Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the last four decades, Ann B. Stahl has been at the leading edge of Africanist and Americanist archaeology. Through a series of multiple, overlapping engagements across theoretical and methodological registers, Stahl has crafted a new kind of archaeological practice that is simultaneously community-engaged, theoretically innovative, and future-oriented. In this session, we reflect on her intellectual improvisations and how they emerged out of a commitment to community-based, long-term fieldwork in Banda, Ghana. We consider the “communities of archaeological practice” inspired and built through Ann’s work and mentorship, as well as their implications for the direction of archaeology as a whole. Key themes include (1) how pasts, presents, and futures mingle in archaeological and digital worlds; (2) interdisciplinary engagements with materiality; (3) global entanglements and taste; (4) relationality and communities of practice; and (5) archaeology and education.