Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity

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.