Ann Stahl’s Archival Imagination

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.

In *Making History in Banda*, Ann Stahl stages an encounter with Rolph Trouillot’s *Silencing the Past* to develop an inspiring discussion of sources, interdisciplinary thinking, the supplemental use of archives, and the fraught dynamics of historical production in the crafting of visions of Africa’s past. Providing a robust support for her work in Banda, Stahl’s attentiveness to matters of historical epistemology is one of the book’s major contributions, and, I would argue, one of her most powerful scholarly legacies, which has guided the work of so many of us on the materiality of Africa’s recent (and less recent) pasts. This paper revisits Stahl’s thoughtful epistemology of history, by placing it in conversation with the archival/historical turn that informed its development and more recent trends in “archive theory.”

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): 39870.0