a chimera) and become a huge project.
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Spanish Translation of Tringham, R. (1994). Engendered Places in Prehistory . Gender, Place, and Culture vol 1:2, 169-203
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This paper describes a project that is currently being carried out in collaboration with the Interactive University of UC Berkeley in which a relational database comprising the contexts, materials, observations, and interpretations in... more
This paper describes a project that is currently being carried out in collaboration with the Interactive University of UC Berkeley in which a relational database comprising the contexts, materials, observations, and interpretations in visual, numerical and textual format from Neolithic excavations in Turkey (Çatalhöyük) and Yugoslavia (Opovo) provides the basic architecture for a series of hyperlinked “vignettes”. The vignettes comprise an interface on the Internet through which a multi-generational and multivocal public can explore and respect and contribute to cultural heritage. They are guided through the exploration of real data and can contribute dynamically with their own interpretations. The emphasis here is on multiscalar interpretations including those at an intimate scale which are followed through and evaluated through the fictional narrative genre. The aim of the project is to create an interface which seamlessly guides, and provides access to primary archaeological data...
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Introduction The idea of the remediation of archaeological and heritage places was inspired by the book Remediation by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (Bolter and Grusin 1999,168). Remediated Places has nothing to do with the traditional... more
Introduction The idea of the remediation of archaeological and heritage places was inspired by the book Remediation by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (Bolter and Grusin 1999,168). Remediated Places has nothing to do with the traditional root for the word (remediare – to heal) but is created from “mediate”, with “re” expressing the idea of mediating what has already been mediated by media. It is based in the aesthetic of hypermediacy -the semi-transparency of looking at reality through a window or mirror as seen most recently in the WWW interface style, Mac (and later Windows) interface, and computer games. Hypermediacy has much in common with hyper-reality, discussed by Baudrillard (Baudrillard 1983), not surprisingly since the latter (see below) also appeals to our visual senses. In their book, however, Bolter and Grusin point to some of the social and sensorial causes of the attraction of hypermediated products. Hypermediacy provides an increase in:
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Spanish translation of Tringham, R. (1991). Households with Faces: the challenge of gender in prehistoric architectural remains. In J. Gero & M. Conkey (Eds.), Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory: Women and Prehistory (pp.... more
Spanish translation of Tringham, R. (1991). Households with Faces: the challenge of gender in prehistoric architectural remains. In J. Gero & M. Conkey (Eds.), Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory: Women and Prehistory (pp. 93-131). Basil Blackwell.
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In this paper, we present: • The nature of the Remediated Places Project itself • The context of the content that is used in this performance of the Remediated Places Project • The theoretical context of the Remediated Places Project and... more
In this paper, we present: • The nature of the Remediated Places Project itself • The context of the content that is used in this performance of the Remediated Places Project • The theoretical context of the Remediated Places Project and the performance in terms of digital technologies, hypermedia and New Media creativity, the process of historical construction, and the remediation of places of significance for cultural heritage • An outline of what will happen at the “performance”
There are many instances in Near Eastern ar- chaeology in which nomadic pastoralists from southern Russia have been cited as the agents of drastic culture change, of the destruction of settle- ments, and of the degeneration of cultures... more
There are many instances in Near Eastern ar- chaeology in which nomadic pastoralists from southern Russia have been cited as the agents of drastic culture change, of the destruction of settle- ments, and of the degeneration of cultures and civilizations. Examples are the Indo- ...
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ABSTRACT The aim of our project, Last House on the Hill (LHotH), is to holistically reconstitute the rich multimedia and primary research data with the impressive texts of the monograph, the printed final report of the Berkeley... more
ABSTRACT The aim of our project, Last House on the Hill (LHotH), is to holistically reconstitute the rich multimedia and primary research data with the impressive texts of the monograph, the printed final report of the Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük (BACH) project, in which a team from UC Berkeley excavated a group of Neolithic 9000-year old buildings at this famous cultural heritage location in Central Anatolia, Turkey. The Last House on the Hill brings together the published text, complete project database (including all media formats such as photographs, videos, maps, line drawings), related Web sites, data and media outside the direct domain of the BACH project, and recontextualized presentations of the data as remixes, movies, and other interpretive works by BACH team members and many others. We are achieving this through an event-centered, CIDOC-CRM-compatible implementation ontology, expressed through an open-source Web publishing platform, providing open access, transparency and open-endedness to what is normally the closed and final process of monograph publication. The idea of embedding, interweaving, entangling, and otherwise linking the data and media from archaeological excavations with their interpretation and meaningful presentation in an open access sharable platform has long been an ambition of those of us working in the digital documentation of archaeological research and the public presentation of cultural heritage. Formidable barriers still exist to making it possible for projects to achieve these aims, ranging from intellectual property concerns to providing commitments to the long-term sustainability of the digital content. We believe that our event-centered implementation ontology will make it far easier for archaeologists and researchers in other disciplines to organize, manage, and share their data while gaining the significant benefits of the CIDOC-CRM framework. This article describes the strategy, goals, architecture, and implementation for the project, emphasizing the novel and innovative approaches that were required to make the project successful.
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ABSTRACT Review by Louis Levine of book by V.M. Masson and V.I. Sarianidi, translated by Ruth TRringham
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Introduction In 1995, the Podgoritsa Archaeological Project carried out excavation, geophysical, palaeoenvironmental, and GIS research at the Eneolithic (5th millennium BC) settlement tell at Podgoritsa, NE Bulgaria (FIGS. 1, 2). The aims... more
Introduction In 1995, the Podgoritsa Archaeological Project carried out excavation, geophysical, palaeoenvironmental, and GIS research at the Eneolithic (5th millennium BC) settlement tell at Podgoritsa, NE Bulgaria (FIGS. 1, 2). The aims of the research were four-fold: 1) to ...
Research Interests: Archaeology, Prehistoric Archaeology, Hydrography, Hydraulics, Landscape Archaeology, and 15 morePhenomenology, Agriculture, Neolithic Archaeology, Archaeoastronomy, Archaeology of Architecture, Megalithic Monuments, Heritage interpretation, Field Archaeology, Belief Systems, Settlement, Habitat, Chalcolithic, Field, The Uses of Archaeology, and History of Archaeological Theory
In almost all of its variants, the Goddess movement has appealed to and uses archaeological materials, especially those that it claims to be images of females: female figurines or statuettes and female motifs on ceramics or other media.l... more
In almost all of its variants, the Goddess movement has appealed to and uses archaeological materials, especially those that it claims to be images of females: female figurines or statuettes and female motifs on ceramics or other media.l Above all, images from the European Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods (c. 40,000 to 5,000 years ago) are claimed to represent fertility and other positively-valued attributes2 and thus are often taken as material and symbolic evidence for the existence of a world in which females, as a generic category, were valued positively. We entered into a more thorough discussion of the use of archaeology in these contemporary social movements in an earlier version of this paper in which we drew attention to the rich literature, the complexity of the issues, and the variety of participants and views involved in what for the purposes of discussion we have termed the ‘Goddess movement’. Here, we shall focus on the use of the Upper Palaeolithic and complexity of the issues, and the variety of participants and views involved in what for the purposes of discussion we have termed the ‘Goddess movement’. Here, we shall focus on the use of the Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic (c.40,000 to 5000 years ago).
see more at: https://www.ruthtringham.com/project/rethinking-figurines-1998/
see more at: https://www.ruthtringham.com/project/rethinking-figurines-1998/
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The first half of the chapter concerns the history of the “Goddess Movement” in the context of the history of the feminist critique of anthropology, and especially of archaeology. The chapter proceeds with a critique of the interpretation... more
The first half of the chapter concerns the history of the “Goddess Movement” in the context of the history of the feminist critique of anthropology, and especially of archaeology. The chapter proceeds with a critique of the interpretation of archaeological data in terms of “The Goddess”, especially anthropomorphic figurines. Paleolithic and Neolithic figurines are at the heart of the debate over origins in the Goddess Movement and in Gimbutas’ work. They constitute the main data-base on the religion of Old Europe that Gimbutas has reconstructed. We write about how the figurines have been interpreted and how they may be interpreted by us, as feminist archaeologists. We point out four characteristics of Gimbutas’ treatment of the archaeological data. Finally we consider how a feminist treatment of the prehistoric figurines would proceed.
more at: https://www.ruthtringham.com/project/archaeology-and-the-goddess-1995/
more at: https://www.ruthtringham.com/project/archaeology-and-the-goddess-1995/
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I excavate layers of dead people’s residential debris; my trowel gradually reveals the thousands of events that have created the layers and material fragments of past lives. At the same time my mind buzzes with all the small stories that... more
I excavate layers of dead people’s residential debris; my trowel gradually reveals the thousands of events that have created the layers and material fragments of past lives. At the same time my mind buzzes with all the small stories that rise up out of the debris of the dead residents. This chapter, inspired by the writing of George Saunders, by Slow (Careful) Archaeology, and by Slow Data, finds the heart in the specifics of the archaeological record and the slow versioning of one story that emerges from them about a house and its 10 residents who lived and died and were buried at the East Mound of Çatalhöyük at least 9000 years ago.
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In this paper there are some thoughts addressing issues of the future of archaeology that are especially dear to my heart, including questions of who sets research agendas, dissemination of archaeological knowledge, multiscalar... more
In this paper there are some thoughts addressing issues of the future of archaeology that are especially dear to my heart, including questions of who sets research agendas, dissemination of archaeological knowledge, multiscalar interpretation of archaeological data, celebrating the ambiguity of the archaeological record, and putting the dialogic nature of archaeological research into practice as the dominant form of its dissemination. These would push archaeology towards a discipline whose boundaries are fluidly defined, flowing into other disciplines easily, driven by sensorially rich and complex lateral thinking and playful exploratory imagination. A discipline that defies categorization as either ‘humanist’ or ‘scientific’ but is nevertheless grounded in empirical data.
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Occupied from around 7500 BC to 5700 BC, the large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement of Catalhoyuk in Anatolia is composed entirely of domestic buildings; no public buildings have been identified. First excavated in the early 1960s,... more
Occupied from around 7500 BC to 5700 BC, the large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement of Catalhoyuk in Anatolia is composed entirely of domestic buildings; no public buildings have been identified. First excavated in the early 1960s, the site was left untouched until 1993. During the summers of 1997-2003 a team from the University of California at Berkeley (the BACH team) excavated an area at the northern end of the East Mound of Catalhoyuk. The houses there date predominantly to the late Aceramic and early Ceramic Neolithic, around 7000 BC. Last House on the Hill is the final report of the BACH excavations. This volume comprises both interpretive chapters and empirical data from the excavations and their materials. The research of the BACH team focuses on the lives and life histories of houses and people, the use of digital technologies in documenting and sharing the archaeological process, the senses of place, and the nature of cultural heritage and our public responsibilities.
Research Interests: Engineering, Geography, Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, Materials, and 15 moreResearch, Digital Technologies, Neolithic, People, Houses, Excavation, Ceramic, Çatalhöyük, Archaeological research, Excavations, Life Histories, Chalcolithic Settlement, Empirical Data, Aceramic, and Archaeological Process
Proceedings of a meeting of the Research Seminar in Archaeology and Related Subjects held at the Institute of Archaeology, London University
Bill Rathje, Michael Shanks and Chris Witmore in conversation with Lewis Binford, Victor Buchli, John Cherry, Meg Conkey, George Cowgill, Ian Hodder, Kristian Kristiansen, Mark Leone, Randy McGuire, Adrian Praetzellis, Mary Praetzellis,... more
Bill Rathje, Michael Shanks and Chris Witmore in conversation with Lewis Binford, Victor Buchli, John Cherry, Meg Conkey, George Cowgill, Ian Hodder, Kristian Kristiansen, Mark Leone, Randy McGuire, Adrian Praetzellis, Mary Praetzellis, Colin Renfrew, Mike Schiffer, Alain Schnapp, Ruth Tringham, Patty Jo Watson, Alison Wylie.
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"This volume is the final report on the excavations of Building 3, and Spaces 87, 88, and 89 at Çatalhöyük, Turkey that were carried out by a team from the University of California at Berkeley (BACH team) during the summers of 1997-2003.... more
"This volume is the final report on the excavations of Building 3, and Spaces 87, 88, and 89 at Çatalhöyük, Turkey that were carried out by a team from the University of California at Berkeley (BACH team) during the summers of 1997-2003. The BACH Area lies at the northern end of the East Mound of Çatalhöyük, whose archaeological remains date predominantly to the late Aceramic and early Ceramic Neolithic of Central Anatolia, ca. 7000 BC. As with previous reports on the Çatalhöyük Research Project, the BACH volume includes chapters of an interpretive nature in addition to reporting the empirical data from the excavations. The research of the BACH team in this volume focuses on the lives and life-histories of houses and people, the use of digital technologies in documenting and sharing the archaeological process, the senses of place, and the nature of cultural heritage and our public responsibilities.
Citation: Tringham, Ruth and Mirjana Stevanovic (editors)
2012 Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey (Çatalhöyük vol.11). Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Publications, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA.
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Citation: Tringham, Ruth and Mirjana Stevanovic (editors)
2012 Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey (Çatalhöyük vol.11). Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Publications, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA.
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This presentation is about the use of the imagination in the archaeological process, especially that part that takes off from the empirical anchor of fieldwork and laboratory research. It is part of an ongoing process in the construction... more
This presentation is about the use of the imagination in the archaeological process, especially that part that takes off from the empirical anchor of fieldwork and laboratory research. It is part of an ongoing process in the construction of a recombinant history about Neolithic Anatolia and Southeast Europe that is based in the empirical details from the Neolithic villages of Çatalhöyük, Turkey and Opovo, Serbia and is called Dead Women Do Tell Tales (DWdTT). It is an extraordinarily complex web of fragments about the archaeological construction of Neolithic households, from the records of the excavations themselves to interpretive vignettes from my creative imagination. This paper presents a radically new (for me) way of framing this web in the context of a computer game of the genre known as “serious game”. This phase of the project’s development shows how the narrative fragments are drawn out of the empirical entities of the Last House on the Hill (LHotH) database at the same time as giving them a more defined sense of place.
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This article is a critical analysis of my own research and that of my U.S., and European colleagues who go to Southeast Europe to do their research. It analyses the nature of their collaboration with the local Balkan archaeologists. It... more
This article is a critical analysis of my own research and that of my U.S., and European colleagues who go to Southeast Europe to do their research. It analyses the nature of their collaboration with the local Balkan archaeologists. It looks at the effect on this collaboration of the post-2nd World War Socialism/Communism. The aim of this paper is to help make more effective the collaboration between archaeologists coming from different political and philosophical backgrounds.
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The UC Berkeley Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology (MACTiA) was established in January 1998, as a result of Meg Conkey's retention negotiations and her enthusiasm and support of my ambition to share with students the... more
The UC Berkeley Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology (MACTiA) was established in January 1998, as a result of Meg Conkey's retention negotiations and her enthusiasm and support of my ambition to share with students the excitement and empowerment of multimedia authoring. The teaching methods and pedagogical philosophy that became the MACTiA's well-known characteristics did not start with its establishment in 1998. They were the culmination of several paths coming together during the late 1980s and early 1990s in the UC Berkeley Dept. of Anthropology, especially its vibrant group of feminist archaeologists led by Meg Conkey. click Although I had been practicing inquiry-based learning all my teaching career, this really took off when Meg and I started teaching together at the end of the 1980s, fostering group research projects and panels. In some ways I could be called an early adopter of digital technology, click starting in 1984 with my Apple Macintosh, loving its visuals and mouse haptics. click My research and teaching at the time focused on the archaeology of architecture and narratives. As the software and hardware developed for documenting and imagining prehistoric houses, my enthusiasm and skills rushed to keep up. click Only one undergraduate, Michael Ashley, volunteered to go on this journey with me. click He created the Chimera Project for his Senior Thesis (1994). click Thanks to Rosemary Joyce, I joined the Hypermedia bandwagon to create the Chimera Web. I wanted very much to share the exciting possibilities of linking different stories and data together, but had no access to a teaching lab based in the Apple Mac. However, during the early 1990s there was increasing university support for early adopters of digital technology for teaching. 1.48
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Visualizing Çatalhöyük "….vision drives out the other senses. It is the ideal sense for an intellectualized, information-crazed species that has withdrawn from many areas of direct sensation." (Porteous 1990 p.5) Of course, Porteous, like... more
Visualizing Çatalhöyük "….vision drives out the other senses. It is the ideal sense for an intellectualized, information-crazed species that has withdrawn from many areas of direct sensation." (Porteous 1990 p.5) Of course, Porteous, like any poetic writer, exaggerates. on the other hand….
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There is no doubt that narratives told by moving images with immersive and evocative sound have an immensely powerful impact on their audiences. Movies - whether documentary. docudrama, or feature - play an important role in creating and... more
There is no doubt that narratives told by moving images with immersive and evocative sound have an immensely powerful impact on their audiences. Movies - whether documentary. docudrama, or feature - play an important role in creating and sustaining mainstream narratives about the past, re-mediating archaeological investigations. 1his role, however, is a subversive one in that movies have as their official purpose entertainment or, at least, edutainment. 1his paper describes the UC Berkeley Archaeological Film Database, now available through any Web browser, in which many of the 600 films about the products and the process of archaeological research have been subjected to a critical analysis through the efforts of several Media and Archaeology courses. 1he critical analysis follows media literacy criteria, including analysis of authorship, funding, distribution, sub-texts, and the impact on changing audiences in terms of the construction of the past.
https://www.ruthtringham.com/project/1141/
https://www.ruthtringham.com/project/1141/
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This presentation discusses the broader implications of digital documentation, presentation and publication for long-term sustainable preservation of humanities research, using the example of our archaeological project from Çatalhöyük,... more
This presentation discusses the broader implications of digital documentation, presentation and publication for long-term sustainable preservation of humanities research, using the example of our archaeological project from Çatalhöyük, Turkey.
The aim of this presentation was to shift the focus of 3D modeling in archaeology and cultural heritage to consider the ways in which a more active motivation and engagement of their users (whether professionals or general public) might... more
The aim of this presentation was to shift the focus of 3D modeling in archaeology and cultural heritage to consider the ways in which a more active motivation and engagement of their users (whether professionals or general public) might lead to the long-term sustainability of the models and visualizations. Currently the life expectancy of 3D models in installations or on-line is generally quite short. My argument is that engagement with the models should be measured not so much how many users/visitors a model receives, but in how long and through how many re-visits the users wish to visit the same model. I am guessing that for most users, the visit is a one-time short event. I identify five major strategy foci that might lead to longer and more specific usage of the models and thus to their longer-term sustainability; these are: 1) active user participation, 2) meaningful exploration, 3) cultural presence, 4) multi sensorial experience, and 5) the education of attention, with greatest emphasis given to the latter. I end with idea that these five foci in fact could all be embraced within the gamification of the models, not necessarily as video games, but as media-rich non-linear narratives that go by various terms, such as Walking Simulator, Interactive Digital Stories, and Alternative Reality Games that take advantage of a mixed environment of Augmented and Mixed Reality as well as the more " traditional " Virtual Reality modeling. I finally point out that such gamification could potentially make powerful contributions to draw attention to socio-political and ethical issues of cultural heritage and archaeology. Bibliographic references on slide 41-45
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Currently in California, fire is seen as a destructive, terrifying force that gobbles up houses and whole neighborhoods, even small towns. Its destructive nature is used as a political pawn in the current struggle between federal and... more
Currently in California, fire is seen as a destructive, terrifying force that gobbles up houses and whole neighborhoods, even small towns. Its destructive nature is used as a political pawn in the current struggle between federal and state entities in the US. And yet there is ethnographic and archaeological evidence that pre-European inhabitants of those same forested uplands treated fire as a friend, using it for constructive purposes. It is this ambivalence of our attitudes to fire that is the focus of my presentation. The ambivalence permeates our interpretations of the empirical archaeological and ethnographic records of burning throughout prehistory and history. Was the burning event the result of deliberate human intent or was it accidental? Was the fire friend or fiend? I will explore how archaeologists (especially of prehistoric periods with no access to written records) can and do act as arson investigators many centuries (and millennia) after the event, in order to determine whether the fire was an act of accidental or intentional destruction. Lest my discussion of this fascinating topic gets out of control, I focus it on the example of my own collaborative research into the burned houses (so-called “Burned House Horizon”) of Neolithic Southeast Europe and earlier examples in Neolithic Anatolia (Çatalhöyük, Turkey), in order to apply some of what we have learned and consider its significance in terms of the history of how fire has been managed and controlled and why fire is chosen as a means of the destruction of places, be they urban or rural, public monuments or intimate domestic places.
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Reviewed book: Yannis Hamilakis. Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, xiii + 255pp., 26 b/w figs., hbk, ISBN 978-0-521-83728-6).
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ABSTRACT Books reviewed by Ruth Tringham in this article:Foragers and Farmers: Population Interaction and Agricultural Expansion in Prehistoric Europe. Susan Alling Gregg.Forest Farmers and Stockherders: Early Agriculture and Its... more
ABSTRACT Books reviewed by Ruth Tringham in this article:Foragers and Farmers: Population Interaction and Agricultural Expansion in Prehistoric Europe. Susan Alling Gregg.Forest Farmers and Stockherders: Early Agriculture and Its Consequences in North-Central Europe. Peter Bogucki.
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ABSTRACT Review by Ruth Tringham of movie by Paul Johnstone
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Retour page d'accueil Chercher, sur, Tous les supports. Retour page d'accueil, Plus de 1.626.000 de titres à notre catalogue ! Notice. ...
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The richness and depth of The Art of Narritjin Maymuru is an excellent example of the appropriateness of the digital format of publication for works of visual anthropology. There is no way a paper publication could have expressed the... more
The richness and depth of The Art of Narritjin Maymuru is an excellent example of the appropriateness of the digital format of publication for works of visual anthropology. There is no way a paper publication could have expressed the interweaving of the essential ...
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ABSTRACT Review by Ruth Tringham of movie by Gene Feldman