The Neolithic House: Ruth Tringham’s Interdisciplinary Approaches to (Re)Constructing Prehistoric Village Life in Southeast Europe and Anatolia

Summary

People create themselves through the houses they build. Ruth Tringham’s archaeological as well as anthropological inquiry has identified houses as active material culture entangled with both material and immaterial social values and rules. Architecture is the material expression of culture, both enabling and constraining the relationship between people and their actions. In archaeology, we receive the final phase of the use-life of a house, yet abundant evidence exists for its making and constant re-making as living space. This paper will explore the intersection of architecture and archaeology focusing on Ruth Tringham’s interdisciplinary approaches to (re)constructing architecture from Neolithic Southeast Europe and Anatolia. The spaces and materialities associated with archaeological investigation – dirt, waste, rubbish, ruins – can be useful as themes for thinking about the Neolithic house, its functions and meanings as well as its construction of mudbrick, daub and wattle, timber or stone. The paper will also try to elucidate and challenge conventional narratives of sedentism to seasonality, and spatial organization to early social complexity. It will also scrutinize the complex processes involved in constructing and re-constructing architecture and the reciprocal relationship between people and the things they built.

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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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage