Museums are vast places. Some have archives consisting of several warehouses, so it's not inconceivable to think that some items get lost in storage. But
Washington: A large conch shell overlooked in a museum for decades is now thought to be the oldest known seashell instrument - and it still works, producing a deep, plaintive bleat, like a foghorn from the distant past.
The shell was found during the 1931 excavation of a cave with prehistoric wall paintings in the French Pyrenees and assumed to be a ceremonial drinking cup. Archaeologists from the University of Toulouse recently took a fresh look and determined it had been modified thousands of years ago to serve as a wind instrument. They invited a French horn player to play it.
Credit: Fritz
et al., doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abe9510
Recordings of this ancient conch shell transformed into a horn provide a time capsule into what sounds it was able to emit, tones that turned out to be in close proximity to the musical notes C, D and C sharp. These sonorous notes were extracted by a musicologist recruited by the researchers, who used a modern metal mouthpiece and blew into the shell’s customized opening.
“I needed a lot of air to maintain the sound,” said Jean-Michel Court, who performed the demonstration.
According to a new open-access study published last week in Science Advances, the remarkable shell is a large specimen of C. lampas, a mollusk heralding from the North-East Atlantic and the North Sea. Today, it can be found in Ireland and France (Brittany, Pas-de-Calais) at its northern borders. Although rare, it still lives in the Bay of Biscay and Basque and Asturian coasts of Spain.
A large conch shell that had been languishing in a museum for decades has been revealed as the oldest known seashell instrument after archaeologists examined it more closely and realized belatedly what they’d been looking at.