Conferência&Oficina no dia 19 de Janeiro de 2012, no Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, Lisboa

The sound of Archaeology
by Cajsa Lund

 

 

Lecture and workshop – listen and enjoy!

Nowadays – in the modern world – we hear sounds almost continuously. In prehistoric times there was more silence. Today most sounds come from gadgets and machines. In prehistory, sounds from nature – man’s environment – predominated. Can we have any understanding of how people listened then?

It is even more difficult to determine what kind of music may have existed in prehistoric times. The knowledge is necessarily based on surviving material traces of music and music-related activities.

Music archaeology is today an accepted term for such research which attempts to describe, explain and reconstruct music and other non-verbal sounds on the basis of archaeological finds. Every single find is really a decodable indicator of sound production. The potsherd and the refuse pit, the plough furrow and the foot imprint – all of these offer clues concerning vanished soundscapes. But the main sources of music archaeology are preserved sound-producing artefacts and pictures of them.

Some of the artefacts were clearly made for sound production, for examples bells and bone flutes with finger holes. In other cases we are faced with exciting questions. What about tubes of bone with beveled ends? Are they whistles or are they something completely different?

Workshop

In the workshop you can have a closer look at the sounding artefacts and discuss them with Cajsa S. Lund, such as buzzers, bullroarers, lithophones, jew’s harps, scrapers and many other finds from prehistory and the medieval ages. You can try out some of the instruments, and also make your own traditional sound tool of nuts and sea mussels!

This activity was proposed and organized by the Direction of ANIMUSIC with the cooperation of the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia in Lisbon - we thank the Museum and its Director Luís Raposo, who kindly welcomed this event.