Selective Hearing: Toward a Puebloan Probability Model for Archaeoacoustic Landscape Properties Using Iconography and Geophysical Variables

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since the first forays into the use of databases and computational analysis of rock art compositions by Leroi-Gourhan in the middle of the twentieth century, digital archaeology applications have boomed, becoming a virtual necessity in twenty-first-century practice. Contemporary computerized tools for managing “big-data” facilitate scholars’ unprecedented capacities to archive, manage, and swiftly analyze large volume datasets, shifting the biggest burden toward developing effective and informed attribute-based models as opposed to compiling sufficient sample sizes. This paper proposes a set of weighted criteria for identifying culturally significant landscape acoustics in the Puebloan Southwest based on experimental results at research loci selected from an existing database of documented petroglyph panels along the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. A targeted sampling strategy was employed to sample locations suspected to have strong sonic significance, and a comparative sample of loci suspected to have little or alternative motivating factors. All locations underwent impulse response tests using percussion and sinusoidal sweeps, and were virtually modeled in 3D to better understand the relationships of possible reflecting surfaces. Ultimately, this paper aims to improve research and sonic heritage conservation strategies by suggesting means of sifting through the ever-increasing large datasets available to twenty-first-century archaeoacoustics scholars.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32002