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In medieval Europe, villages were bound together by the sound of church bells, which summoned the community for reasons both sacred and secular. Desert communities in northwestern New Mexico may have been similarly organized around sound — in this case, the blast of a conch-shell trumpet echoing out from a central “great house.”

A recent article in Antiquity explores how the ancient Pueblo communities of Chaco Canyon may have sounded to the human ear. ��ñ�� Professor of Anthropology Ruth Van Dyke is the lead author of “Seashells and sound-waves: modeling soundscapes in Chacoan great-house communities,” alongside co-authors Kristy Primeau of the State University of New York at Albany, Kellam Throgmorton of Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, and David Witt of the State University of New York at Buffalo. Van Dyke’s research will also be featured in the popular archaeology magazines Current World Archaeology and Antike Welt this July.

Today, 23 Native American tribes claim descent from the ancient canyon dwellers, including the Hopi, Zuni, Acoma and others. Between 850 to 1150 CE, Chacoan communities were arranged around a central “great house” and constructed in a way that enabled residents to see far—such as the next great house, usually five or more miles away.

Great houses weren’t just central visually; researchers discovered that a conch-shell trumpet blown from the great house could be heard throughout the community.

“When we first began to do the modeling, we began to see how the reach of the sound mapped perfectly onto the boundaries of each community,” Van Dyke said. “It seems that people either weren’t allowed to or didn’t want to live beyond the reach of a call from the great house.”

Reconstructing ancient sound is a complex process; digital elevation models must be very high resolution and include land features such as rocks and canyon walls as well as architecture, Van Dyke said.

“Then you need to be able to figure out how sound will reverberate or be blocked or amplified in each situation,” she explained.

Witt obtained the digital elevation models, while Primeau processed the data using ArcGIS, with algorithms she designed herself. A ��ñ�� alumnus, Throgmorton, PhD ’19, contributed much of the data; he had researched two Chacoan communities for his dissertation.

Big shells are powerful ritual objects among the Pueblo even today and are used in ceremonies to impersonate the call of the plumed serpent. The conch shell trumpets have the same decibel range as a loud motorcycle, Van Dyke said.

Archaeologists have discovered 46 of these shells across the southwestern U.S., most from the southern deserts of Arizona. Seventeen were excavated in Chaco Canyon, a powerful ritual center of the ancient Pueblo world.

While shell trumpets were common in ancient cultures located along the Pacific Ocean, Chaco Canyon lies 600 miles from the sea. Other imported items, such as cacao beans from the Maya civilization more than 1,000 miles away, were also discovered in Chaco Canyon.

Chacoan great houses may have been empty ceremonial centers, residences of elite rulers or both. The evidence varies in accordance with time and place; great houses and their surrounding communities dominated the high desert landscape for 300 hundred years, said Van Dyke, who has researched the human experience of the Chaco Canyon landscape since the 1990s.

“One of the reasons I have been interested in viewsheds and soundscapes is because I am interested in the nature and composition of these communities. There are nearly 200 of these communities across an area the size of the state of Alabama, and only about 15 of them have been intensively investigated,” Van Dyke said.

Even after 140 years of archaeological study, there are many unknowns surrounding Chacoan society. There’s a sense of urgency, too: the landscape itself is under threat by oil and gas development, over the objections of the Pueblo people, archaeologists and environmentalists, Van Dyke said.

“Existing laws technically protect major archaeological sites from destruction, but existing laws do a very poor job of protecting or helping us study less tangible aspects of the human experience, like viewscapes and soundscapes,” she said. “Yet, we do have means at our disposal — such as the model we developed in this study — to examine soundscapes and protect them.”