South American Music: A Curious Use of Strings
The ancient civilizations of the Andean region in South America is home to the oldest cities in the Americas. Dr. Rudy Shady, a Peruvian archeologist researched and headed the discovery of some 18 different settlement sites located in the Supe Valley of central coastal Peru, with a capitol city at the ancient cite of Caral. The research done in collaboration with American archeologists Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer in 1991-1995 shows that “the rise of civilization in Peru preceded Mesoamerica, the other center of pristine civilization in America, by at least 1500 years.” These cites date back to 2500 to 3000 BCE, and unlike their contemporaries in Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Mesopotamia, they developed without the benefit of trade and connectivity to adjacent societies. These cities in Peru evolved in isolation.
The evidence at Caral reveals detailed religious, economic, ceremonial, and musical practices. They were adept at textile technology, agricultural development, and fishing. There is a dynamic collection of structures, including an amphitheater, a central pyramid, a greater pyramid, a lesser pyramid, residential zoning, and commerce centers. There seems to be little artwork recovered, however there is a great deal of artifacts indicating jewelry, ornamentations, and elaborate fabrics. One of the buildings uncovered was a specialized craft workshop littered with bone and stone tools, suggesting that these rooms were used for supplying sumptuary goods.
The inhabitants consumed large amounts of sea mollusks, sardines, and other fish, though because of the lack of nets or fishing implements it is likely that they traded with neighboring fishing communities. The abundant presence of cotton seed suggests that their thriving textile industry was used as trade and facilitated the economic partnerships within the region. The farmers of the area did not have the need to develop hydraulic or complex irrigation systems, as the rivers and waterways provided regular flooding and abundant springs. This lack of a need for complex social structures necessary for agricultural labor and organization is a possible reason for such a large civilization to have arisen despite the lack of neighboring cultural cooperation and trade. The American Association for the Advancement of Science journal from 2001 cites if the Canal excavation,
“The move inland into the middle reaches of the Supe Valley thus appears to have been historically one of the first transitions from marine foraging to agriculture on the coast and to irrigation-based agriculture in Peru.” (Solis, 2001)
Textiles were made via the use of bone and wood needles. Another location at the Caral site found tufts of fiber and seeds of cotton. Fabrics were made for domestic use, display for social differences, rituals, and commerce. In 2005, Dr. Shady found buried in a cache inside a pyramid at Caral, another important use of textiles in American culture. Her team unveiled a khipu, or possibly, proto khipu (quipu in Spanish) that predated previous khipu from the 9th century by almost 3000 years. These devices were used as tools for communication and consisted of a pendant with strings attached that used knots, color variations, and weaves to indicate different meanings. Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs now had a partner in its early forms of communication by mankind.
The curiosity is that these other contemporary civilizations had complex writing systems, textile technology, mathematics, social structures, modern tools, and yet they also developed stringed instruments. The lyre, lute, and harp were all products of available materials, tools, and mathematics (to arrive at harmonic intervals and proportions) and the civilizations of ancient South America also possessed these means. Why then, is there a curious absence of stringed instruments from the culture of South America where it persists in ancient cultures elsewhere? The reverence and use of ropemaking and string making were so prevalent that the people there used it as a form of record keeping, yet no evidence has been uncovered that any musician created an instrument that used this highly developed string technology for instrumentation.
The cite at Caral uncovered 32 flutes from a corner of the Temple of the Amphitheater. These were decorated with figures of monkeys, serpents, condors, eagles, and humans and made from pelican and condor bones. Another group of 38 instruments, likely bugles, provide evidence for an elaborate musical expression in the Supe Valley. As Dr. Shady writes,
“The instruments help confirm the emphasis on collective musical performance in Canal-Supe society, and the early role of participatory artistic performance in Andean cultural heritage.” (Solis, p39)
Stone slabs discovered from 1000 B.C. to 200 B.C. depict a court show of elaborately dressed figures carrying ritual objects and musical instruments. Shell trumpets obtained from the Strombus shells traded over long distances with complex designs and highly polished were used. The Nazca of the south coast used ceramic drums, whistles, trumpets, and panpipes during the 1st to 8th centuries. The Mochi cultures from the 2nd to 9th centuries used ceramic sculptures that depicted individuals walking in a line or dancing while playing panpipes, flutes, rattlepoles, trumpets, drums, and puputos. Hélène Bernier from the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes,
“There is a strong connection between music and death in Moche iconography. Diverse instruments appear in a great variety of scenes related to death and the afterlife such as macabre dances, funerary processions, and erotic scenes involving skeletons.” (Bernier, https://www.metmuseum.org)
The one exception that I discovered to the presence of a stringed instrument in the Americas prior to the arrival of the Spanish is the beating of the tāwitól. This is from Carl Lumholtz in his research of the Tepehuanes, a group of indigenous people in Mexico. His writing agrees with several other historical accounts of this instrument’s presence in ceremonial practices, including the Quijongo of Central America, the Cora, Huichol, Maidu, and Maya. Lumholtz writes,
“This was a large, round gourd, on top of which a bow of unusual size was placed with its back down. The shaman's right foot rested on a board which holds the bow in place on the gourd. The bow being made taut, the shaman beats the string with two sticks, in a short, rhythmical measure of one long and two short beats. When heard nearby, the sonorousness of the sound reminds one of the cello.” (Lumholtz, 1923)
Lumholtz goes on to suppose the that this use of a stringed instrument was likely not indigenous to the area but introduced by African slaves. The controversy behind Lumholtz’ presumption is that Africans were rarely- if ever- found in the North Western part of Mexico, and it is highly unlikely that a foreign object would become such an integral part of the religious ceremony of several tribes. R.B. Dixon, the American anthropologist, noted of the Maidu of the Sierra Nevada,
“In the religion of that tribe also this bow plays an important part, and much secrecy is connected with it." (Dixon, 1903)
Regardless of these observations, this instrument does not show up in pre-colonial archives, and until such evidence presents itself, we must conclude that stringed instruments either are not part of the ancient American music culture, did not survive in the archeological record, or were not significant enough to be inclusive to the ceremonial and religious tradition. This lack of string instrument, given the importance of rope and string use for communication, textiles, and trade is impressive, especially given their presence in early history of their contemporaries, with similar developmental progressions. The scene now is far from this. Stringed instruments enjoy a large part in the Mariachi, Jalisco, Cumbia, and a wide variety of others. The charango is today’s Peruvian national instrument, and the music of this nation is dominated by it. Enjoy today’s listening example of ADIOS PUEBLO DE AYACUCHO (Charango Peruano - PUKA) playing this amazing modern string instrument of South America.
Sources:
· Dr. Ruth Shady Solis, “America’s First City? The Case of Late Archaic Caral”, Andean Archeology III, 2006
· Ruth Shady Soli, Jonathan Haas, Winifred Creamer, “Dating Caral, a Preceramic Site in the Supe Valley on the Central Coast of Peru”, Science , Apr. 27, 2001, New Series, Vol. 292, No. 5517 (Apr. 27, 2001), pp. 723- 726 (American Association for the Advancement of Science.)
· Charles C. Mann, “Unraveling Khipu's Secrets”, Science, Aug. 12, 2005, New Series, Vol. 309, No. 5737 (Aug. 12, 2005), pp. 1008- 1009
· Bernier, Hélène. “Music in the Ancient Andes.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/muan/hd_muan.htm (originally published August 2009, last revised April 2010)
· Carl Lumholtz, “Unknown Mexico: A Record of Five Years' Exploration Among the Tribes of the Western Sierra Madre, in the Tierra Caliente of Tepic and Jalisco, and Among the Tarascos of Michoacan, Volume 1” (1902)