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Musical Instruments

Persistent Identifier
https://exarc.net/ark:/88735/10623

A musical instrument is an object that was used to or designed to create music but it the purpose of the user that gives it the real meaning. The objects are made from different materials like bone, wood or even stone and can come in different shape and sizes, like pipes, rattling ornaments or bottle gourds. With the help of experimental archaeology, it is possible to reconstruct the shape of the objects as well as the music it was used to play.

Featured

Acutus’ Eagle Bone and Two Bone Tubes with Holes Found in A Roman Fleet Base in The Netherlands - About Signalling Whistles and Animal Calls

Author(s)
Annemies Tamboer 1 ✉
Publication Date
EXARC Journal Issue 2022/1
At the location of a former Roman military fort and fleet base existing from AD 15-28 in Velsen, The Netherlands, more than 3000 bones and bone fragments were excavated. Three of these can be interpreted as musical instruments. Two bone tubes, of a roe deer and a stork, are provided with one and three holes respectively, on the third, a length of an eagle wing bone with one joint removed...

A Singing Bone from the Mätäjärvi (‘Rotten Lake’) Quarter of Medieval Turku, Finland: Experimental Reconstructions and Contemporary Musical Exploration

Author(s)
Riitta Rainio 1 ✉,
Annemies Tamboer 2,
Taina Saarikivi 3
Publication Date
EXARC Journal Issue 2021/4
At the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, in the town of Turku (SW Finland), a new quarter was built near a lake that came to be known as Mätäjärvi (‘Rotten Lake’), possibly because it was polluted by the waste from leather tanners, shoemakers, and other artisans. In the excavated remains of a wooden house in this quarter, objects like leather shoes, clippings and scrapings, imported stoneware from Germany...

Bone Pipes with Parallel Tone Holes. Materials from Medieval Poland (until the End of the 12th C)

Author(s)
Dorota Popławska 1 ✉,
Anita Kander-Marchewka 2,
Amelia Skibińska 3,
Piotr Zawadzki 3
Publication Date
EXARC Journal Issue 2021/4
Bone and wood pipes are among the medieval aerophones which have been discovered during archaeological excavations in Poland. The ones that interested us are characterized by a parallel arrangement of sound holes. They are short pipes, several centimetres long, with two holes cut in different places of the pipe body, either at one end or in the middle...

Early Medieval Bone Pipes: Understanding the Sounds of These Instruments through Reconstruction

Author(s)
Lucy-Anne Taylor 1 ✉
Publication Date
EXARC Journal Issue 2021/4

Introduction

Bone pipes dating from both the early and late medieval period have been found in the archaeological record from across central and Northern Europe such as in: The Netherlands (Tamboer, 2004), Denmark, Sweden (Lund, 1981a), Poland (Poplawska, 1998), Latvia (Urtan, 1970) and Estonia (Oras, 2015) (Tamboer and Rainio, 2020). One of the first comprehensive studies of these instruments as a whole is that by Brade, published in 1975.

Oakbank Dog Rose: A Working-model of an Iron Age Wooden Whistle from a Loch Tay Crannog

Author(s)
Simon Wyatt 1 ✉
Publication Date
EXARC Journal Issue 2021/1
In 1980 a small piece of worked wood was discovered during excavation at Oakbank crannog in Loch Tay, Scotland. It was interpreted as a whistle by Nick Dixon. While there are several other Iron Age artefacts which have been interpreted as whistles, in Britain, this is the only one currently known to the author which is made of wood. This paper describes the manufacture and sounding of a model of this Iron Age...

Experimental Research on the Neanderthal Musical Instrument from Divje Babe I Cave (Slovenia)

Author(s)
Matija Turk 1 ✉,
Giuliano Bastiani 2
Publication Date
EXARC Journal Issue 2020/3
11th EAC Trento 2019
***The supposition that an unusually perforated femur of a juvenile cave bear found at the Divje babe I Palaeolithic cave site in Slovenia could be a musical instrument led to heated debates. According to its archaeological context and chronostratigraphic position, if made by humans, it could only be attributed to Neanderthals...

Bottle Gourd as an Implement for the Poor in Roman Italy

Author(s)
Brittany Bauer 1 ✉
Publication Date
EXARC Journal Issue 2020/2
Bottle gourds, which are thought to have originated in Africa, have been collected and cultivated in Italy since antiquity for the making of vessels and utensils, as well as food, musical instruments, and fishing buoys. Columella and Pliny the Elder both write extensively about the uses of bottle gourds, yet the importance of this vegetable in antiquity is notably absent from modern scholarship...

Animal Teeth in a Late Mesolithic Woman’s Grave, Reconstructed as a Rattling Ornament on a Baby Pouch

Author(s)
Riitta Rainio 1 ✉,
Annemies Tamboer 2
Publication Date
EXARC Journal Issue 2018/1
10th EAC Leiden 2017
***In one of the Late Mesolithic graves at Skateholm, Sweden, dating from 5500–4800 BC, was buried a woman together with a newborn baby. Altogether 32 perforated wild boar (Sus scrofa) teeth, along with traces of red ochre pigment, were found in this grave. We interpreted these artefacts as a rattling ornament decorating a baby pouch...

Anatomy of Prehispanic Bells - Study of an Ancient Lost Process

Author(s)
Raúl Ybarra 1 ✉
Publication Date
EXARC Journal Issue 2012/1

The elaboration of bells in the Prehispanic Era was of great importance due to the special meaning attributed to them in religious ceremonies. Today, knowledge of the techniques that were used in their fabrication is scant and lacking in detail. For that reason, the objective of the present study was to carry out a morphological study of bells from western Mexico...