She is a Professor of the Graduate School (Anthropology) at the University of California, Berkeley and Creative Director and President of the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA), a recently established non-profit organization.

Tringham is probably best known for her work at Selevac (1976–1979) and Opovo (1983–1989), Serbia, at the Eneolithic tell settlement of Podgoritsa, Bulgaria (1995), and at the well-known site of Çatalhöyük (1997-), Turkey.

During high school she learned Latin and Greek and was active in children's clubs at the Natural History Museum in London, where she was introduced to proper research methods.

After a few years she joined the San Francisco Symphony Chorus in 1984 where she has helped record several CDs and a Grammy Award-winning song of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

She was subsequently invited to assist at Mogens Orsnes' excavation of an Iron Age bog site in Ejsbøl, Denmark.

[7] Five years later she dedicated her first book, Hunters, Fishers, and Farmers: 6,000-3,000 B.C, to V. Gordon Childe, Stuart Piggott, Bohumil Soudsky, and Peter Ucko.

"[2] To her, the masculine standpoint in archaeology overlooks the microscale (domestic) aspect, therefore devaluing the role of women in ancient societies.

Margaret Conkey and Ruth Tringham have collaborated on a public multimedia device that challenges the Goddess movement, which tries to portray the past matricentrically.

[11] Çatalhöyük is a tell of an extremely well preserved Neolithic and Chalcolithic site located in the Konya-Karaman Plain in modern day Turkey.

To Tringham, Çatalhöyük is important not only because it encourages a team of archaeologists to think and record the basis and implications of their actions, but also because it can make the practice of feminist archaeology a reality.

[13][15] Located at Vojvodina in the lower valley of the Timis River, north of the Danube, Opovo-Ugar, which was occupied between 4700 and 4500 BCE, belongs to the Vinča-Pločnik culture and is another site that provides information on the socioeconomic developments during the Neolithic.

However, at this time she said she was a ‘remedial’ feminist archaeologist because she believed that it was not credible to give "faces" to people of prehistory in order to "recreate" life as it actually was.

This interest led to her and Margaret Conkey founding of the Multimedia Authoring Center for the Teaching of Anthropology (MACTiA) at Berkeley.

CoDA was created to help archaeologists and cultural resource and heritage managers "capture, preserve, and share digital content.