AURIGNACIAN RHAPSODY With, through and about flutes from Swabian origins, in-between a priori, and a posteriori

Abstract

Life situations, acoustic spaces, melodic-harmonic musicality, and children, are contexts from which a number of experiential observations are amplified as related to material engagement with, through and about three particular archaeological artefacts from the Swabian Aurignacian referred to as the Ach flutes. In themselves these observations are enmeshed across a series of archaeo-organological experiments which are interrelated in respect of immutable fluting, hypothesised as a tangible aspect of the human compulsion to play with sound. The Ach flutes appearing so early on in the archaeological record provide an indication that fluting was a niche that modern H. sapiens harnessed in order to thrive and that these behaviours may be raised in reflection to the demise of the Neanderthals. Music and the origins of music are deconstructed from postcolonial and gender perspectives, which includes perspectives on ritualisation and fetishisation. Human evolution and the evolution of human music are also outlined. Music is argued as being functional, and results from quantitative and qualitative data lead to the logical abduction that the Ach flutes directly enhanced the survival of the Aurignacian Achtalians. Music making – as in the generating of sound patterns via processes of sound patterning – starts in infanthood through provisioning, ontogenically first enhanced in the universal cradle of the mother-infant dyad. This is supported by perspectives which draw on numerous aspects of developmental psychology concerning sound and music, touching on the subject of children and young adults in archaeology, termed umbilical chords. An unwritten but assumed hypothesis that the hall at Hohle Fels was a place for fluting in the Aurignacian Achtal is overturned in favour of an appreciation that not only concerns dealing with the particular caves in which flutes and flute fragments were found, but also the environment in which the caves are embedded, in this case, the Ach Valley. Researching and understanding the musical cognition of modern humans using the archaeological record as a proxy is theorised and practised via an appreciation of critical Peircian semiotics in which a rationale for the dynamic icon is developed for fluting behaviours.