The day the music died: Making and playing bone wind instruments at La Real in Middle Horizon, Peru (600–1000 CE)

Abstract

• Forty bone wind instruments (aerophones) produced from camelids and condors were recovered from La Real, Arequipa. • Recreating a chaîne opératoire can illustrate the way these instruments were produced and played by all members of society. • Use of these instruments is abandoned in the later Middle Horizon overlapping with Wari expansion into the region. • Condor and camelid bone related to the symbolism of Andean mobile agropastoral communities and gender complementarity. • Cessation of making and playing these bone instruments attests to shifting ideologies about musical experiences. Musical performance and audience participation are important activities in both group celebrations and funerary practices. This paper considers the intersection of music and ritual in shifting local mortuary traditions during state expansion in the southern Peruvian Andes. It addresses musical activities and burial rites during the Middle Horizon (MH) (600–1000 CE), a period defined by social change, population expansion and greater influence of the Wari state. We present new evidence for shifting sound-making practices from the site of La Real in the Majes Valley of Arequipa. We mobilize morphological and acoustic analyses to determine the variation in instrument production and the likely idiosyncratic ways that participants played these objects. There is a musical tradition of manufacturing wind instruments from animal bone in the early MH (600–850 CE) followed by abandonment of these practices in the late MH (850–1000 CE). We suggest this shift correlates to a higher valuation of formalized acoustic aesthetics over collective instrument production and group musical performance. Instead of playing their own instruments at mortuary events, communities listened to music as spectators.