Air and sound: Indigenous wind instruments made of bone in the Southeast United States

ABSTRACT

By studying the distribution of wind instruments made of bone, we investigate the presence of musical traditions in the American Southeast and nearby regions during the last few centuries prior to European arrival. Our findings show that southeastern Indigenous peoples used bone instruments far less than their neighbors, suggesting that they almost exclusively made whistles and flutes from reeds, wood, and other materials that do not survive in the archaeological record. This variation in materials was not based on a lack of knowledge, as we detail the presence of several bone wind instruments in the Southeast, but rather, we suggest, a unique musical tradition in the region.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• flutes
• late Pre-contact
• Mississippian
• archaeomusicology
• aerophones

Acknowledgments

Much of the work used comes from Katherine Lee Hall Martin’s unpublished master’s thesis (University of Tennessee, Knoxville). We understand that she has since passed and while she enjoyed archaeology, she ended up making a career in music. We benefited greatly from her work for which we are deeply grateful. We also appreciate our colleagues, Amanda Roberts, Sharon Pekrul, William Allen, Neill Wallis, and Tim Baumann, who conducted searches of their collections, and James Krakker, who provided access to NMNH collections. We also appreciate James Rees, David Dye, Betsy Reitz, John Scarry, Vin Steponaitis, Jeff Mitchem, Lynne Sullivan, Jeff Chapman, Heather Lapham, and Richard Polhemus, whom we polled in an effort to locate additional Southeast aerophones. Finally comments by reviewers, RaeLynn Butler (Muscogee [Creek]), LaDonna Brown (Chickasaw), and two anonymous individuals greatly improved the final product.

Data availability statement

Original data records are at the institutions who hold the collections while compiled data sets are available from the first author (MCS) and are housed at the National Museum of American Indian.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew C. Sanger

Matthew C. Sanger is Curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution.

Rachel Cajigas

Rachel Cajigas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama.

Elliot H. Blair

Elliot Blair is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama.

Anna Semon

Anna Semon is the Manager of the North American Archaeology Laboratory at the American Museum of Natural History.