Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Invoking “music” in archaeology triggers assumptions and questions about what is musical, who makes music, and the methodologies used to identify, determine, and explore musical concerns in archaeological materials and practices. Music-making, viewed as a cultural practice, is both contextually dependent and contextually generative-expressive. Therefore, archaeological inferences about music are particularly sensitive to anachronistic and cross-cultural biases. Music archaeology must somehow reflect material culture and perhaps address human experience, yet how? Such ontological and epistemological concerns become sidelined when tools and praxis are standardized; not the case for music archaeology, with its particular precedents, diverse contributing fields, and controversies aplenty. Definitions of music differ, constraining and compartmentalizing how music and sound are recognized, addressed, and integrated in archaeological research. For example, whether acoustical science is leveraged previously distinguished music archaeology from archaeoacoustics, which arose as separate fields, but appear synonymous to many. Shifting sonic terminology—such as “soundscape”—carries historical and disciplinary significance frequently misunderstood. Our session brings together practitioners of music archaeology across the Americas who take distinct and context-specific approaches. The papers and case-study summaries that introduce panelists in our group conversation foreground the ways that research perspectives and archaeological contexts shape methodologies, revelations, and interpretations.

Other Keywords
Experimental Archaeology • Mississippian • Music Archaeology • Andes: Formative • Ritual and Symbolism • Urbanism • Cultural Transmission • Ceramic Analysis • Ethnoarchaeology • Communities of Practice

Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) • United States of America (Country) • United Mexican States (Country) • Republic of Peru (Country) • Republic of Panama (Country) • Republic of Colombia (Country) • Netherlands Antilles (Country) • Aruba (Country) • Republic of Ecuador (Country) • Republic of Chile (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)

  • Documents (9)
Documents
  • Archaeological Contexts and Social Uses of Pututus in the Prehispanic Central Andes (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mélanie Ferras.

    This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pututus are marine shell trumpets (organologically, horns), known in the prehispanic Central Andes from the Archaic period to the Late Horizon. Different classes of those sound-producing artifacts have been discovered: some of them cut from various species of marine gastropods, and others produced in ceramics...

  • An Interdisciplinary Proposal for the Study of Sound and Music in Moche Art: The Case of the Afterlife/Underworld Dances (Dance of the Dead) (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela La Chioma.

    This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Moche art, archaeological evidence related to sound and music can be found in cultural materials from sculptured bottles to the notorious fine-line paintings. Sound-producing instruments, musicians, and musical performances have been featured worldwide in museum expositions and scholarly discourse about...

  • Music-Archaeological Experimentation and Aural Heritage: Human Perspectives on Sonic Experience (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Miriam Kolar.

    This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human interactions with archaeological materials and settings facilitate responsive explorations of things and places in use. In my Andean fieldwork at Chavín and Huánuco Pampa, music-archaeological experiments and ethno-archaeomusicological performance studies of artifact instruments and their replica...

  • A Native American Music Replication Project: An Ethno-archaeomusicological Perspective (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Howell.

    This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper chronicles an instrument replication and composition project, using archaeological materials, historic and ethnohistoric documentation, and interviews with archaeologists, music consultants, project commission personnel, craftspersons, composer, and others with a vested interested. Three instrument...

  • Searching for the Missing Drum: The Evidence for the Presence and Ceremonial Importance of Ceramic Vessel Drums in the Prehistoric Southeastern United States (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only James Rees.

    This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early historical accounts suggest that drums played an important role in the ceremonial life of the prehistoric southeastern United States. However, because they were made in whole or in part of ephemeral materials, drums are virtually invisible in the archaeological record. Interestingly, historical records,...

  • Some More Thoughts on the Study of Prehispanic Soundmakers (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthias Stöckli.

    This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of prehispanic musical instruments or soundmakers stored in museum collections was certainly foundational to the history of music archaeology. Due to the fact that they were most often decontextualized, those studies used to concentrate on one of two aspects of many of these artifacts; namely, their...

  • Sound Practices in Late Postclassic to Early Colonial Tlaxcallan: Applying a Community of Practice Framework to Investigate Sonic Expression (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina Kosyk.

    This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeological interpretations of Postclassic period central Mexico, sound practices and related assemblages are often conceptualized as unchanging, standardized, and fixed to a common Mesoamerican religious system under the umbrella of Aztec cultural expression. This neglect of other polities’ sound...

  • Teotihuacan Sound Mapping: Exploring the Sonic Sphere of the City of the Gods (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Adje Both.

    This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Teotihuacan Sound Mapping Project explores the role that sound and music played in the ancient urban environment of the site. The sound tools and musical instruments of Teotihuacan are re-created and played in different architectural settings, and the instrumental and architectural acoustics subsequently...

  • “They Made Many Tunes”: Musical Instruments of the Pueblo Peoples of the Northern Rio Grande Valley (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Brown.

    This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The distributions of different types of musical instruments across the American Southwest have been generally defined, but little work has been done to tie these data to studies of ethnogenesis, migration, and language groups. This paper examines archaeological, musicological, ethnographic, and historical...