Content uploaded by Ruth Tringham
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Ruth Tringham on Jan 20, 2016
Content may be subject to copyright.
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
1
Creating Narratives of the Past as Recombinant Histories
Ruth Tringham, Dept. of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Chapter 2 of Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology, edited by Ruth M. Van Dyke
and Reinhard Bernbeck, published by University of Colorado Press, Boulder, Co.,
pp.27-54
This is an updated (January 2016) pre-print copy of a chapter in a published book. Please respect the
intellectual property of the author and the copyright of the publishers. If you find any errors please
contact the author at Tringham@berkeley.edu. Meanwhile this pdf is distributed to interested readers
under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
2
Creating Narratives of the Past as Recombinant Histories
Ruth Tringham
There are narratives about history with beginnings and endings and there are
narratives with no beginning and no ending. Even as a 10-year old I was never happy
with E. Nesbit’s philosophy of writing: 'There are some things I must tell before I begin
to tell about the treasure-seeking, because I have read books myself, and I know how
beastly it is when a story begins, "Alas!" said Hildegarde with a deep sigh, "we must
look our last on this ancestral home"'--and then some one else says something--and
you don't know for pages and pages where the home is, or who Hildegarde is, or
anything about it’ (Nesbit 1899:10).
Writing Fragments
Chaos, entanglement, complexity, ambiguity is not popular, yet it is praised by those
that have the patience to follow its intricacy. Is an entangled web worth it? I believe it
is, if it creates a narrative that leads to further and deeper exploration and complexity
of representation. Can we make complex narratives easier to grasp and engage with?
Digital formats are much better for this than printed linear text; but, as Angela Piccini
(2007) among others has remarked, they are not usually used to their full potential.
Kathleen Stewart starts her printed book Ordinary Affects (2007) by saying that it “is
an experiment, not a judgment. Committed not to the demystification and uncovered
truths that support a well-known picture of the world, but rather to speculation,
curiosity, and the concrete, it tries to provoke attention to the forces that come into
view as habit or shock, resonance or impact. Something throws itself together in a
moment as an event and a sensation; a something both animated and inhabitable”
(Stewart 2007:1). My vision of alternative narratives in this paper comprises similarly
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
3
entangled fragments of events, experiences, and sensations that are documented,
remembered, or imagined in the past (from very distant to very recent).
Most of the narratives that have been presented in this volume are fragments, but so
they would have to be within the word count restrictions. For example Nelson’s
fragments are fragments extracted from what are conceived ultimately as longer
coherent linear texts. Both Thomas’ and Van Dyke’s fragments are created as
demonstrations of the different formats of narratives that address the same content
and of the power of “alternative” formats that use creative imagination to narrate
beyond a heavily empirically based text; I created such fragments myself in a previous
work (Tringham 1994).
The fragmentary narratives that I create in this current work may fulfill both these aims,
but my ultimate aim is neither the creation of a longer cohesive text, nor is it the
demonstration of the value of multiple genres in archaeological expression. Rather,
the fragmentary (vignette) format is the end product of my creative efforts, as it is with
Kathleen Stewart and ‘flash fiction’ writers. The latter fragmentary style of writing1 has
developed in close association with changes in writing styles brought about by digital
technology, as has the public diary or blog (Pratt 2009). I was very interested to read
in this volume Gilead’s comparison of the Talmud to a website in which commentary
could be added to an on-line publication. I suppose Twitter would represent the
ultimate in fragmentary writing!
However, the fragmentary style in which I create is inspired by another source of digital
narratives. They emerge as a result of the filtering, guidance, and ‘scaffolding’ (in this
case mine, but it could be any database creator’s) out of an archaeological database
of media, text, and alphanumeric documentation as ‘database narratives’, following
the inspirational work of Lev Manovich (2001). Such narratives are by definition closely
and explicitly linked to the empirical data and their media representation.
By definition also, such narratives are written at an intensely intimate scale. Together
or as individual narratives they become ‘microhistories’ (an increasingly popular form
of writing history) (Brown 2003:10-12; Ginzburg 2012:193-214; Szijarto 2002) or –- a
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
4
more obscure but no less significant a concept -- ‘recombinant histories’ (Anderson
2011:122). The agenda of my paper is not to downplay the significance of Kathleen
Stewart’s wonderful (2007) printed volume, nor the printed bulk of microhistories
(Davis 1984; Ginzburg 1980; Ladurie 1997). Nor would I wish to deny the importance
of the majority of papers in this volume who all emphasize their alternative narratives
as explicitly and “thickly” (apologies to Clifford Geertz) founded in the empirical details
of archaeology and being “written” at the slow pace of the intimate scale of everyday
life.
In this paper I hope to demonstrate that the creation of narratives using the digital
technology involved in constructing database narratives enables the combining and
recombining of the fragments into a woven fabric or – to use a more “trendy” metaphor
- a tangled fishing long-line to create a complexity of history that approaches more
closely reality. I believe, as do many authors in this volume, that to write about people
and their multisensorial experience of places and events has a greater appeal to a
broad set of audiences to engage in how we construct history. How much greater is
that appeal when constructed in a tangled but content rich framework akin to a
multiplayer real-world on-line (or mobile) game (for thoughts of this nature I have also
been greatly inspired by the many ideas in Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan 2004).
Early Narratives
Since my enlightenment in the late 1980s/early 1990s as to the importance of giving
life-histories and voices to people of the past and to expressing and celebrating the
ambiguity of the archaeological construction of the past (Tringham 1991, 1994), I have
been trying to achieve the twin ambitions of making the process of archaeological
interpretation transparent to a broader public and in doing so to legitimize the use of
imagined narratives about prehistoric people by making explicit their connection to the
primary archaeological data. Without the support of Meg Conkey, Janet Spector, and
Rosemary Joyce, I might have been discouraged from this endeavor in the resistant
atmosphere of the early 1990s, that Sarah Nelson and others have also noted in this
volume.
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
5
The construction of the Chimera Web in 1994-96 with content from the Opovo project
(Serbia) (Tringham, et al. 1992) was my first digital attempt in this direction (Wolle and
Tringham 2000). I have described this process and the exhilaration of transferring
narratives from printed to digital formats in a number of publications (Joyce and
Tringham 2007). It was especially the open-endedness and democratization of the
digital format which I found inspiring, in that it provided an opportunity to use data-
centered imagination to present alternative viewpoints, interpretations, and scenarios,
that were more engaging to create and, I think, to “read” than the closed definitive
narratives represented by the printed word.
The structure of the Chimera Web was based in George Landow's (1992) concept of
Hypertext -- the ability to create nodes with links, through which a user can navigate
around documents, just as we do/did in Web 1.0 “pages”. It was designed with a
hypertext authoring program called Storyspace2 that was used (and still is) to create
standalone hypertext narratives, for example, Rosemary Joyce and colleagues’ Sister
Stories (Joyce, et al. 2000; Lopiparo and Joyce 2003). I chose to build the Chimera
Web as a standalone (not Web-based) interactive hypermedia opus in the multimedia
authoring application Macromedia Director, (in order to incorporate a rich audio-visual
content), that ultimately was a disastrous decision in terms of its sustainability.
The narratives of the burning of House 2 at Opovo are told through the voices of two
female survivors, Baba and Yaya. They did not really exist of course, but someone
like them certainly did. These people are given fictional biographies and are placed
on a multiscalar chronological chart at an appropriate point of Opovo’s stratigraphy,
associated with the biography of a house and household (Tringham 1994:fig.6). At
different periods of their lives they embrace other Neolithic settlements of the region.
Their narratives are fiction, but they are grounded in the archaeological data. The
design ambitiously aimed to link the imagined narratives about why and how Neolithic
people burned houses to a web of data about the Opovo archaeological project, the
investigation of Neolithic house fires, modern arson investigations, the socio-politics
of archaeology in the Balkans, and basis of the project in archaeological method and
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
6
theory as well as the excavation database. This crucial last step -- the integration with
the database – proved elusive with the technology and expertise available to me at
that time and until very recently.
Database Narratives and History
A number of technical and theoretical developments have helped to make these
original ambitions a more feasible – and sustainable – reality. The concept of
Database Narratives has had an important effect on thinking differently about the
relationship of narratives (of whatever genre) to databases. At the same time, the
enormous growth and consumer access to processing power, networking power and
storage capacity in the ethereal world of the Internet has transformed what mere
mortals (as opposed to highly trained and specialized software engineers) can do to
construct interfaces and databases that are openly accessible, downloadable,
searchable, and updatable through an Internet browser.
Lev Manovich took a rather different standpoint on hyperlinking from that of George
Landow (1992) when he formulated his concept of the Database Narrative (Manovich
2001:221-226). He pointed out that the opposition of database and narrative is a
symbiotic one. Databases have a data structure which contrasts to the algorithmic
structure of a narrative. Interfaces with an obvious algorithmic narrative structure can
be drawn out of a database, resulting in the creation of a complex, fluid – even
ephemeral - web of alternating interfaces/narratives (database narratives), as
Manovich himself created in his SoftCinema 3 and Steve Anderson created in
Technologies of History4 (see also Soar and Gagnon 2013).
Steve Anderson (2011:122-127) directed the idea of database narratives towards the
construction of narratives of history, what he called ‘digital histories’ or ‘recombinant
histories’. He recognizes two directions in which historiography has embraced digital
technology. On the one hand is the idea of amassing the “total” historical record of
events through accessible networked interoperable databases, creating history that is
as full and definitive as possible. On the other hand “digital technologies have …
enabled strategies of randomization and recombination in historical construction
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
7
resulting in a profusion of increasingly volatile counter-narratives and histories with
multiple or uncertain endings” (Anderson 2011:125); in other words recombinant
histories. Both these practices are legitimate pathways to creating narratives about
the past.
Recombinant histories, however, rather than being narratives that describe an
experience of the past are “collections of infinitely retrievable fragments, situated
within categories and organized to predetermined associations, ….by which the past
may be conceived as fundamentally mutable and reconfigurable” (Anderson
2011:122). In thinking about how recombinant histories would in practice change the
writing of history and the role of the historian, Anderson (who himself is interested in
the potential of recombinant histories for artistic works, history-based games and the
exploration of popular culture and film) points out that “…the database and search
engine enable non-linear accessing and combining of information into forms that defy
both literary and historical conventions. Works of history once understood to comprise
an expanding field of collective historical knowledge are thereby repositioned as raw
materials in infinitely reconfigurable patterns of revision, remixing and
recontextualization” (2011:125).
By now it is probably clear that this concept of an endless combination of fragmentary
narratives has been a guiding principle of my current construction of narratives about
archaeology and prehistory. Although the majority of archaeological narratives are
constructed as coherent linear narratives with a beginning, middle, and end that,
moreover, focus ultimately on broad and long-term themes, I have argued elsewhere
that archaeological data are in the first instance most appropriate for narratives that
are non-linear fragments and that are written at an intimate scale (Tringham
1994:198).
In historiography, starting in the 1980s and currently flourishing, a trend towards
writing “microhistories” has focused on this scale of narrative and a very close reading
of the documentary evidence, in contrast to the more traditional “history writ large”
(Ginzburg 2012:193-214). The historians’ argument for writing at this microscale (see
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
8
most clearly in Szijarto 2002) is, firstly, that the narrative is more closely associated
with primary documentation or ‘little facts’, thus decreasing the degree of ambiguity,
meaning, as I shall argue below, that any interpretation is more clearly and closely
sourced in empirical data; secondly, it enables the historian to come ‘face to face’ with
individual actors of the past, arguably closer to ‘reality’ in the ‘Cinema Verité’ sense of
the word, providing a richer picture of the context as can be seen in their microhistories
and, as I have argued, as a strong aspect of the feminist practice of archaeology
(Tringham 1994:183-184); at the same time microhistorical narratives with their
imagined extensions of the primary documents enable the reader to immerse
themselves in the experience of the everyday of the past from many points of view
(Davis 1984; Ladurie 1997). The challenge for the prehistoric archaeologist is how to
create such attractive narratives when the only primary documents (in the
historiographic sense) are those of the archaeologist-interpreter separated by
thousands of years from original action. The rest of this paper addresses that
challenge, as, I believe, have all the other papers in this volume.
An important critique of “microhistorical” narratives has been their tendency to become
so absorbed in the particulars of the story that the broader historical context is ignored
or poorly articulated (Lamoreaux 2006). The argument for multiscalarity is one with
which archaeologists are quite familiar. I have long been delighted that the technology
of Hypertext and now Database Narratives enables the author to link to ever-
expanding scales of interpretation and back again to the particular (Joyce and
Tringham 2007). Lutz has pointed to a number of works in the microhistorical genre
that have demonstrated the power of Web-based narratives to present a multiscalar
aspect to the work and is delighted, as am I, by the open-endedness of such narratives
and the ability of such narratives to juxtapose narrative with the source document (Lutz
2007). It is not surprising, therefore, that an increasing number microhistorical works
are being written as on-line narratives.5
Last House on the Hill On-line Database
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
9
During the summers of 1997-2005, I directed a team from the University of California
at Berkeley (BACH team) who carried out an archaeological project of excavation and
analysis at the site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, a 9000-year old Neolithic
settlement mound, as part of the overall Çatalhöyük Research Project. The project
focused on the life-history of a single house (Building 3).
Figure 1. Screenshot of the Last House on the Hill database, after a search for Feature 634, showing
the presence of 44 directly related, and after the selection of the place Feature 162, which has 76
relations
The printed monograph report of the BACH project, entitled Last House on the Hill
(Tringham and Stevanovic 2012), is mirrored by an online digital database of the same
name (Ashley et al.2012)6. The digital Last House on the Hill (LHotH) project, however,
does much more than provide a digital presentation framework for publishing Last
House on the Hill. Its ambition, one which we have long wished to satisfy, is to embed,
interweave, entangle and otherwise link the complete project database (including all
media formats such as photographs, videos, maps, line drawings) with their
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
10
interpretation and meaningful presentation in an open access, sharable platform. It is
an open-ended data stream that can grow and – as long as it is well curated – can live
for many decades (Tringham and Ashley 2012).
Figure 2. Chart of structure of the entities that comprise the Last House on the Hill database and the
channels that lead to the database narratives
Our greatest challenge has been how to enable the user to make sense of such a
deluge of rich media, data, analysis, and interpretation; how to link the components
meaningfully for a variety of publics, to ensure their long-term preservation through
access and usage.
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
11
Creating Meaningful Narratives and Recombinant Histories
The ultimate aim of the Last House on the Hill (LHotH) database is to encourage both
archaeologists and a broader public to be inspired by interpretive guides and other
kinds of scaffolds or “outerfaces”7 to explore our data and media in order to use them
in creative and productive ways to think about both the past and the present. Anderson
and Manovich structure their databases in various ways using filters and other means
to guide the creation of narrative interfaces8. In the same way, the Last House on the
Hill (LHotH) database has been structured to make sense of the mass of
archaeological documentation as the relationships between people, actions, tasks,
and the contingencies of time and space, grouped together as events in
archaeological (Neolithic) time or the more recent time of the BACH excavation project
(Figure 1). Narratives that represent these relationships can be drawn out of the
database through the filter of the alternating perspectives or standpoints of people,
places, things, and media, thus enabling the recontextualization and remixing of the
content that resides in the database (Figure 2).
An eBook/iPad version of the printed Last House on the Hill monograph could be one
such narrative, but one that does not stray far from the conventions of linear “reading”
of the printed monograph and what Bolter and Grusin (1999) refer to as “respectful
remediation”. On the other hand, at UC Berkeley’s Multimedia Authoring Center for
Teaching in Anthropology (MACTiA) we have always encouraged in our students and
colleagues a more ‘radical remediation’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999) of the data and
media of the BACH project in which an explorer of our data re-uses and re-
contextualizes our excavation products to create in their own narrative an alternative
interpretation or 'reading' of the data, challenging the apparent authority of the 'expert',
even using such tools as irony and satire. We have already created some 'remixes' of
this kind, such as RAVE: Requiem for a 'boneyard'; Dido's Lament; Remixing Dido's
Lament (Tringham 2012b)9.
But I believe that we can go much further in using on-line database and web-
(or mobile) based interface technology to radically and creatively remediate our
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
12
archaeological data to explore the many possible trajectories and scenarios of the
past. Unlike the original hypertext narratives (for example, Joyce, et al. 2000) in which
the nodes are fixed but a path of navigation or juxtaposition can be followed allowing
the narrative to be “read” differently each time the group of elements is visited, the
data and media that provide the sources for database narratives are infinitely re-
configurable (albeit structured and scaffolded with filters), they are infinitely (within
reason) expandable and updateable, and can be “harvested” and related in a much
more complex fashion.
Dead Women Do Tell Tales – The Beginning
In order to demonstrate the potential of such a database narrative I have gathered
together a selection of fragments, some of which are entities harvested from the
LHotH database, others from my creative imagination, into a preliminary set of
microhistories which themselves are fragments of a bigger (yes, probably endless)
work –- Dead Women Do Tell Tales (DWdTT). With this paper, it is at the beginning
of its construction. It is a ‘recombinant history’, made up of fragments from the
archaeological construction of Neolithic households in Southeast Europe and
Anatolia. Many of the fragments are drawn from the database of the Last House on
the Hill (that is, the BACH project at Çatalhöyük, Turkey). Others (not presented in this
paper) draw upon data and media from the archaeological projects of Opovo and
Selevac, both in Serbia and both of which figured heavily in the hypermedia Chimera
Web.
Dead Women Do Tell Tales harvests and then recombines these data fragments in
order to think about a very big question: what is it in the Neolithic household-based
foundation that leads to such a contrast in the trajectories of southeast Europe and
Anatolia towards the establishment of centralized authority and urbanism in which the
social reproductive role of the individual household is lost (Tringham 2000). This very
large question forms the background – and perhaps ultimate aim – to the many
microhistorical narrative fragments in DWdTT that – like Stewart’s Ordinary Affects –
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
13
are about everyday social practice, multisensorial experiences, and small events in
Figure 3. The selection of source data from the LHotH database for the microhistory/database
narrative “Basket in Feature 634”
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
14
the life-histories of people, places and things: “Ordinary affects are the surging
capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual
motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences”(Stewart 2007:2).
Douglass Bailey and Melanie Simpkin in this volume have a similar desire – but a
different response to the challenge – to think about the slow rhythm and small time
increments of the everyday.
There are, for example, seemingly contrasting ways in which the continuity of place is
established – at Çatalhöyük, where the dead are buried under the house floors, on the
one hand, and “open” sites like Opovo and Selevac where the houses are given a
funeral pyre and the dead are nowhere to be seen, on the other; or contrasting ways
in which walls of old houses form the foundations for a new house creating a
settlement mound (“tell”) such as Çatalhöyük’s East Mound, on the one hand, and a
new house is built next to an old house in Opovo and Selevac. How these contrasts
play out in everyday life can be explored by following the imagined life-paths of the
people who resided in these places. Such life-paths are full of ambiguity even with the
support of archaeological data, so that the narratives help to explore alternative
scenarios. And how do the archaeologists in these places struggle in their research
on a daily basis with this same ambiguity? The history that is thus created is multi-
formatted, cumulative, never complete, rich in imaginative thinking, and hard
(impossible?) to grasp as a definitive story.
The focus of the narratives in DWdTT is always on people – past and present residents
(including archaeologists themselves) and visitors who created and continue to create
places in the different locations embraced by the project. In the Last House on the Hill
(LHotH) database prehistoric people are associated with their final resting places (as
in Figure 1 for the character ‘Dido’), with the surviving places and things that they
experienced with all their senses as they went about their everyday lives, as well as
with the life-histories of themselves, their houses, and their villages. Archaeologists –
who also have life-histories and experiences - are also related with these places (such
as human remains specialist Lori Hager). Their first-person narratives in both
prehistoric and present are of necessity the product of memory, and thus sometimes
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
15
seem to be non-linear and incomplete, with elements of bias, wistfulness, and secrecy
that diaries and memories emote. The skill for the reader, as when listening to any
stories, is to “read” between the lines and “read” from multiple sources.
Figure 4. Five microhistories/database narratives created about Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey for
Dead Women do Tell Tales
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
16
The complexity of this task is exacerbated by the fact that the prehistoric “voices” so
far have only one source – my imagination. I am in agreement with Michael Shanks
(2012) that we need to be aware that our imaginations are in play throughout the
archaeological process. I believe that we need to be aware as much as is feasible of
its sources, and how we are articulating between past and present imagining (Ashley
2012). The sources for my imagination are multiple, but come from many years
fieldwork in the countryside of southeast Europe and Anatolia, as well as broad
reading of ethnographies and histories. I am not aware of explicitly modeling any of
the characters in DWdTT on people from my experience, but I am sure that I do. The
creation of both character and plot is more like the process described by Beveridge
(1974) in his Art of Scientific Investigation quoting from Dewey (1933) “First comes
awareness of some difficulty or problem which provides the stimulus [RET: in our case
a combination of empirical evidence, such as “Dido’s” injuries of healed broken ribs
and dislocated hip, or burning a house deliberately at high temperatures, that needs
explanation]. This is followed by a suggested solution springing into the conscious
mind (Beveridge 1974:53)”. Even so, as with any writer of creative fiction, I know that
I cannot avoid something of my modern worldview embedding itself in the prehistoric
“voice”. Mark Pluciennik in this volume has covered for me the implications of my
author-ity in doing this; I choose his third option – to make this fact transparent and
being ready to enter into a dialogue with my readers, including those who may be
offended by my focus on death as well as life. These products of creative imagination
at this point in the development of Dead Women Do Tell Tales are expressed as
responses 9000 years ago of an informant, not to an ethnographer, but more like to a
curious traveller, who has landed up at Çatalhöyük by accident, rather like Ibn Fadlan,
the hero of Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (Crichton 1977). I am sure that this
will change during further development of Dead Women Do Tell Tales. The “modern”
voices are based in diaries, video, and publications of archaeologists and visitors
harvested from the LHotH database.
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
17
For the purposes of this demonstration of DWdTT, I am focusing on five microhistories
or database narratives drawn out of entities and their relationships in the Last House
on the Hill database and their fictional interpretations. They serve as a scaffold for the
exploration of one small corner of the BACH project – the burial of a woman under a
platform in Building 3. Each microhistory builds from a single entity that can be found
in the LHotH database. From there, as with Spector’s (1993) What this Awl Means, or
Gilead’s Lysol bottle fragment in this volume, other fragments are related through
relations that occur in the database. One microhistory builds from basket phytoliths
found associated with a Neolithic burial of a mature woman known as Feature 634 or
‘Dido’. This one small artifact is directly related through its relationship between
“basket” and then “Feature 634” in the LHotH database to at least 20 other fragments
(Figure 3). Such fragments comprise text narratives attached or embedded in media
items in the form of captions and other metadata, or they might be textual descriptions
(from diaries or archaeological contexts) that are enhanced in DWddT by attached
images or videos and alphanumeric data from the database converted into text or
charts.
The entities or fragments of the “Basket in Feature 634” microhistory include images
of this and several other baskets, including an attempt to preserve a basket, an image
of another set of phytoliths interpreted as binding rope in the same burial, and two
videos that record two events in “project time” – the discovery and the excavation of
the remains of the basket; the people in the videos include Willeke Wendrich a
specialist in basket analysis, and Lori Hager the human remains specialist who
excavated Feature 634. Exploration might encourage you to jump to another
microhistory that focuses on Lori Hager. On the other hand you might follow links to
other narratives in the “Basket in Feature 634” microhistory that go beyond the
collection in LHotH. These include an excerpt of a publication by Wendrich about
excavating baskets at Çatalhöyük; in addition, there are fragments that have been
constructed as new narratives that I (being the only user so far) have created as a
result of exploring the web of media, texts, and other data and my imagination; these
include giving the basket itself a voice in order to tell about its life (a literary trope that
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
18
has been used by a number of other writers), and scenarios of making the basket
based on Wendrich’s analysis.
One of the fragments in the “Basket in Feature 634” microhistory entitled “Who is
buried in F.634” is a video that remediates and remixes the primary data in the Last
House on the Hill database describing how we came to designate the woman buried
in F.634 as ‘Dido’. This fragment, as with a number of others, appears also in three of
the other microhistories (Figure 4) demonstrating not only the idea of entanglement
but also the idea that the same fragment can be viewed multiple times and will have
a different affect in each juxtapositional context. In the Lori Hager microhistory, the
burial is seen from the point of view of the human remains specialist who excavated
it; in the Dido microhistory it provides the archaeological introduction to the life-history
of this mature woman; in the Burials in Building 3 microhistory this fragment is
juxtaposed with other burials before and after F.634, providing Dido’s context among
the residents of Building 3 as a household.
Similarly, fragments from Lori Hager, Dido, and Burials in Building 3, such as “Life-
History of Building 3”, are also fragments in the BACH project microhistory, again each
with a different context and a different affect. Thus when landing on “Life-History of
Building 3” in BACH Project a “traveller” could follow the path of archaeologists as
they constructed the history with fragments mostly drawn from the LHotH database;
by following a link such as “Life History of a Household”, however, the context changes
and the reader would follow a parallel path but one constructed from the
archaeologist’s imagined life of a single household or person in Building 3. And from
there you travel onto a different set of narratives.
Such a tour of a recombinant history that I present here can be quite challenging.
Steve Anderson in the introduction to his on-line recombinant history of film
Technologies of History advises the user:
Although certain aspects of the design may initially appear to resist
easy navigation, our aim is neither to frustrate the user nor indulge in
aestheticized design experiments……..The experience of moving
through the project is … intended to be partly experiential and partly
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
19
curatorial; users may select from categories of content that are based
on genre, format or (primarily) threads of historiographical concern.
The multiplicity of opportunities for revelation or chaos function as both
a metaphor for history’s own lack of resolution and as a rhetorical
strategy for resisting narrative closure.10
With very similar aims in my project, the eventual cloud-based or mobile device user
interface of Dead Women Do Tell Tales may resemble Technologies of History or may
more resemble a 2- or 3-dimensional computer game. Two requirements for the future
user interface of Dead Women Do Tell Tales that are inspired by Technologies of
History are, firstly, that it be connected to the LHotH database so that entities can be
searched for and harvested on the fly. The second requirement is that it should enable
users to log their path of exploration in order to create (and contribute) new narratives
and “the creation of new critical contexts in which viewers simultaneously interrogate
the past and rethink the entangled relations of history, memory and media”11 Just as
users of a database are invited to save their search tables while exploring a ‘regular’
on-line database, users of Dead Women Do Tell Tales would be invited to create their
own recombinations of fragments/entities from those built into the DWdTT and those
they find by digging deeper into the LHotH database. Both of these requirements
would satisfy my ambition of engaging a broader audience in the creation of narratives
that are based in, but challenge, the boundaries of archaeological research.
The interface that you see in this demonstration serves more to enable the
visualization of the underlying structure of DWdTT and its relationship to the Last
House on the Hill database. Currently the user interface of Dead Women do Tell Tales
is built in a free mind-mapping software called The Brain12 . Like all proprietary
software (remember Storyspace and Macromedia Director!) it is unlikely to survive the
test of time. Moreover, it is not connected directly to the LHotH database. For the
moment, however, it is useful to show how the “thoughts” – my fragmentary narratives
– sometimes as parents, sometimes as children (depending on context) or as non-
hierarchical “jumps”, and represented as a 3D web of enormous depth and complexity
(Figure 5). The structure of Dead Women Do Tell Tales – the fact that the source of
each fragment is embedded in the narrative “entity” as metadata – guarantees that
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
20
any interpretive narrative will be firmly anchored in the empirical data of the projects
by its relationship to other fragments in the microhistory which themselves have been
drawn directly from the LHotH database (Table 1). Thus at every step the author could
argue and even further embed the rationale for his/her interpretation in terms of
plausibility by direct reference to a source in the LHotH database.
Figure 5. Screenshot of the microhistory/database narrative “Basket in Feature 634” in the on-line
The Brain interface
The LHoTH content, as the primary source of the archaeological project, has been
created and prepared in a way that makes it sustainable, meaningful, and re-usable
for many generations. User interfaces – like Dead Women Do Tell Tales, the results
of harvesting from a database - may be more or less sustainable depending on
whether they are built on open-source or proprietary software, depending on how
easily the software and content can be updated, depending on how easily and how
much they are accessed and used, and, of course, how engaging they are. However,
trends and fashions in interfaces change and are nevertheless relatively ephemeral.
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
21
For now, however, the reader on their web browser can explore this version of Dead
Women Do Tell Tales with its five existing microhistories and follow along as the
recombinant history expands and begins to take shape in future months13
In a chapter of Last House on the Hill entitled “Sensing the Place at Çatalhöyük”, I
could do little more than suggest such narratives as these that might go beyond the
strict empirical boundaries of the excavated data as tantalizing but disembodied
fragments (Tringham 2012a). In the Dead Women Do Tell Tales recombinant history
we will use the full power of digital technology to take these fragments - narratives -
of created knowledge and audio-visual representation and combine and recombine
them into an open-ended but always accumulating history of the BACH project, that
is itself a (frequently forgotten) fragment of the larger Çatalhöyük Research Project.
They are tangled with other stories from other forgotten archaeological projects in
Serbia to create a new set of narratives that are themselves recombined to create a
history that can never be grasped but at the same time is not so far from “reality”,
because all are embedded with some kind of empirical details.
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
22
Table 1. Details of the contents of three microhistories/database narratives created
for Dead Women Do Tell Tales about Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey showing their
source as entities in the Last House on the Hill database, or as texts of creative
writing.
microhistory
/ vignette
narrative title
primary
medium
narrative
source
Basket in
F.634
Introductory
scaffold for the
Basket
microhistory
audio
The basket of this microhistory was associated
with burial in Feature 634, but was it as a
container of the dead, or as an accompaniment
for the dead person? From the object itself a
wide net harvests many stories about the
basket, many of them written as creative
imagination
Basket in
F.634
Basket in F.634
Text
with
photo
Description of phytolith remains of a basket
designated Features 640 and 760
photo: CRP
080200_202443.jp
g; text: LHotH
Feature description
Basket in
F.634
Discovering the
basket in F.634
video
2 August, 2000: Willeke Wendrich discusses
with Ruth Tringham, Lori Hager and Mirjana
Stevanovic the fragile white phytolith remains
of baskets at Çatalhöyük and the difficulties in
studying them.
Video: BACH
CaTDV catalog:
CH2000V011 clips
75 to 86 merged;
text:
http://vimeo.com/57
55391
Basket in
F.634
Excavating the
basket in F.634
video
2 August, 2000: Human remains specialist Lori
Hager is excavating the phytoliths at the top of
the fill of burial F.634.
Video: BACH
CatDV catalog:
CH2000V011 clips
89 to 101 merged;
text:
http://vimeo.com/57
62027
Basket in
F.634
Lori Hager
video
Lori Hager - one of two human remains
specialists in the BACH Area - is being asked
about her memory of Çatalhöyük through the
senses.
CatalViceoPlace
CatDV catalog:
LoriInterview_clip3.
mov
Basket in
F.634
Accompanying
the dead
text
Dido will have a basket as company. She
remembers her child accompanied by much
more.
RET Creative
imagination
Basket in
F.634
Basket Analysis
text
Analysis of some of the phytolith basketry from
Çatalhöyük by a basketry specialist Willeke
Wendrich for how the baskets are made
Willeke Wendrich
(2005) Çatalhöyük
Basketry. In
Changing
Materialities at
Çatalhöyük:
(Catalhöyük vol.5),
edited by I. Hodder,
pp. 333-338.
McDonald Institute
for Archaeological
Research,
Cambridge, UK. p.
336
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
23
Basket in
F.634
Willeke
Wendrich
video
Introducing Dr. Willeke Wendrich, who has
been brought to Çatalhöyük as a
consultant for the Neolithic baskets
Willeke_Intro_July2
000-basket_01-
H.264.mov
Basket in
F.634
How Was the
basket Made
text
Dido remembers how she was taught to make
her first basket
RET: creative
imagination
Basket in
F.634
Biography of a
Neolithic basket
Text
with
image
The basket in F.634 tells its life-history
RET: creative
imagination; photo:
basket_02.jpg
Basket in
F.634
Sedges
image
Some of the materials used to make baskets at
Çatalhöyük
Internet
Basket in
F.634
who collects the
sedge
text
Work-song sung by the sedge-cutters of
Çatalhöyük
RET: creative
imagination
Basket in
F.634
where is it
collected?
map
Google Earth
Basket in
F.634
Who Made the
Basket
video
Animation movie created by Colleen Morgan
with her avatar in the virtual world of
Çatalhöyük on Okapi Island in Second Life.
Colleen Morgan:
machinima_1.mp4
Basket in
F.634
Basket for
cooking or
storage in the
Building 3
Photo
with text
Phytoliths (plant remains) from a round basket
found in the middle of the western room
(Space 158) of Building 3 used for cooking
LHotH DB:
081700_125153
Basket in
F.634
Baskets as
coffins then and
now
photo
with text
Baskets used in burials to contain the dead;
juxtaposition of two images then and now
Images: Then:
John Swogger:
Swogger_burial_6.j
pg; Now: wicker-
coffin.jpg
Basket in
F.634
Basket
Excavation at
Çatalhöyük
text
Basket specialist Willeke Wendrich discusses
the challenge of excavating baskets because
of the fragmentary nature of their preservation
Willeke Wendrich
(2005) Çatalhöyük
Basketry. In
Changing
Materialities at
Çatalhöyük: edited
by I. Hodder, pp.
333-338. McDonald
Institute for
Archaeological
Research,
Cambridge, UK. p.
333 and Fig. 15.1
Basket in
F.634
Platform F.162
Photo
with text
The north-central platform (Feature 162) of
Building 3 was a focus throughout the BACH
excavation with four different burial events
cutting through it.
LHotH DB
990728_134250.jp
g
Basket in
F.634
who is buried in
Feature 634
video
A movie remixed from LHotH media entities
focuses on the excavation of a skeleton of a
mature woman - whom we have called Dido.
Quinlan, Ashley,
Tringham remix:
http://vimeo.com/17
146954
!!
!!
!!
!!
!!
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
24
Lori Hager
introductory
scaffold to the
Lori Hager
microhistory
audio
Lori Hager the human remains specialist with
Basak Boz of the BACH project team. They
excavated and documented all of the burials in
Building 3. Lori is interested in thinking about
the skeletons as people.
Lori Hager
Excavating the
basket in F.634
video
!!
Lori Hager
Lori Hager
video
!!
Lori Hager
Discovering the
basket in F.634
Video
!!
Lori Hager
Lori's video
interview of
excavating
burials
video
An interview 23 February 2005 in Berkeley,
California Lori Hager about her memory of the
perception of touch while she excavates the
burials and her experience of excavating this
very intimate scale of archaeological practice -
the investigation of human burial.
LoriInterview_cl
ip5-6.mov;
http://vimeo.co
m/6182084
Lori Hager
Excavating
burials under
platform F.162
Photo
with text
Lori Hager and Basak Boz, are mapping,
recording, and removing the uppermost layer
of bones from the mass of human bones buried
under Feature 162
LHotH DB:
061401_115655
Lori Hager
Burials under
F.162 from
Phase B3.4A
Photo
with text
Feature 162 showing the multiple (four) burial
pits beneath its floors in the later phases of the
history of Building 3
LHotH DB:
061301_145504
Lori Hager
Revealing the
dead then and
now
text and
video
Then: Dido describes how they reveal the
older burials as new burials are dug Now: 14
August 2000: Ruth, Lori and Basak figure out
how to reveal the sequence of burials from the
mass of bones.
text: RET creative
imagination; video::
CH2000V007C_cli
ps03to04_081400_
cropped.mov,
http://vimeo.com/57
08213
Lori Hager
Capturing burial
discussions on
video
Photo
and text
Project videographer Jason Quinlan records a
discussion between BACH field directors Ruth
and Mirjana and human remains specialists
Basak and Lori about recording the mass of
human bones under platform F.162
LHotH DB:
061401_074521:
Lori Hager
Basak Boz
text
Introducing Basak Boz
Lori Hager
recording burial
documentation
Photo
and text
Lori Hager fills in a Skeletal Unit sheet as
colleague Basak Boz removes the bones from
one of the burials under feature 162
LHotH DB:
061701_154440:
Lori Hager
Dido's biography
Text
with
illustrati
on
Dido tells the story of her life especially her
memory of its dramatic events, including the
births and deaths of her children
Text: RET creative
imagination; image:
John Swogger:
Swogger_g768_wo
man.jpg
!!
!!
!!
!!
!!
Dido
introductory
scaffold to the
Dido
microhistory
audio
Dido is what we came to name the woman who
was buried in Feature 634. In this microhistory
I imagine much since no written trace exists,
but we can build much about her from the
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
25
skeletal remains and the basket with which she
was buried.
Dido
Dido's biography
text
!!
Dido
who is buried in
F.634
video
!!
Dido
Rope on Dido's
hip
photo
Phytoliths that mark the former presence
of rope binding the hips of "Dido," a
female excavated in 2001.
LHotH
DB:062301_18171
2.jpg
Dido
Arlene Rosen
text
!!
Dido
Excavating the
Dead
video
!!
Dido
Revealing the
dead
text
!!
Dido
Hiding the dead
Text
with
image
Dido tells of some of rules that regulate how
the dead should be prepared for burial and
hidden.
text: RET creative
imagination; image:
LHotH DB:
072600_022205.jp
g
Dido
Containing the
dead
text
Dido talks to the curious visitor about how she
and her fellow villagers see burial as a
container, like a womb or a cave.
text: RET creative
imagination; image:
John Swogger,
catal_swogger_buri
al.jpg
Dido
Burials under
F.162 from
Phase B3.4A
photo
!!
Dido
Excavating the
basket in F.634
video
!!
Dido
Lori Hager
video
!!
Dido
Who Made the
Basket
story
!!
Dido
Biography of a
Neolithic basket
text
!!
Dido
Aerial Photo of
Building 3
Photo
with
Text
Aerial shot of the BACH area in 2000, looking
west showing a busy day in the life of the
excavation of Building 3, where at least ten
people are working comfortably. This might
give an indication of how many could have
lived in Building 3 during its prehistoric life.
LHotH DB:
081700_140917:
Dido
Life-history of a
household
story
The collective life-history of the residents of
Building 3 as told by Dido to a visitor
text: RET creative
imagination
Dido
Life-history of
Building 3
image
Image of the changing floor plan of Building 3
through its 10 phases defined archaeologically
LHotH DB:
bach_ch4_fig0
3_ret.tiff
!!
!!
!!
!!
!!
Burials in
Building 3
Introductory
scaffold to the
Burials
microhistory
audio
The burials in Building 3 are almost all under
platforms (F.162 and F.173) at the northern
end of the main living room as is usual at
Çatalhöyük.
Note: dark grey shading indicates fragment repeated in another microhistory. Empty cells are not
included
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
26
Acknowledgements. The “we” referred to at many points in this paper refers especially
to the pleasure and inspiration and guidance I have received in working with Michael
Ashley, who has been my “peer learner” from the beginning of our journey in building
digital histories together to its most recent manifestation in the Center for Digital
Archaeology (CoDA). We have created CoDA, an NPO, together with Meg Conkey,
who has also been a tower of support and generosity on this journey, and Cinzia
Perlingieri, without whom none of these projects would ever get finished.
References Cited
Anderson, S.
2011 Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past. Dartmouth College
Press (UPNE), Boston.
Ashley, Michael
2012 An Archaeology of Vision: Seeing Past and Present at Çatalhöyük, Turkey. In Last House on the Hill:
BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey (Çatalhöyük vol.11), edited by R. Tringham and M.
Stevanovic, pp. 481-502. Archaeologica Monumenta 27. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology
Publications, UCLA, Los Angeles.
Ashley, M., R. Tringham and C. Perlingieri
2012 Last House on the Hill: Digitally Remediating Data and Media for Preservation and Access
Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage 4.
Beveridge, W.
1974 The Art of Scientific Investigation. Heinemann Educational Books. Heinemann, London.
Bolter, J. and R. Grusin
1999 Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Brown, R.
2003 Microhistory and the Post-Modern Challenge. Journal of the Early Republic 23(1):1-20.
Crichton, M.
1977 Eaters of the Dead. Bantam Books, New York.
Davis, N. Z.
1984 The Return of Martin Guerre. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Dewey, J.
1933 How We Think. D.C. Heath and Co, Boston.
Ginzburg, C.
1980 The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller. Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore.
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
27
2012 Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive. Translated by J. Tedeschi and A. Tedeschi.
University of California Press, Berkeley, California.
Joyce, Rosemary, C. Guyer and M. Joyce
2000 Sister Stories. NYU Press, New York.
Joyce, R. and R. Tringham
2007 Feminist Adventures in Hypertext. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14(3:
special issue: Practising Archaeology as a Feminist, edited by Alsion Wylie and Meg
Conkey):328-358.
Ladurie, E. L.
1997 The Beggar and the Professor. Translated by A. Goldhammer. University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.
Lamoreaux, N.
2006 Rethinking Microhistory. Journal of the Early Republic 26(4):555-561.
Landow, G.
1992 Hypertext: the convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore.
Lopiparo, J. and Rosemary Joyce
2003 Crafting Cosmos, Telling Sister Stories, and Exploring Archaeological Knowledge Graphically
in Hypertext Environments. In Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the Arts, edited by J.
Jameson, Jr., C. Finn and J. Ehrenhard, pp. 193-205. University of Alabama Press,
Tuscaloosa.
Lutz, J.
2007 The Web Gives and It Takes Away. Canadian Historical Association Bulletin 33(2):38-39.
Manovich, L.
2001 The Language of New Media. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Nesbit, E.
1899 The Story of the Treasure Seekers. Puffin Classics Books, London.
Piccini, Angela
2007 Faking It: Why the Truth is so Important for TV Archaeology. In Archaeology and the Media,
edited by T. Clack and M. Brittain, pp. 221-236. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California.
Pratt, Mary
2009 How Technology is Changing What We Read. PC World: May 5,
http://www.pcworld.com/article/164355/how_technology_is_changing_what_we_read.html
(accessed 7/12/2012)
Shanks, Michael
2012 The Archaeological Imagination. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California.
Soar, Matt and Monika Gagnon (eds)
2013 Database | Narrative | Archive: Seven interactive essays on digital nonlinear storytelling.
http://dnaanthology.com/anvc/dna/index (accessed 10/15/2013)
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
28
Spector, Janet
1993 What This Awl Means. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: MN.
Stewart, K.
2007 Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
Szijarto, I.
2002 Four Arguments for Microhistory. Rethinking History 6(2 ):209–215.
Tringham, Ruth
1991 Households with Faces: the challenge of gender in prehistoric architectural remains. In
Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory:, edited by J. Gero and M. Conkey, pp.
93-131. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
1994 Engendered Places in Prehistory. Gender, Place, and Culture 1(2):169-203.
2000 The Continuous House: A View from the Deep Past. In Beyond Kinship: Social and Material
Reproduction in House Societies edited by S. Gillespie and R. Joyce, pp. 115-134. University
of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA.
2012a Sensing the place of Çatalhöyük and Building 3: the rhythms of daily life. In Last House on
the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey (Çatalhöyük vol.11), edited by R.
Tringham and M. Stevanovic, pp. 531-552. Archaeologica Monumenta 27. Cotsen Institute of
Archaeology Publications, UCLA, Los Angeles.
2012b The Public Face of Archaeology at Çatalhöyük. In Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from
Çatalhöyük, Turkey (Çatalhöyük vol.11), edited by R. Tringham and M. Stevanovic, pp. 503-529.
Archaeologica Monumenta 27. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Publications, UCLA, Los Angeles.
Tringham, Ruth and Michael Ashley
2012 Afterword: Last House on the Hill: the digital mirror of House Lives. In Last House on the Hill: BACH
Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey (Çatalhöyük vol.11), edited by R. Tringham and M.
Stevanovic, pp. 553-554. Monumenta Archaeologica 27. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology
Publications, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA.
Tringham, Ruth, B. Brukner, T. Kaiser, K. Borojevic, N. Russell, P. Steli, M. Stevanovic and B. Voytek
1992 The Opovo Project: a study of socio-economic change in the Balkan Neolithic. 2nd
preliminary report. Journal of Field Archaeology 19(3):351-386.
Tringham, Ruth and M. Stevanovic (editors)
2012 Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey (Çatalhöyük vol.11).
Monumenta Archaeologica 27. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Publications, UCLA, Los
Angeles.
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Pat Harrigan (editors)
2004 First Person : New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Wolle, A. and Ruth Tringham
2000 Multiple Çatalhöyüks on the World Wide Web. In Towards reflexive method in archaeology:
the example at Çatalhöyük by members of the Çatalhöyük teams, edited by I. Hodder, pp.
207-218. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge.
Tringham/Subjects and Narratives Ch.02/2015
29
Endnotes
1 http://www.flashfictiononline.com/ (accessed 07/12/2012)
2 http://www.eastgate.com/storyspace/ (accessed 01/06/2012)
3 The Soft Cinema website includes samples of videos: http://www.softcinema.net/index.htm?reload
(accessed 03/16/2011)
4 http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/6/techhistory/ (accessed 03/16/2011)
5 One of the best known is “A Midwife’s Tale” which was the subject of a PBS film with supporting
materials: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/midwife/. But look also at the following website in which the
same original materials are put in the context of writing narratives: http://dohistory.org/ (accessed
09/16/2011)
6 http://www.codifi.info/projects/last-house-on-the-hill/ (accessed 7/12/2012)
7 this term was first used by Shahina Farid at Çatalhöyük in 2005 (personal communication)
8 See Soft Cinema (Manovich): http://www.softcinema.net/index.htm?reload and Technologies of
History (Anderson) http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/6/techhistory/ (accessed 03/16/2011)
9 http://www.ruthtringham.com/Ruth_Tringham/BACH_digital_publications.html (accessed
11/15/2013)
10http://www.technohistory.net/blog/index.php/technologies-of-history-interactive/ (accessed
03/16/2011)
11 http://www.technohistory.net/blog/index.php/technologies-of-history-interactive/ (accessed
03/16/2011)
12 http://www.thebrain.com/ (accessed 07/16/2011)
13 http://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/230E20DC-C9BC-7492-9B9C-297A384B4CCF#-67
(accessed 11/01/2013)
