Year: 2018
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Sound is one of the lost dimensions of the prehistoric and early historic past.In recent years, multisensory approaches have sought new ways of addressing this deficiency, moving beyond those developed by music archaeologists to consider not the sound producers (instruments) but the spaces in which sound and "music" may have played a particular important role.This has included analyses of Palaeolithic painted caves and Neolithic chambered tombs and stone circles.The otherworldly significance of special sounds is well attested by ethnographic studies.The transfer of such a general perspective onto mute prehistoric structures is however methodologically challenging.This chapter briefly reviews recent work in this field and argues that close attention to the archaeological evidence may sometimes be effective in constraining the range of possible scenarios.Whether music was used to induce altered states of consciousness or heighten awareness among participants within these ceremonial structures, however, remains open to question.Ancient structures sometimes produce curious acoustic effects.Among the most famous is the sound associated with the Colossi of Memnon, the pair of gigantic seated statues set-up at Thebes in Egypt by pharaoh Amenhotep III in the 14 th century BCE.The Greek writer Strabo, towards the end of the 1 st century BCE, provided the earliest account, describing how on certain days soon after dawn one of the statues emitted a noise likened by a later writer to the breaking of a lyre string.Strabo suspected that the sound was a trick produced by someone standing close to the base of the statue (Strabo Geography 17: 46).On the other hand, Philostratus (Life of Apollonius of Tyana 6: 4) was convinced that the statue spoke.This curious phenomenon drew important visitors: inscriptions carved on the base of the statue record that they included the Roman emperor Hadrian in November AD130, and his successor Septimius Severus in AD199, but by the end of the following century repairs had rendered the statue silent (Bowersock 1984).The 'voice' was in fact an accidental phenomenon, resulting from the partial collapse of the monolithic statue shortly
Author: Chris Scarre
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology (arts and humanities)
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2596160734