 Hello, and welcome to another episode of Ask an Archaeologist. Ask an Archaeologist is a series of live stream interviews co-hosted by the Archaeological Research Facility and the PBA Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. During each program, we interview a UC Berkeley affiliated archaeologist and answer audience questions. During this show, you can submit your questions in the chat box on YouTube, which is to the right or the bottom of the video that you're watching. Today, we are happy to have with us Professor Ruth Trangham, who is going to talk about how archaeologists deal with uncertainty celebrating the ambiguity of the archaeological record, a case study from Neolithic Serbia. Ruth is a semi-retired professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her research has always focused on early agricultural Neolithic societies, and she's directed and published archaeological excavations in Southeast Europe and in Turkey at Çatalhöyük. For the last 30 years, she's been celebrating the ambiguous nature of archaeological materials by combining an informed imagination with the results of empirical archaeological research and digital technologies to engage a broader public in alternative scenarios about the prehistoric past. So, Ruth, thank you so much for joining us today and welcome. Thank you. If you'd like to just start with your slideshow. Yeah, I'll do that. I'm going to start sharing if you'll have a second where you see my whole life here on my desktop. That's exciting. And then we'll go off into here. Are we all good? We are, yes, perfect. Yes. Looks good. It does. Okay, shall I start then? Yeah, go ahead. Great. So anyway, I wanted to start with the fact that the big problem about the past is that almost immediately it is ambiguous. It is incomplete. The further back in the past, like the prehistory I work with, the more fragmentary becomes its evidence. I'm an archaeologist and my research focuses on 6000 to 9000 years ago when there are no written documents, no mention of individual people. So what am I to do to humanize my practice? We like our mysteries and our unknowns and uncertain to be resolved and be provided with a truth or a fact. We do not feel comfortable with ambiguity. Do you feel comfortable? If not, I will try to make you feel a little more comfortable in this therapy session. I'll point to four aspects of this that you might even find resonate with your own experiences, even if you are not known have ever been an archaeologist. The first and perhaps the most important of my theme, my four themes, is that history and prehistory are written at different scales. Traditionally, we write narratives about history and prehistory in which the persona of the archaeologist as well as his or her historic subjects remain anonymous and viewed as by a far distant bird's eye. This is history writ large that you see in these three volumes, for example. And how else you might ask, can you write about the past where all that remains a fragmentary remnants of their lives? The extraordinary thing is that this generalized view of human history is based on the evidence that is the result of individual events, including archaeological data that are created by tiny events of humans dropping, forgetting, losing and burying. The kinds of dramas written about by professional fiction writers, but not by archaeologists, with some exceptions. And these are just a few exceptions, including my own in this volume that I'll be talking about a little later. I have worked with a top down model called the Neolithic Revolution, involving the spread of agriculture into Europe. All through the 1980s, the household scale is as far as I felt comfortable in making statements about life in the past. The household scale would be about as much as I can point to in the lower picture down here that I'm pointing to with my little arrow. Looking at a place from a distance or a bird's eye view, the ambiguities of the data can be smudged over by broad statements about household activities or village exchange or regional movements. Only in 1988, when I was encouraged to think about what these generalized models would look like at a human scale, that the questions such as, well, they had to walk everywhere, carrying or dragging all their stuff. Who did the carrying and how? Who fetched the water and where from and what did they wear on their feet? It is at the intimate scale of inside the household where these stories are the richest. There is an enormous space for devising alternative scenarios here, but only by using the imagination. Informed by the fragmentary empirical evidence, we have nothing else in prehistory. What I love is the challenge of constructing prehistory from this intimate scale where you have to bring the imagination into play, building from the available empirical data, the physical evidence to give names and personalities to your actors, because they certainly had those. It is easier to write about human change from the viewpoint of a millennium that you see on the far left here, since the details are blurred out. It is much harder to bring your imagination to focus on the scale of a human lifetime, seen over here on the right, and show how they've got names here, which of course are completely made up. But somebody had to be living in this yellow square that we call the subject of my case study, Opovo. This is it, here getting bigger as we consider the half millennium, and here divided now into three building horizons that cover the 200 years of the occupation of Opovo. And this is coming into looking at the generations and now the human lifetimes. All of this whole column here, this red column, is completely made up by my imagination, but it's not entirely as simple as that. At Opovo, I'm now going to begin, introduce my case study, the excavations at Opovo in Serbia. At the time of the excavations in 1983 to 89, it was in the former Federated Republics of Yugoslavia, now it's in Serbia. At Opovo, my team and I investigated a prehistoric Neolithic agricultural village with houses about 6,500 years old. These were easy to spot on the surface by a mass of red burned clay rubble that were the remains of their houses. Their houses were built in the Wattle and Dorb system that you see up in the top left picture. This phenomenon of, I should say, what's interesting is that in this area of Europe during a 2000 year period, known as the Neolithic and Neolithic, from 5,000 to 300, 3,000 BC, all the houses of all the villages were completely burned. This phenomenon has been labeled the burned house horizon. And it's a blanket or grand scale term that allows for many explanations. And in fact, you can see it's covering there in the red area here on this map and actually now comprises a much larger area since recent excavations over towards the northeast over there. The favorite explanations by archaeologists to explain this phenomenon were traditionally common sense explanations. It must have been invasion or raiding or a huge swath of accidental fires. But at Oppovo, we wanted to provide a set of empirical data that would at least be a starting point for dealing with the ambiguous situation or such a widespread phenomenon of house burning. Our project at Oppovo was designed specifically to investigate the burned house horizon phenomenon to determine firstly, were the fires accidental or were they deliberate intentional. And secondly, were they single fire events or were they simultaneously simultaneous village wide fires. We excavated several houses, like the one you see in the top left hand picture with detailed systematic methods that resembled a modern arson investigation, including the analysis of the burned rubble that you see over in the on the left here. And then analyzing later on in the lab, we don't have it here, the temperature of burning of the clay, and it by this we were able to create fire maps where we were could identify hotspots the yellow ones here, and then point to a reconstruction of what of what it looks like that happened. We concluded from these these analyses that these houses were not burned at the same time in a village wide fire, but were burned in separate events. Moreover, they were not burned by accident by but by deliberately intentional firing. And as you can see here what the the the fire was helped by adding fuel to the to the already the fire which was started and then adding fire of fuel continuously through the process and carefully orchestrated so that the walls collapsed inwards over the first roof. And no humans were ever found burned in the buildings. Some houses had a rich array of ceramics and other materials burned in the house on its floors and covered by the debris of the walls and the roof. You can see the kind of temperature at which these houses were burning which was one of the evidences of deliberate firing. And for instance this vitrified clay here is the is burning burned at over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit well easily able to melt metal. So, some houses had no artifacts and the resulting mass on the ground that you see here in the top left is a permanent inhibitor of vegetational growth it's a massive solid area of burned clay, ceramic like clay. And it lasted for millennium millennia until the even the present day, where the fields of the farmers find it in their fields, and they use it to fill potholes. And really as far as we could go in terms of scientifically proven data, our field excavations were interrupted by the Yugoslav Civil War. Later in the 2000s field studies by other archaeologists helped to confirm or clarify our empirical data from the Yugoslav Civil. But still our conclusions did not satisfy me, or anyone else. I did not expect the mystery of why the houses were burned to be solved. Explanation would involve informing our imaginations about all the possible reasons for the intentional burning of houses. To evaluate which explanation would be more plausible in given archaeological contexts. After the end of the oppover field seasons in the early 1990s. I began to explore ways in which the empirical data from the oppover excavations could be linked through the blossoming digital consumer technologies to fictional narratives in which I imagined residents live their lives around the focus of fire and houses. I was thrilled by the way in which the limitations I had been experiencing with creating fictional narratives in printed media and making in making such links, all of those limitations dropped away when I use the digital data and I could almost realize my dreams of actually doing the link the live linking of data to narratives or to stories. In using the digital world. The camera web which you see here on on the left, you can see it's it's entangled network of links that include some data stuff some stories, some other stuff from lateral thinking that bring in the reason why we some some models are more plausible than others. All of this. This is the camera web. That I created during the 1990s and you can see that the anchoring part and anchor over here is recognizing the sources of the archaeology archaeologists imagination. The more richly informed our imagination is by our lived experiences by researching house burning in history and ethnography. The more interesting will be our investigations and our interpretive stories as we attempt to go beyond the limitations of the physical archaeological data. For instance, I found many possible reasons for intentionally burning houses in ethnography and history from disease tests greed, domiciled and others, but one motivation was especially interesting to me. This was the deliberate burning of a house as a symbolic act of funeral pyre for the house, what I call Domithanasia. I learned that this would happen in the context of a strong importance to the society of the household as the central unit of society. Just as I had been theorizing for Opovo and the other burned house horizon villages. So this became my most plausible and loved explanation. Yes, I have to say it was my favorite. I imagined its benefits for the residents, for instance to memorialize the house to ensure the continuity of the household through many generations of houses and residents. And the effect and affect of the symbolic intensity of the performance of the fire, the burning itself. All of this can be used to inspire our imaginations to generate our interpretations of the empirical data. But this path from source to imagination to inference has to be treated with care. It has to be done explicitly and transparently and not hidden. This brings me then to the final little theme here, which is that the past is always seen through the eyes of the present. As an archaeologist of prehistory, I look at the past through a double lens myself and the remains and ruins that are silent witnesses. We have to work hard to hear my own lens, like all of yours is colored by my various standpoints and viewpoints that I have on the world and the past. And these need to be taken. We need to be aware of these as we are making our interpretations. I have a need for voiceless voices and taken for granted to be exposed and examined by critical analysis. I value the importance of ritual in our lives as markers of times and events and continuity. I have a dislike of essentializing statements that generalize groups of people and places when in reality they are made up of an ever changing mosaic or network of communities and scenes. And I regularly aim for the unexpected by turning to traditional expectation on its head. For example, I chose a female to orchestrate the burning of a house instead of the expected male leader. I have given inanimate archeological archeological artifacts a voice in the latest of my stories. In my stories, however, I try never to lose sight of the empirical archeological data out of which they are drawn. Creating knowledge is a cumulative and collaborative process, whether you lean towards the narrative or scientific method of creating it. My role is to encourage you to hear what I say, and from that make a link. You make a link that makes it meaningful in your own experience and imagination. And that's your responsibility. So I have a couple of minutes if I'm allowed. Am I allowed two more minutes? Of course. Yes. Yes. I got one. I got one just to show this haiku, which sort of draws this together. I could have cut it if I needed to. Oh, everyone always loves a haiku. This is a small movie. Actually, it's a haiku. Let me just, I didn't mean to start it yet. I got too excited. I made this haiku about the intertwining of past and present in our minds as we practice archeology. It's called Crossing Timelines, and it's about a more recent archeological project called the BAK project that I didn't talk about today at the 9000 year old Neolithic settlement of Chattelhuyuk in Turkey. Okay. Great. That's a nice way to end. Thank you, Ruth. Pleasure. I hope I didn't take, did I? No, no. It was great. I want to remind people, the listeners who are listening live, you can ask a question by typing it into the chat box on YouTube. And so, Ruth, can you comment on, that's a huge area that this burnt house phenomenon is happening across and across a very long time. Can you comment a little bit on what other excavations are like, how many places is documented and across how wide an area. You know, it's very interesting. I gave a talk about this last fall in England. It was called Fire Friend or Fo. And as I was preparing for that, I looked and looked for anybody who had written some kind of survey or whatever of where it was. And there is none. There's all just sort of bits and pieces at the moment. It is needed. People say, well, I'm writing one like that or whatever. I think they just don't want me to write one. But anyway, that's not have that on. So I'm not sure I would have the energy or time to do that. But there is a lot. It's found all over. There are some new excavations in southern Hungary that actually put it earlier than it had thought it was before. You know, it's still Neolithic, but it's earlier in the Neolithic. We thought it was just part of the mature Neolithic. And there's more stuff over in the Ukraine, very new excavations of these mega sites, which are all burned. What's interesting is that there have been many years where archaeology was being done and nobody ever talked about the burning. It wasn't a topic of investigation, which is it was just taken for granted. Well, that burned. It's an accident or it's neighbors or used for as different parts. But in general, there are a lot and there have been some very interesting experimental works. We have done recently in the 2000s experimental in terms of to create the same mass of clay to actually say, you know, to repeat our conclusions and very interesting experiments and also some analyses that have been done. But it's not it's not been a lot of sort of real systematic collection of the data. It's interesting because you know why because it's very ugly stuff. Well, you would think that people would comment on it considering that it is so hot that it destroys everything. I mean, it sounds like you have very little artifactual evidence from this site. There is actually that's not quite true because a lot of the time the the ceramics, they survive quite well, bones not so well. So the animal bones from those sites from the houses don't don't survive so well, but around the houses there are pits, storage pits or rubbish pits garbage pits, not so much a couple of storage. There's a well. There's a we had a well at Opovo, but these big pits that were dug to for the clay to build the door to make the houses. And so that was quite a common and common phenomenon. And so there is a lot of art. Those are full of artifactual materials and not impacted by the burning. Yeah, but the houses themselves. You're right. There's not a lot that survives but bone does survive. I think if there were humans in there, we would have found them. So, yeah. Great. We have a question from the audience about how frequent. Did these house burning rich rights happen and in for instance the time span of an individual individual life. So it's a well, no, we can't. First of all, we don't have the people we assume that they didn't they lived a relatively short life about perhaps a generation or a generation and a half, perhaps not not far past 40 or 4045. But in that time. They might have experienced. I actually imagined one in another in Chattel who you could try to do this I imagined that this young woman moved into the house at the age of 12 and lived in the whole the house for the whole time until she died at the age of about 45. So that would be a generation really and but that it's probably the only would have experienced their own house burning once. But if we think of every all every house being burned at the end of its life so that and you might have several households in a village so you could imagine that a person might at up above we maybe had five 10 houses. And the whole settlement we didn't actually we only excavated four or five. So they might have, and they were all burned. So there, there were at least three, four, five houses. Yeah, it's interesting to think about how the burning of the house is something that people would have perceived possibly as something positive, or that's, you know, part of their what they do with their community and do you well because you were in that fire panel that we did last year I know that you've been thinking about this but the way that we in California in particular, and many parts of the world now think about fire it's in a very negative way and that's why I called that. Yeah, actually it's interesting that's why I called my, my talk last October, the fire friend or foe because what was interesting was that in when in that same panel, Kent Lightfoot, and I think he was with also talking about the whole idea of Native Americans who saw fire as something positive in a different way you know the the controlled burning of the forest was something that enhanced the environment. It didn't destroy it and that's I it's interesting that our whole negative looking at fire comes from, especially I think urban context the urbanism. Urban context where if one house burns. It's likely that another one will catch fire very easily that if the especially if the house is a book built of more flammable material one of the things that I didn't say and this is that these wattle and door houses are very difficult to burn. There is this massive layer of clay, and the word the flammable parties is sandwiched in between the outer skin and the inner skin which is this clay door. So that that protects it from fire which is an amazing thing but still so this is, I think I wanted to say that that even house burning, like in some environmental burning can be seen and probably was seen more as beneficial. Not, not necessarily in a practical sense, but in a more sort of symbolic emotional sense that I think that it's a long it's a it's a it's a long story how we came in California to think of fire as very dangerous. And it started in the Second World War, you might have known this when they, they sent fire bombs, the Japanese sent fire fire balloons across the Pacific that floated all the way to California and everybody that's where you know the bear. What's he called smoky bear was helping people to look out in the countryside for these fire bombs. And that's where the whole fear of fire started I'm sure it's been exacerbated by what you know our own experience now. Recently, right. The listener has a sort of a follow on question to that that if this is a sort of ritual or cultural phenomenon. Can you do you see evidence over time of this pattern sort of growing or expanding in practice. Actually, it does it changes spatially and chronologically the earliest in the beginning that the earliest evidence we have of the house burning is over in certain present day Serbia in and possibly Hungary as well. And the western part of Southeast Europe, and the latest is in the Ukraine, which goes on all the way into the three thousand two thousand eight hundred and doesn't start until. The first part of his shifting eastwards through time and space. And that's actually something that seems to not have occurred to people to archaeologists until very recently so nobody's really written very much about that. And that's something that I noticed as I was doing this, and it started at the earliest evidence I think is in these big continuous settlements in the western part of the south of Southeast Europe the tell settlements, big settlements, not in little tiny villages but caught on then expanded to the smaller settlements, as time went on. That's great it sounds like there's a lot of research that can be done. I mean, I even said that in this talk, you know, not this one I just gave but in October I said, is really nice dissertation for anybody who wants it, that's just waiting to be done. So we're about out of time I had one more question that if you apparently a listener has written in to ask about the haiku if you could explain a little bit more about it. Well, I actually wrote about that in an if that was written for a presentation in a symposium which became a volume of book. And I mean, my chapter is in that book from the symposium, which is called archaeology's of the heart. And it was from, and we were supposed to write about you know what something how archaeology appeal to our emotions. And so I had been thinking about this whole thing of, of how it's crossing at the whole crossing of the timelines, how we're thinking from now to back then. And they would have been from thinking from now to as time, you know, they're living the time as it's going forward. So in our seven years. They were living perhaps 45 years. So it's very it's just, it's just a lovely thing of example of the relativity of time. Very nice. Great. Well thank you for that explanation. And thank you so much for joining us today Ruth. Great to hear about your work. Thank you. Yeah, thank you and thanks to everyone. Sorry, sorry. We hope you can join us tomorrow. We're going to be having Anna Nielsen present talking about a closer look at Nabataean burials comparing primary and secondary burials and Nabataean contexts at Petra. And we hope we hope you can join us then same time tomorrow. And also if you have a chance to fill out the feedback form which the link is in the bottom in the description of the video below the screen here. So thank you so much for joining us today and we hope to see you at another one.