archæoacoustics

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Spirits in the Stones

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http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/188_stones1.shtml

The summer of 2004 has seen interesting discoveries in Canada and

India that highlight a new branch of archæological research –

archæoacoustics. Old rocker PAUL DEVEREUX explains how we may now be

able to hear the soundtrack of the Stone Age.

 

 

Voices in the wall: Aboriginal rock-shelter art in the Kimberley

region of Australia. The curvature of the rock wall tends to produce

focused echoes from specific parts of the panel, so that the figures

of gods or spirits appear to have their own `voices'.

Image: Paul Devereux

 

In the early summer of 2004, a research expedition consisting of two

colleagues and me visited Canada to find out if the mysterious

engraved and painted glyphs and signs of prehistoric American Indian

rock art could, in a fashion, speak to us. 1 We wanted – literally –

to listen rather than to look. As perverse as this seems, it was in

keeping with a newly recognised aspect of archæology

called "archæoacoustics". Archæologists have finally realised that

ancient people had ears, and have discovered that various kinds of

acoustic effects – from eerie echoes to resonant frequencies that can

affect the brain – seem to have been an intentionally planned

component of a number of prehistoric sites worldwide, from ruined

temples to rock art locations. 2, 3 Prehistory is at last gaining its

own soundtrack.

 

Rock Medicine

 

Our expedition's interest was directed at two of Canada's most

important prehistoric rock art sites, both of them in Ontario:

hundreds of engravings on a rock outcrop in Petroglyphs Provincial

Park, and a profusion of ancient Algonkian rock paintings daubed in

red ochre on a mighty cliff-face protruding out of Mazinaw Lake in

Bon Echo Provincial Park. Canadian rock art interested us because of

a traditional Algonkian Indian belief that manitous – spirits – lived

inside rocks and cliff-faces, and that shamans in trance could enter

the rock surfaces and meet with them in order to exchange tobacco

offerings for supernatural power, usually referred to as "rock

medicine". (If the shaman failed to carry out this operation

correctly, though, it was said he could become trapped in the cliff

or rock he had spiritually entered and never return to his body

outside. In our terms, he would die or go mad.) We wanted to test the

hypothesis that such rock art marked venerated, magical places where

the spirits could be heard; perhaps places where echoes were

unusually strong. Had the Indians, like the ancient Greeks, believed

echoes to be the sound of spirits calling, mimicking human-made

noises to do so? Although there had been no previous linking of

either of these Ontario rock-art sites with special acoustic

properties, we had come to find out for sure.

 

The Teaching Rocks

 

Two hours driving time east of Toronto lies the Kawartha Lakes

region, a wild, scenic area popular with visitors for camping,

canoeing and hiking. At its heart lies the town of Peterborough,

which lists as one of its visitor attractions Petroglyphs Provincial

Park, 40 km (25 miles) to the north-east. This park gives the region

a unique heritage claim, for the petroglyphs form the largest

concentration of ancient rock-face engravings in Ontario – some say

in the whole of Canada.

 

I didn't quite know what to expect as we made our way along a

woodland trail to what the local Indians call Kinomagewapkong, The

Teaching Rocks, the outcrop containing the prehistoric carvings.

There appeared to be no hint in the generally available literature

that sound was in any way associated with the place, so our visit was

something of a long shot.

 

The first surprise was encountering a large-windowed building amid

the trees; it had been constructed in 1985 to house and protect the

carvings. Inside the building, a gallery allows visitors to walk

around the edge of the great sloping mass of marble containing the

mysterious glyphs. Their presence was known locally from at least the

1920s, and probably much earlier, but didn't become apparent to

outsiders until 1954, when a group of prospectors chanced across

them. An initial assessment of the site yielded a count of 92

engravings, but a much more thorough study in 1967 showed that there

were fully 10 times that number, though many are incredibly faint and

easily missed by the untrained eye.

 

 

Everett Davis, one of the prospectors who

discovered Petroglyph Rock.

Image: Ontario Parks, Petroglyphs rovincial Park

 

 

The engravings are reckoned to be between 600 and 1,100 years old.

There are depictions of human figures with sunbursts around their

heads, birds, canoes, snakes, turtles, and humanoid beings with long

ears, together with a welter of abstract signs.

 

 

Petroglyph Rock with some of the carvings and part of

the deep fissure from which voice-like

sounds occasionally eminate.

Image: Ontario Parks, Petroglyphs rovincial Park

 

 

What were they all about? The long-eared figure is thought to

represent Nanabush, or Nanabozho, a trickster-type spirit who

sometimes took the form of a hare, and present-day Indian (First

Nation) people ascribe specific symbolic meanings to many of the

other markings. But the truth is that no one knows for sure; after

all, the people who made them are long gone.

 

 

The protective building enclosing the rock outcrop at

Petroglyphs Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada.

Image: Paul Devereux

 

What is clear is that this huge, flattish slab of white crystalline

marble (metamorphosed limestone) was once the focus of intense

spiritual interest, and the aim of our little expedition was to find

out why this had been so. After all, there were other marble outcrops

around, so what was special about this one? Lisa Roach, assistant

superintendent of the site, told us that as the slab slopes in a

south-easterly direction; one suggestion was that it might face

sunrise at a time of year which was important to the ancient people.

 

Such an explanation seemed inadequate – at least to us – to explain

the site's unique profusion of rock art. Lisa then pointed out a

distinctive fissure that cuts across the rock surface. It is 5 metres

(16ft) deep in places, she informed us, and at certain times of year

the sound of underground water can be heard issuing from its depths.

We had an acoustic connection at last! After further discussion, Lisa

told us that the roaring noise sounded exactly like the babble of

human voices. Perhaps this was why the marble outcrop was so

venerated: the voices of the manitous issued from it. Perhaps it had

even been used as an oracle site.

 

The noise made by the water is apparently well known to locals, and

is even alluded to in the little printout sheet given to the site's

visitors, but, like the petroglyphs themselves, it had never been

thought particularly worthy of mention to outsiders.

 

This unexpected discovery drove home to me the adage that until one

asks the right question the correct answer cannot be forthcoming.

There is no doubt that questions regarding sound – and how it might

extend information about archæological sites and their uses – have

for too long remained unasked.

 

Spirits in the Stones

 

Pictures in the water

 

Heartened by our finding at the petroglyphs outcrop, we set off for

Bon Echo Provincial Park, 75km (47miles) to the east. We knew the

site contained the largest single concentration of ancestral

Algonkian rock paintings or "pictograms" in Canada – but its

suggestive name also drew us there.

 

There are around 200 paintings, daubed in red ochre, on Mazinaw Rock,

a cliff-face over 1km (0.6 mile) long rising up to 100metres (330 ft)

out of Mazinaw Lake, one of Ontario's deepest. The name "Mazinaw"

derives from the Algonkian word mu-zi-nu-hi-gun, meaning, variously,

writing, picture, painting, book, and often interpreted by extension

as meaning "pictures in the water" at the Bon Echo and other smaller

but similar sites.

 

 

 

Northern section of Mazinaw Rock, Bon Echo Park.

Image: Paul Devereux

 

 

The only markings on Mazinaw Rock that most casual visitors know

about are lines of Walt Whitman poetry that Flora MacDonald Denison

had carved in foot-high (30cm) letters in the 1920s. But the more

ancient "writing on the wall" consists of the mainly abstract images

painted up to 1,000 years ago by ancestral Algonkian peoples. The

paintings can only be accessed by boat, and it is an awesome

experience floating dangerously close to the jagged rock face seeking

panels of faded ochre markings, all of them just above the waterline.

 

Bon Echo park is a sizeable chunk of wilderness containing other

cliffs and bodies of water, but we found that our hunch had proven

correct: the "echo" name relates specifically to the Mazinaw Rock

cliff-face. It is locally renowned for the exceptional echoes it

produces; demonstrations of the phenomenon are even given during

tourist boat cruises on the lake. Exceptional echoes and an

exceptional concentration of pictograms – we felt their coincidence

was unlikely to be due to mere chance.

 

 

Algonkian red ochre painting at Mazinaw Rock.

The motifs have not been deciphered.

Image: Paul Devereux

 

We worked our way along the cliff-face, photographing the many

markings; some of them were still fairly strong, others weathered to

near invisibility. Although most of the paintings are abstract

glyphs, there are a few representational images, including boats

containing bird-headed humanoid figures (usually interpreted by rock-

art experts as being spirit canoes); a strange, almost camel-like

animal plus a few other more recognisable ones; and a couple of

depictions of our long-eared friend. (Big ears? We couldn't help but

idly wonder if that was a reference to the acoustics associated with

powerful manitou places, the spots where the spirits spoke.) As we

proceeded, we made periodic digital recordings of echoes; how these

related to specific pictogram panels will be covered in a more

detailed academic paper elsewhere at a later date, but it became

apparent to us that the areas of the loudest, fastest-returning

echoes coincided with the greatest concentrations of pictograms.

 

In addition to the echoes, other phenomena may also have marked out

this place as being supernaturally powerful. For instance, one

earlier archæological researcher paddling alongside the Mazinaw Rock

admitted to being "more than a little startled" to see water nearby

begin an inexplicable whirling motion, accelerating "till it lifted

suddenly into a miniature waterspout". We also experienced the water

around us occasionally behaving in an inexplicably erratic manner,

just as if restless spirits were agitating it.

 

Rock music

 

Unknown to us, while we were listening to rock art in Canada, another

case of acoustic archæology was being discussed in the mainstream

academic literature. It involves the rediscovery of inscribed,

naturally musical boulders in the Sanganakallu-Kupgal area of the

Southern Deccan, India, by the Cambridge–Karnatak

universities' "Bellary District Archæological Project", directed,

coincidentally, by a Canadian archæologist called Nicole Boivin. 4, 5

The use of acoustic effects there seemingly dates back to Stone Age

times.

 

The key rock art sites occur on the prominent landmark of Hiregudda

Hill, where hundreds of petroglyphs are to be found along a dolerite

cliff. Some of the rock art is fairly recent, but much of it dates

back to the Neolithic era. Depictions of cattle – showing long-

horned, hump-backed animals of the sort still common in southern

India – are the most common, along with those of human beings. Some

of the human figures appear to be males engaged in sexual activity,

while others seem to be shown dancing. Other images include

elephants, tigers, birds, wheeled carts, footprints, and what Boivin

calls "religious symbols". Certain engravings are in such

inaccessible places that whoever made them must have been suspended

from rock overhangs in order to carry out the work. The rock art was

clearly considerably more serious than mere doodling. The whole site

had originally been discovered in 1892, but had subsequently

become "lost" to researchers. The Bellary Project managed to identify

it again with the help of local people.

 

"Amidst the petroglyphs at this site," writes Boivin, "there are also

round, polished grooves that emit musical ringing tones when struck

with granite stones." The "gong-like" effect was demonstrated to the

archæologists by a local informant, who referred to the inscribed

boulders as "musical stones". Similar naturally sonic rocks were also

identified at another rock art site in the district.

 

Due to the masculine nature of some of the rock art imagery at

Hiregudda, and the difficulty of its production in some cases, the

current interpretation is that the site was seen as a male sacred

site, and that shamans came there to communicate with the spirits of

the place – the production of the musical tones from the rocks being

part of formalised rituals to help in that process.

 

Face the music

 

There may be trouble ahead, as the old song puts it, because many

important archæological sites in the Bellary district are

unprotected. This includes the musical rock sites, which are

threatened by both large-scale commercial quarrying and local granite

quarriers who target surface boulders. Damage from quarrying has

already occurred at some of the district's archæological sites, so

the threat is pressing. The Bellary District Archæological Project

hopes to be able to bring this danger to general attention through

publicity, and also to try to get local authorities to see the

heritage and tourist value of preserving these rare sites in the hope

of securing guaranteed protection for at least some of them. If the

Project fails in these attempts, then Hiregudda's ancient ringing

rocks will be literally silenced forever. It will be a tragic irony

if this should happen just when archæology is beginning to listen.

 

End