Improvisation and Creativity at an Emergent Andean Center

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.

Ann Stahl continues to produce a rich, and provocative scholarship, one that has inspired scholars across regions and generations. She has long positioned herself within "intellectual crosscurrents," drawing on literature from a wide range of disciplines. Most recently, this has resulted in a critical reflection on creativity and improvisation (Stahl 2019). In this paper, I engage Stahl’s writing on creativity in a region quite far from Banda, Ghana. I explore how her thinking on creativity might productively shift Andeanists away from lingering structuralist tendencies. I focus on Tiwanaku, a center of Andean creativity during initial urbanization in the 5th and 6th century AD. Specifically, I consider the creativity and improvisation associated with early (cal AD 420-590) polychrome Qeya ceramics and the various aesthetic communities of practice implicated in their complex itineraries. I deploy some of Stahl’s strategies to investigating generative processes and examine how some of the analytical spaces for investigating creativity might help us reframe the practices associated with these evocative materials.

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): 39226.0