Who Will Remember the Dead? Embodying the People of the Past in Novel Ways

Summary

Archaeologists encounter the people of the past as skeletons with some frequency, yet attempts to reconstruct the life histories of the dead have often been ordinary and predictable. As a scientist and a storyteller, Ruth Tringham's consideration of the dead, inspired by empiricism and imagination in equal measure, imparts multiple truths through multiple voices in novel ways, with a particular focus on visualization. The people of one house at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, for example, are embodied, and ultimately remembered, as fleshed bodies, as avatars, as storied individuals with complex lives, and as operatic actors in gripping tales of survival and death. The dead come alive in Ruth’s versions of the past, and guide us to a more complete vision and deeper understanding of each life recovered through the archaeological process. Ruth's rendering of the dead assures their remembrance through time in a manner like no other, providing models of interpretation that are expansive and creative, real and not real, and always within the realm of possibility.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Lithics Cowgirl, Household Archaeologist, Digital Doyenne: A Session Dedicated to Ruth Tringham

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