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One material has come to define Inca architecture —stone. The Inca used this enduring material as part of their built environment, and it played a critical role in helping to validate their rule. For example, the Inca shaped stone in ways that seemed to root the Inca in time and space, and thus convey messages of authority and belonging. Over the centuries, Inca stones have captured the modern imagination, such that people think of sites like Machu Picchu and its enduring lithic remains as representing the totality of the Inca built environment. The result is a very narrow view of Inca architecture. In this paper, Nair examines news way of looking at this Indigenous building tradition; ones that move beyond stone and the enduring by focusing on a range of other materials and the ephemeral. In doing so a vastly different picture of Inca architecture emerges.
Speaker Stella Nair, Associate Professor, Indigenous Arts of the Americas at UCLA, CA.
Moderated by Harvard Andean Working Group.
Co-sponsored by Harvard Department of Anthropology and Harvard University Department of History.
Biographies
Stella Nair, Associate Professor, Indigenous Arts of the Americas at UCLA, CA. Trained as an architect and architectural historian, Nair has conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and the U.S. Midwest, with ongoing projects in the South Central Andes. Her research examines the art, architecture, and urbanism of indigenous communities in the Americas, before and after the arrival of Europeans. Nair’s scholarship is shaped by her interests in material culture studies, cross-cultural exchange, hemispheric networks, landscape transformations, spatial theory, and construction technology.
Nair’s publications explore a range of subjects and regions such as the design of Inca royal estates, Tiahuanaco stone carving, colonial Andean paintings, and Brazilian urbanism. She has received research grants and fellowships from the American Philosophical Association, the Center for the Study of the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art), Dumbarton Oaks, the Fulbright Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the John Carter Brown Library. Nair has published At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero (University of Texas, 2015), and (with Jean-Pierre Protzen) The Stones of Tiahuanaco: A Study of Architecture and Construction (Cotsen 2013). Nair’s article “Localizing Sacredness, Difference, and Yachacuscamcani in a Colonial Andean Painting” was honored by its selection as one of thirty-two ‘greatest hits’ articles published in the last hundred years of the Art Bulletin.
Stella Nair is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History. She is also Core Faculty in the Archaeology Interdepartmental Program and the Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies at UCLA. In addition, Nair is Affiliated Faculty with the American Indian Studies Center, the American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program, and the Latin American Institute.
Nair is the Director of the Andean Laboratory and the Architecture Laboratory at the Cotsen Institute.