Some More Thoughts on the Study of Prehispanic Soundmakers

Summary

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 iconography or their acoustics, more rarely also on both. The holistic interpretation of this double nature continues to be a major concern of organological studies within music archaeology. That such an interpretation of their representational and sonic aspects would call for a thorough spatial, social, and cultural contextualization of these artifacts is a claim easy to make but often difficult to implement on the basis of the archaeological evidence. Another topic of this paper is the tendency in recent music archaeology to prefer the supposedly more neutral term “soundmakers” over “musical instruments” when talking about those artifacts. The underlying concepts of these two terms are also worth to be discussed in some length.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32720