Lamenting the Dead: The Acoustic Element in Bronze Age Funerary Rituals in Syro-Mesopotamia

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.

This paper will employ GIS in exploring the experiential aspects of the burial process in Early Bronze Age North Mesopotamia, with a particular attention to funerary soundscapes. To investigate the potential impact of vocal and musical sound, a 10 m resolution digital elevation model (DEM) was developed, and the "System for the Prediction of Acoustic Detectability" (SPreAD-GIS) was employed to predict the potential acoustic "footprint" on a series of Early Bronze Age (third millennium BCE) archaeological sites. The results of this study suggest that music and vocalization (i.e., lamentation singing) had strong impacts, both within the immediate mortuary landscape and beyond. This has important mnemonic consequences for the society of the first urban centers. The funerary arena in Early Bronze Age Syro-Mesopotamian society involved many different sensory experiences, among the most important visibility, movement/processions, and sound. The archaeological sites of Ebla, Mari, and Ugarit preserve the archaeological/cuneiform evidence for a rich music culture associated with funerary rituals, but how this impacted the society remains unclear. A better understanding of the acoustic landscape will form a vital component in assessing the societal impact of public and private funerary rituals in the first urban centers.

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): 32006