Episode 62

Listening to the Oldies - Ep 62

This week, Anna and Amber sing you a little tune about musical instruments in the archaeological record, and the ways that we can access ancient music today. From the discoveries of the earliest known flutes, to jamming out with Homer, to some mind-blowing takes on sound and silence, consider it our first movement in this composition.

Links

Scales from Around the World (How Music Really Works)

A Biological Rationale for Musical Scales (PLOSOne)

A Voice from the Past (The New Yorker)

The European Music Archaeology Project Recreates Instruments of Old (New York Times)

Ice and Longboats: Ancient Music of Scandinavia (European Music Archaeology Project, Volume 2)

Ancient Greek music: now we finally know what it sounded like (The Conversation)

8 Oldest Musical Instruments in the World (Oldest.org)

Brookhaven Lab Expert Helps Date Flute Thought to be Oldest Playable Musical Instrument (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

Oldest Greek Fragment of Homer Discovered on Clay Tablet (Smithsonian)

Sing like you mean it! - the Linguistics of Tonal Languages

Listen to Sappho Read By Stephen G. Daitz (The New Yorker Podcast)

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek (Open Culture)

Homer Multitext Project

We can tell where a whale has travelled from the themes in its song (New Scientist)

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.