• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Ancient Chacoans Used Conch Shell Trumpets Like Church Bells For Announcements

May 2, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Long before governments had the power to ping citizens on their smartphones, the pre-Hispanic inhabitants of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon used conch shell trumpets to send out population-wide notifications. According to new research, the ancient Chacoans may even have deliberately designed their settlements to ensure that everyone was within earshot of a sea-snail toot at all times.

Advertisement

From around 850 to 1150 CE, the Chaco Canyon was the cultural heartland of the Puebloan peoples who inhabited the southwestern US. Typically, Chacoan centers from this period consisted of enormous sandstone structures known as “great houses”, around which small clusters of domestic sites were scattered through the landscape.

Advertisement

Previously, archaeologists excavating the canyon have discovered conch shell trumpets within elite burials, despite the nearest source of such shells lying around 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) to the southwest on the Pacific coast. Providing an important if somewhat obvious insight, the authors of a new study explain that “these prized items would have provided their bearers, probably community leaders, with the means to create a very loud blast of sound.”

Trumpets of this kind continue to be used by the present-day descendants of these ancient Puebloans during ritual practices, all of which suggests that the shells may have played an important role in Chacoan life. To investigate, the study authors digitally modeled the reach of a conch trumpet blast when blown from the great houses of five different Chacoan settlements.

Their results demonstrate that the sphere of sound matches up perfectly with the distribution of domestic sites around each great house. It therefore appears that the ancient inhabitants of the Chaco Canyon deliberately arranged their villages so that the authorities could communicate with all residents at any given time simply by blowing on a sea shell.

“If leaders atop great houses needed to quickly communicate with all community residents, a conch-shell blast would have been a more effective method than relying on community residents to look in the right direction at the right time to see, for example, smoke/mirror signals,” write the authors.

Advertisement

Speculating on the function of these audible notifications, the researchers say that trumpets may have been used to signal the start of communal activities like religious ceremonies. “This is not unlike the idea of a medieval church bell calling a community to mass”, explained study author Professor Ruth Van Dyke in a statement via email.

More broadly, the researchers state that “the acoustic reach of a conch-shell trumpet could have been one way of ensuring the internal cohesion of Chacoan communities.”

The study is published in the journal Antiquity.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. ARK Invest’s Wood expects market rotation back to growth stocks
  2. Most Plant-Based Milks Are Poorer In Key Micronutrients Than Dairy
  3. Great Pacific Garbage Patch Now A Floating Love Shack For Coastal Species
  4. Hard Working Urchins Don’t Deserve Their Bad Reputation

Source Link: Ancient Chacoans Used Conch Shell Trumpets Like Church Bells For Announcements

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • If Birds Are Dinosaurs, Why Are None As Big As T. Rexes?
  • Psychologists Demonstrate Illusion That Could Be Screwing Up Our Perception Of Time
  • Why Are So Many Enormous Roman Shoes Being Discovered At Hadrian’s Wall?
  • Scientists Think They’ve Pinpointed Structural Differences In Psychopaths’ Brains
  • We’ve Found Our Third-Ever Interstellar Visitor, Orcas Filmed Kissing (With Tongues) In The Wild, And Much More This Week
  • The “Eyes Of Clavius” Will Be Visible On The Moon Today, Thanks To Clair-Obscur Effect
  • Shockingly High Microplastic Levels Found On Remote Mediterranean Coral Reef Island
  • Interstellar Object, Cheesy Nightmares, And Smooching Orcas
  • World’s Largest Martian Meteorite Up For Auction Could Reach Whopping $2-4 Million
  • Kimalu The Beluga Whale Undergoes Pioneering Surgery And Becomes First Beluga To Survive General Aesthetic
  • The 1986 Soviet Space Mission That’s Never Been Repeated: Mir To Salyut And Back Again
  • Grisly Incident In Yellowstone National Park Shows Just How Dangerous This Vibrant Wilderness Can Be
  • Out Of All Greenhouse Gas Emitters On Earth, One US Organization Takes The Biscuit
  • Overly Ambitious Adder Attempts To Eat Hare 10 Times Its Mass In Gnarly Video
  • How Fast Does A Spacecraft Need To Go To Escape The Solar System?
  • President Trump’s Cuts To USAID Could Result In A “Staggering” 14 Million Avoidable Deaths By 2030
  • Dzo: Hybrids Beasts That Are Perfectly Crafted For Life On Earth’s Highest Mountains
  • “Rarest Event Ever” Had A Half-Life 1 Trillion Times Longer Than The Age Of The Universe – How Did We See It?
  • Meet The Bille, A Self-Righting Tetrahedron That Nobody Was Sure Could Exist
  • Neurogenesis Confirmed: Adult Brains Really Do Make New Hippocampal Neurons
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version