Magic Sounds of Peru's Ancient Chavín de Huántar

The ancient ceremonial center of Chavín de Huántar in Peru featured a calculated blend of architecture and sound for sensory effect, suggests new research.

New findings of a recent archaeoacoustic study suggests that the ancients of the 3,000-year-old Andean ceremonial center at Chavín de Huántar, in the central highlands of Peru, practiced a fine art and science of manipulating sound with architecture to produce desired sensory effects. With the assistance of architectural form and placement, and sounds emitted from conch-shell trumpets, the oracle of Chavín de Huántar "spoke" to the ancient center's listeners.

Says Miriam Kolar, Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, PhD Candidate
 at Stanford University and leader of the study: 

"At Chavín, we have discovered acoustic evidence for selective sound transmission between the site's Lanzon monolith and the Circular Plaza: an architectural acoustic filter system that favors sound frequencies of the Chavín pututus [conch-shell trumpets] and human voice."

The Lanzon is a sacred statue or stela depicting the central deity of the ancient Chavín culture. It is housed in the central chamber of a series of underground passages within the Old Temple of the ceremonial and religious center of Chavín de Huántar. A central duct was built to connect the area of the monolith with that of the Circular Plaza, a place of ceremonial activity and significance. The duct was specifically designed to filter to a certain sound range -- namely, the range emitted by the Chavín pututu instrument.
The Circular Plaza Terrace was built up around the Circular Plaza in order to make the 21m-diameter plaza artificially sunken. Located within the Circular Plaza Atrium, it appears that the terrace and the other components of the Atrium (the plaza, the terrace, a staircase, and three galleries) were constructed contemporarily. The 2.52m tall Tello Obelisk, carved from granite, excavated by Julio Tello in the 1930s and currently housed in the anthropology and history museum in Lima, would have originally stood in the center of this plaza. The thatch roofing, as described by Stanford archaeologist John Rick, protects a series of engraved stone plaques portraying jaguars and Chavin personages that were revealed during excavations in the Circular Plaza.
The Lanzon has been interpreted variously as a principal deity of Chavin, an oracle with the power to speak (thanks to a hole in the roof of the chamber), a symbol of trade, fertility, dualism, and humankind's interaction with nature, or any combination of these. What is evident is that the 4.5m (15 feet)-tall obelisk is a painstakingly carved piece of white granite in a roughly lance-like shape, and depicts a human-feline hybrid with claws, writhing snakes for hair and eyebrows, fangs curved sideways in a smile (thus the nickname 'Smiling God'), and one arm raised while the other is lowered. Other carvings at Chavin de Huantar depict Lanzon clutching a Strombus shell in one hand and a Spondylus shell in the other, which has been interpreted as a possible reference to fertility and the duality of the sexes
"Because intact sound-producing instruments -- the conch-shell trumpets known in Spanish as "pututus" -- have been excavated at Chavín", continues Kolar, "we can study and record how these artifact instruments sound, and measure their acoustics. 

A comparison between the sounding characteristics of the pututus and the site's spatial acoustic features provides clues about how these instruments may have contributed to the ancient sound environment at the complex."

Central to the purpose of this careful arrangement of sound and architecture and the resulting dynamics is the sensory effect that the sound is designed to have on humans within earshot, which some scholars theorize creates the intended "state of mind" for religious or worshipping purposes. By conducting controlled psychoacoustic experimentation with human participants at the ancient site, researchers were able to test how the site architectural acoustics and artifact instrument sounds interact to produce sensory effects on the participants.

The relationship between the interaction of architecture and sound and its sensory effect on humans is not a concept or cultural invention unique to or lost with ancients. Consider, for example, the effect on a person standing within an immense cathedral while listening to music of a religious nature. Medieval architects designed the architectural acoustics of these masterpieces of stone and structure to support or enhance the "spiritual" experience of worshippers who practiced within their walls.

But the study has its limits.

"We could not design a study to determine what an ancient listener thought about what he or she heard, because such questions are both culturally and individually dependent," states Kolar. "However, it is possible to study functional perceptual mechanisms such as auditory localization -- the perception of where a sound source is in relation to the hearer/listener. We can extend findings from such experiments to understand some of the perceptual implications of site architectural acoustics for ancient humans."

Kolar and colleagues hope to continue to develop research tools such as those used at Chavín de Huántar for application at other archaeological sites.

The study and its findings were presented at the AAAS Annual Meeting on February 16, 2011.

To find out more about Chavín de Huántar, see the article, Ancient Peru: The First Horizon in Popular Archaeology Magazine.
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/december-2011/article/magic-sounds-of-peru-s-ancient-chavin-de-huantar