Chirping Birds, Barking Dogs, and Singing Men: Ancient Ceramic Effigy Vessel Flutes from Tala, Jalisco, West Mexico

Summary

Duct flutes are an important class of aerophone instrument among the ancient and modern indigenous Americans. Duct flutes can be further classified into tubular and vessel types. While they are widely distributed, vessel flutes, unlike tubular flutes, are rarely depicted in regional iconographies. This is perhaps because they are small in size and generally hidden by the player’s hands and are thus difficult to portray in murals, vases and sculptures. However, this is not the case in West Mexico as data from our survey of online museum databases shows, they are third most commonly represented in ceramic sculptures. In this paper we describe, and examine, a collection of seven unpublished ceramic vessel flutes from Tala, Jalisco, Mexico.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Music Archaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15997