Preface
About the subject
Recent calls for an ‘archaeology of the senses’ have
served as a timely, even overdue reminder that the
past which we experience — and which others have
experienced before us — is multisensory, drawing
not only upon the primary field of vision, but also
‘on touch, smell and hearing (Houston & Taube 2000;
‘Cummings 2002; Thomas 1990). When we first enter
megalithic tombs, Palaeolithic painted caves or Ro-
manesque churches, the unusual sound qualities of
those spaces strike us immediately. Voices resonate,
external noises are subdued or eliminated, and a
special aural dimension is discerned which comple-
ments the evidence of our other senses. Such sounds
are intrinsic and indeed prominent elements of such
experiences, elements that we ignore at our peril in
seeking to understand the human use of places and the
construction of buildings and monuments. Yet they are
apt to be forgotten when prehistorians discuss such
spaces in the abstract.
The growing field of archaeoacoustics focuses on
the role of sound in human behaviour, from earliest
times up to the development of mechanical detection
and recording devices in the nineteenth century. In the
British Isles and France archaeological interest in ‘site
acoustics’ has had its origin in the need to unravel the
enduring mysteries of Palaeolithic caves and late pre-
historic stone monuments — and a growing realiza-
tion that their acoustics might tell us something useful
about the human activities which may or may not have
taken place there. In North America, South Africa and
Australia, similar concerns surround the interpreta-
tion of rock-art panels, where acoustical properties
may have drawn people to confer special significance
‘on specific places or features in the landscape.
From this recent beginning the subject has
begun to develop its own agenda, primarily pre-
historic in scope and architectural or topographical
in direction; nevertheless it does not — or should
not — exist in isolation from other sound-related
enquiry. One of the purposes of the present volume
is to bring together studies from separate but related
areas of archaeoacoustics to establish more clearly the
common ground that exists between the prehistoric
acoustics of ‘uncertain’ places (which is to say, where
human activities have gone unrecorded) and those
of documented historical structures such as theatres
vii
and churches — and finds of musical instruments
and sound-tools.
‘The study of remains of portable sound-produc-
ing devices, sometimes termed ‘music archaeology’, is
a long-established and lively one, providing a useful,
developed vantage-point from which to view archae-
acoustics. The antiquity of such tool-use behaviours
is demonstrated by Upper Palaeolithic bone pipes,
from Isturitz in the Pyrenees and from Geissenkléster-
le in South Germany, dating back some 35,000 years
or more. The evolutionary importance of human mu-
sical behaviour may take us still further back (Cross
1999; Falk 2000; Mithen 2005). Elite tombs of more
recent periods contain many musical grave-goods,
sometimes comprising impressive suites of musical
instruments; among them the Chinese fifth-century
ac tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng with more than 60
suspended bronze bells, a large rack of stone-chimes
and a whole orchestra of stringed instruments, flutes
and drums (Falkenhausen 1993). Representations in
art (whether figurines or wall paintings) further assist
the interpretation of musical traditions, especially
elite traditions, in these more recent centuries. But it
is through the routine processing of archaeological
small-finds that we obtain the broadest, most coherent
view of musics social prehistory. Following the pio-
neering example of Vincent Megaw (e.g. Megaw 1961;
1968a,b; 1981), work in this area at first followed a
broadly organological and music-historical direction:
focusing on specific artefact classes such as pipes or
stringed instruments, and developing museum survey
and cataloguing programmes in the search for new
pieces — a process which still continues.
Interest in music archaeology in Cambridge goes
back to the work of John Coles on Bronze Age horns
(Coles 1963; 1973), and subsequently that of his PhD
students who are amongst the contributors to the
present volume (Holmes 1976; 1986; Lawson 1978 et
eq.) In 1982, one of us (GL) hosted in Cambridge the
first international conference of the ‘Study Group on
Music Archaeology’, in association with the Interna-
tional Council for Traditional Music.
Since the mid-1980s these organological and
socio-cultural approaches have matured consider-
ably, leading in turn to increasing awareness of the
need to address also the cognitive and behavioural
implications which underlie ‘music archaeology’; in
Particular seeking to elicit those elements which may
‘Scanned with CamScannerPreface
characterize musical purpose and musical tradition
in the archaeological record. It is to re-frame these
wider and deeper questions in a way that embraces
both tool-based and environmental phenomena that
we have lately begun advocating the establishment
of what might be called ‘cognitive archaeoacoustics’
(Lawson et al. 1998; Lawson & d’Errico 2002; 2003;
Lawson 2004).
About the volume
The attentive reader will identify two interwoven ap-
proaches to archaeoacoustics in the contributions to
the present volume. In the first, tools such as musical
instruments and simple sound-makers offer an im-
portant alternative viewpoint in the study of ancient
acoustic architectures, through consideration of the
abilities of ancient peoples to generate and manipu-
late sound using portable objects, either natural or
fabricated. Alongside this is set the study of the spaces
themselves: from natural enclosures such as caves and
ravines to chambers or other structures whose built
forms would have served — whether by accident or
design — to contain or exclude sound. In between is
that large category of places and spaces where sound
may or indeed must have played a role, but which are
inherently difficult to assess.
But throughout the volume the primary focus of
the contributors is, for want of a better word, inten-
tion. Hitherto we have tended in archaeoacoustics to
‘employ commonsense arguments to allow us to assert
the probability that ancient people — like ourselves
— would have responded to and even engineered
acoustic space. Such arguments risk becoming circular,
however, as we attempt to peer further back into our
human past. In the present volume, therefore, the con-
tributors consider aspects of their own observations or
methodologies which might enable us to convert data
drawn from measurement of the ancient phenomena
we study into admissible evidence of behavioural con-
nexion; ‘admissible’, that is, in the sense that they are
based on compelling arguments derived from specific
evidence. The establishment of such arguments is in
‘our view essential to the future of archaeoacoustics
asa disciplinary endeavour, whether considering the
properties of structures or of natural settings; and
undoubtedly it represents a considerable challenge
to our ingenuity.
‘The multi-period nature of ‘music archaeology’
may help us: for example, the sheer quantities of finds
of Roman, medieval and even later date can offer an
epistemological proving-ground and therefore inform
our interpretation of still older material. Crucial in-
sights are also afforded by ethnography, which not
only illustrates the diversity of ways in which instru-
ments and music can be made around the world today,
but also reveals contrasting, non-westem attitudes to
‘sound’ and ‘music’ and the different meanings at-
tached to them by different cultures. Furthermore, the
inherent interest of particular kinds of instruments or
monuments should not obscure the fact that the most
obvious and most ancient sound-producer of all is
the human body: feet, hands and voice. The ubiquity
of rhythmic and other musical behaviours in human
populations today and the evident deep-rootedness of,
some of them in the archaeological record is indeed
one of the most exciting aspects of archaeoacoustics,
and is touched upon in several of the contributions
to this volume.
The original papers from which the volume has
developed were first presented at a workshop held at
the McDonald Institute in Cambridge in June 2003.
Although the purpose of the meeting was primarily
to address methodological issues, it was also our aim
in bringing together a broad range of specialists who
‘were operating in this field to help give archaeoacous-
tics the prominence in archaeology that it most surely
deserves. For, whatever difficulties we may encoun-
ter in trying to establish the specifics of prehistoric
sound-use behaviours, no-one who has witnessed the
phenomena for themselves can fail to appreciate their
potential significance.
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