Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Scholar Shares The Music Of Ancient America
Jim Rees was — and still is — a teacher. Although he retired from his career at Springdale High School in 2008, he’s on a quest to “introduce people to music archaeology and how one goes about studying ancient music.” In pursuit of that goal, he’ll speak at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Fayetteville Public Library on “Studying Music From the Stone Age.”
“The title comes from a conference I attended last summer in Slovenia called ‘Music in the Stone Age,’” he says, defining the period as a time before the widespread use of metal tools and written records. “I presented a paper there on music artifacts from Ozark bluff shelters.”
Rees says he began his career teaching music and switched to social studies after receiving master’s degrees in history and anthropology, but it was while doing volunteer work at University of Arkansas Museum Collections and the Arkansas Archeological Survey that “I ran across several music artifacts, mostly flutes and whistles. In doing research on these, I discovered the field of music archaeology.
“Music, loosely defined, is one of the oldest human activities, but we only have indirect access to ancient music through the study of music artifacts, experimental archaeology, iconography and ethnographic analogy,” he goes on. Music archaeology as a field of study is “virtually unknown” in the United States, he says, but has a long history in Europe and Latin America.
“I know of only six American scholars — including myself — who have recently published in this field, and three of them study cultures in South America or Mesoamerica,” he says. “This may be because of a lack of music artifacts in the North American archaeological record. However, I believe it’s because these artifacts have gone unrecognized or have been overlooked. I’ve managed to locate quite a few, relatively speaking, just in Arkansas and surrounding states.”
In addition to discussion, Rees says on Saturday he will share “some of my discoveries in the field including several music artifacts from the Ozarks and other parts of the state. I haven’t actually dug up any of these artifacts myself. I found them in existing collections, some of which were made as far back as the 1920s. There is a lot of material sitting around on museum shelves that needs further study.”