Torma was mostly self-educated. In 1875, she was encouraged by Flóris Rómer, considered by some to be the father of Hungarian archeology, to begin her own excavations of the ancient settlement of Tordos, along the Mureş river. The symbols and scripts on clay objects she found during an excavation in Hunyad County became an archaeological sensation. She also found artifacts of the 6,000- to 7,000-year-old Tordos culture, some of which were covered with Vinča symbols.[2][3] According to Gizella,
Zsófia Torma was the first to discover the Neolithic culture of Tordos, drawing attention to the connection between the signs of Tordos and the Assyrian-Babylonian literacy, the penetration of Sumerian literature through Southeastern Europe. She worked in Tordos for twenty years, more than thirty years before the discovery of the carefully collected, extremely valuable finds and dissertations on them, as the Vinca-Tordos culture was only explored in 1908.[1]
Torma had severe financial problems caused by her self-funded excavations. She also struggled with archeologists in her own country, who "ridiculed and ignored her, as a woman and amateur in the field of archaeology, as well as her groundbreaking ideas and efforts."[3] However, her finds and writings found acceptance among foreign researchers who engaged in long correspondences with her.[1][3]
Her most well-known work, the Ethnographische Analogien, was published in Jena, Germany, in 1894.
Torma had an important role in the founding of the National Museum of Transylvanian History of Kolozsvár (present-day Cluj-Napoca). In her will, she left her collection of 10,387 archeological pieces to the Transylvanian National Museum's Museum of Medals and Antiquities.[1]
On 24 May 1899, just a few months before her death, she became the first female to be named an honorary doctor at the Kolozsvári m. kir. Ferencz József Tudomány, what is today Babeș-Bolyai University.[1]
Torma died in Szászváros (present-day Orăștie), on 14 November 1899.[1]
Lozny, Ludomir R., ed. (2011). Comparative Archaeologies A Sociological View of the Science of the Past (1., neue Ausg. ed.). New York, NY: Springer New York. pp. 285, 305. ISBN9781441982254.
"Zsófia Torma". Pagina Municipiului Orăștie (in Romanian). Secui Adrian-Iulian. Retrieved 24 May 2014.
