A Supplemental Approach: The Influence of Ann Stahl’s Interdisciplinarity to African Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There is a long history of interdisciplinary research on the precolonial African past, with historians, archaeologists, and historical linguists seeking out and drawing on insights from their allied disciplines. These scholars often seek to integrate different types of data, or use one type of data (like archaeology) as support for others (oral traditions/histories, linguistics). What Stahl’s work in Ghana has offered, however, is a theoretical approach to thinking about way that different types of data must be understood as distinct forms of knowledge. One important result of this is a critical engagement with the way that scholars attempt to triangulate between these data fields, without privileging one over the other. In this paper, I explore these aspects of Stahl’s work and show how it has impacted the way that I have worked to re-conceive the relationship between archaeology and historical linguistics, in the context of my own research in Zambia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38637.0