The Study of Neolithic and Eneolithic Southeast Europe

During the 1996-97 academic year, Prof. Tringham was engaged in the following projects:

1) Firstly she presented the preliminary draft of the final monograph publication of the archaeological project that was carried out at Opovo, a neolithic village in Yugoslavia. The site was excavated by a team from U.C. Berkeley and the Institute of History, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia and the Regional Museum at Pancevo, Yugoslavia under her direction in collaboration with Dr. Bogdan Brukner, in 1983-1989. They were thus able to finish the fieldwork part of the project before the outbreak of open civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Final drafts are currently coming in from authors of special chapters in the volume from Yugoslavia and Canada.

The final volume will be published by the Archaeological Research Facility publications during 1998. The main coordination work for publication is being carried out by Dr. Tringham in collaboration with Mirjana Stevanovic, who finished her Ph.D. dissertation on architectural materials from Opovo in May 1996. An award from the Abigail Hogden Fund was obtained for Mirjana Stevanovic and Dr. Tringham to complete the preparations for publication.

2) During 1996-97, Dr. Tringham continued on the construction of the multimedia product entitled the Chimera Web. This is an interpretive archaeological study based on the data from her Opovo excavations, in which multiple interpretations of the same data are expressed, and interpretations from different viewpoints (both prehistoric and modern) and at different scales. The aim is to show how archaeologists - or, rather, one archaeologist - construct prehistory and create the "facts" of prehistoric life. This interpretive study takes advantage of both hypertext software in which concepts and data can be linked and embedded as a network (or web), and multimedia software that enables the production of imagery that gives to the prehistoric reconstruction's the illusion of photographic images of "real" places and landscapes. The end product of the research is a hypermedia "product" on CD-ROM.

During Spring semester 1997, in conjunction with UC Berkeley's Cybersemester, Professor Tringham taught a Freshman Seminar in which students helped to develop a "game" module within the Chimera Web, which was designed to appeal to K-12 readers and to encourage them enter the Chimera Web proper. During this period, she began to transfer the bulk of the Chimera Web from Macromedia Director to the more flexible Macromedia Authorware.

3) The results of Dr. Tringham's research in Bulgaria (1993-95) at the Eneolithic tell settlement of Podgoritsa, in NE Bulgaria are now in press in the Journal of Field Archaeology. She continued to use the results of her excavations in Southeast European prehistory in her research in prehistoric architecture and the construction of prehistoric places.

4) Following on from her pilot project at the Early Neolithic tell settlement of Catal Höyük, Turkey in August 1996, she conducted the first major field season there in August-September 1997, with a team of post-doctoral associates (Mirjana Stevanovic, Nerissa Russell), and graduate students (Julie Near, Jason Bass, Sonya Suponcic, Miriam Doutriaux, Katherine Twiss, Ayfer Bartu) from U.C. Berkeley Dept. of Anthropology, as well as undergraduates from Stanford University and UCSC, and the University of Belgrade. Her project - known as Berkeley Archaeologists at Catal Hyoid (BACH) excavates under the "umbrella" project of the Catal Hoyuk Research Trust, directed by Dr. Ian Hodder of the University of Cambridge. The focus of the BACH project is the investigation of the architectural remains and the mosaic of individual house-histories in the formation of tell. The 1997 season was funded by the remaining funds of her first-year NSF award for the ill-fated Podgoritsa project, and a small supplement granted by NSF. Much was achieved on this shoestring budget, which will be reported in more detail in the ARF Newsletter. Funds are being requested in Fall 1997 for future seasons.

7) At the end of the academic year 1996-97, Dr. Tringham in collaboration with Dr. Margaret Conkey embarked on a project of developing their joint research on Archaeology and the Goddess as a multimedia module for students and the general public. This project was the result firstly of writing another joint article on this topic in which many of their suggestions from earlier articles about the study of figurines was put into practice in a feminist analysis of anthropomorphic representations for a monograph to be published by the British Museum Press. Producing a multimedia module on this topic was also encouraged by the award to Professors Tringham and Conkey of one of the highly competitive Chancellor's Cybersemester Awards for Educational Multimedia Development. It is planned that this module will act as the prototype for others in which research data of archaeologists at Berkeley is interpreted through this medium for students and broader outreach to the public.

Last modified 10 November 1999.