My writing semester

Hi all! I wanted to briefly describe my writing for this semester. As I mentioned in class, I often have several things on the go, each at different stages. For instance, I am about to (this week!) resubmit a paper to the Canadian Journal of Archaeology with my PhD student Kayla, recent PhD Eloi, and our recently departed colleague Shanti Morell-Hart (now at Brown) on McMaster and Latin American archaeology. I have two other papers currently in peer review that may arrive back on my desk in the coming weeks months that may disrupt the plans below. But my major writing projects this semester is one “monkey on my back” article that I need to finish, and several conference papers.

The first is a paper on Andean asethetics, in particular exploring the imagery on “Terminal Late Formative” ceramics, textiles and stone monoliths.

I presented this work to a group of archaeologists and art historians at Columbia University last year. The paper explores the role of ancient imagery over the course of ~150 years, as the site of Tiwanaku is being transformed into a critical Andean urban assemblage. Here is my current introduction:

“Researchers working in the Lake Titicaca basin are making significant headway in understanding the timing and processes in the emergence of Tiwanaku. The ancient Andean center, located in the southern Lake Titicaca basin of Bolivia, urbanized rapidly in the late 6th century and early 7th century AD. Archaeological work over the past century has demonstrated that Tiwanaku was characterized by impressive craft production, with feasting events involving chicha or corn beer and other mind altering substances and interaction with other-than-humans such as stone monoliths. Despite the significant research over the past century, researchers have struggled to fit the site and polity into conventional political economy models of early states. While the polity clearly influenced a broad region of Andean South America, we have yet to find clear military or economic control over Middle Horizon landscapes.

Images, however, played a particularly important role at the urban center and Tiwanaku aesthetics reached across significant distances. In this paper, I argue that the visual economies of the earlier periods of the site , a time known as the “Terminal Late Formative” (Marsh et al. 2019), are critical for understanding the new worlds associated with the Middle Horizon. I pay particular attention to ceramics known as Qeya, but also to early southern Titicaca basin monoliths and textiles from the broader region. While archaeologists have been researching Formative Period societies across the region for several decades (see for instance x, y, z) , very little has been published on the earliest visual economy associated with the site, which was a time of significant political change and expanding social networks. The researchers who have engaged this imagery have done so to identify the origins of the later iconographic systems of urban Tiwanaku and regional patterns, not to understand the early dynamics at the site itself. I argue that visuals were far from mere “by-products” of broader social and political processes, but instead were essential actants in Tiwanaku social projects. These aesthetic systems co-emerge with new monumental complexes and emplacement of a wide variety of stone sculptural beings. I ask a different set of questions than those exploring the birth-place of particular iconographical styles. What kind of role did these image rich objects play in emergent networks? Were these objects associated with founding families and broader work parties involved in early building projects? Finally, were the New Worlds that emerged at Tiwanaku associated with new ways of seeing?”

The paper was well received at Columbia, but the audience highlighted a few critical things for me to grapple with:

• the need to tighten up my key argument/stakes (an issue that I was already concerned about – there is a lot going in in this paper!)
• Defining terms. I am juggling a few different issues here (aesthetics, images, art) all of which have considerable baggage in general, but even more so in the context of the ancient Andes.
• Interpretation: I have an argument around the use of hallucinogenics. My current explanation/understanding is far too vague.

So, I am reworking the paper, with helpful feedback from my writing group, with the hope to submit this Cambridge Archaeological Journal this summer. Instead of presenting my timeline, below is my writing log from week to week (a screen-grab from the writing program Scrivener) from last year when I was working on it more intensely.

The other writing projects are several conference papers. I have a paper I’m giving at the Society for American Archaeology meetings. Both engage my recent work at Tiwanaku. The first is a paper in honour of Ann Stahl , who was an important mentor to me. My paper is titled “Improvisation, Intellectual Crosscurrents, and Creativity at an Emergent Andean Center”, and really engages some of the threads from the paper discussed above. The other presentation (“Visualizing the Origins of Monumentality: the Case of Tiwanaku, Bolivia”) is a collaboration with my partner Kathryn Killackey, and discusses our recent work at visualization at Tiwanaku.

For the conference papers I tend to chip away. I have lots of little pieces of “tiny text” written as notes in my note-taking app of choice Obsidian. I continue working to create reading notes, to convert them to more permanent in Obsidian. In the coming weeks I’ll start playing with my notes to construct a mind map to see how the various pieces might fit together. (Below is an early mind map for a paper currently in press)

Clearly lots to do! See you next week.