Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Sound has always been an omnipresent component of human experience, and recent trends in archaeological inquiry seek to explore the importance of acoustics, instruments, and what was heard in the past. More than a mere channel of communication, sounds, performances, and music conferred connotations of power, contributed to the formation of identities, and were an important part of all activities, including recreation, aesthetics, and ritual praxis. This session presents case studies in applied archaeoacoustics, psychoacoustics, soundscapes, and archaeomusicology from a variety of scales and cultural perspectives. Defined by Scullin and Boyd (2014:363), soundscapes consist of “all sounds present in any given environment and how these sounds interact within that environment.” Here, we consider a variety of archaeoacoustical topics, including discussions of natural and anthropogenic places that affect the propagation of sound waves; the sonorous landscape; speech intelligibility; theoretical, psychological, and cognitive sonic studies; the conservation and promotion of auditory heritage; and studies of instruments used to produce music and/or signals.