Experimental archaeology and music

Archaeoacoustics is sometimes controversial, but as long as it is regarded as a speculative activity - like much archaeological interpretation of prehistoric remains - then it's a really interesting area to explore. Of course we don't know what prehistoric music sounded like, but we can be pretty sure that it existed, because of finds like ringing rocks and bone flutes.

clipped from www.archaeology.org Elizabeth Blake suspended three flint blades from a small wooden frame. Holding her cell phone in one hand, she took a piece of antler in the other and gently struck each blade once. Over a bad transatlantic connection, our phone conversation had been difficult, but the tones from the four-inch-long blades came through—clear, sweet, and crystalline. They sounded like hand bells or struck goblets. The blades are replicas of 30,000-year-old artifacts from the sites of Isturitz in the French Pyrenees and Geißenklösterle in southwestern Germany.

Sagalassos, city in the clouds

This is where they found sculptures of the Emperor Hadrian and the Empress Faustina:

clipped from www.archaeology.org City in the Clouds In 1706, Paul Lucas, traveling in southwest Turkey on a mission for the court of Louis XIV, came upon the mountaintop ruins of Sagalassos. The first Westerner to see the site, Lucas wrote that he seemed to be confronted with remains of several cities inhabited by fairies. Later, during the mid-nineteenth century, William Hamilton described it as the best preserved ancient city he had ever seen. Toward the end of that century, Sagalassos and its theater became famous among students of classical antiquity. Yet large scale excavations along the west coast at sites like Ephesos and Pergamon, attracted all the attention. Gradually Sagalassos was forgotten...until a British-Belgian team led by Stephen Mitchell started surveying the site in 1985.