The Materiality of Music: A Technological and Functional Study of Two Mesoamerican Omichicahuaztli
Valeria Bellomia and Ivana Fiore
Pre-Hispanic music instruments that are on exhibit in museums as art objects, are not only witness to a sophisticated world view, but also constitute the material trace of a cultural behaviour that once was physically inscribed in their body. For the first time in their “museum” history, two Mesoamerican scraped idiophones made of human bones, commonly known by the Nahua name omichicahuaztli in the scientific literature and currently on display at the Museo delle Civiltà – Museo Preistorico Etnogra co “Luigi Pigorini” in Rome, have been the focus of an interdisciplinary study that sought to analyse their biological characteristics as bones, reconstruct their cultural biography as artefacts, determine their organological features as musical instruments, and identify their indigenous identity as witnesses to a past civilization. In this article we present the taphonomic analysis of both instruments in an attempt to reconstruct their use as sound-producing devices, within the frame of the cultural context in which they were played. The results demonstrate that from a detailed analysis of the raw material from which the sound devices were made we can obtain a large amount of information about their “social life,” that is, their manufacture, manipulation and cultural use.
Instrumentos musicales prehispánicos expuestos en museos como objetos de arte, no solamente son testigos de una cosmovisión so sticada, sino también representan las huellas materiales de un comportamiento cultural que se inscribió físicamente en sus cuerpos. Por primera vez en su historia “museal”, dos idiófonos de ludimiento mesoamericanos hechos de huesos humanos y a menudo referidos en la literatura científica con el nombre nahua omichicahuaztli han sido estudiados con un enfoque interdisciplinario. El estudio de los dos instrumentos, expuestos actualmente en el Museo delle Civiltà – Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnogra co “Luigi Pigorini” en Roma, buscó analizar sus características biológicas como huesos, reconstruir sus biografías culturales como artefactos, determinar sus rasgos organológicos como instrumentos musicales y resaltar su identidad indígena como testigos de una civilización pasada. En este artículo presentamos el análisis tafonómico por medio del cual intentamos reconstruir su uso como dispositivos sonoros en su contexto cultural original. Los resultados demuestran que de un análisis escrupuloso de los materiales de los que están hechos los dispositivos sonoros, se puede obtener una gran cantidad de información sobre su “vida social”, o sea, su manufactura, manipulación y uso cultural.