Ruth Tringham | Old Europe: House, Fire, the Goddess, and Ambiguity

The Marija Gimbutas Memorial Lecture
Presented by Ruth Tringham, University of California Berkeley
Old Europe: House, Fire, the Goddess, and Ambiguity
Lecture begins at 7:46.

Marija Gimbutas has always held a special place in Ruth Tringham's life. A few times their paths crossed, but mostly like ships passing in the night. In this talk, Tringham focuses on an earlier pre-Indo-European Neolithic population located in southeast Europe and Anatolia, an area Marija Gimutas referred to as Old Europe, whose prehistoric culture believed in a nurturing "Goddess" in her various forms and manifestations. Join us as Tringham draws our attention to aspects of Old Europe that played only a small role in Marija Gimbutas's narrative—house, clay, fire, and the intimate view—while asking the question of how we feel about the level of certainty we attribute to these narratives based in archaeology.