AN INSTRUMENT FOR THE AGES

This ocarina depicts a seated human figure with a headdress. It was recovered from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

People have been playing ocarinas for thousands of years. The purposes of these instruments appear to be as varied as their sizes and shapes.

By Gayle Keck

You might have had one when you were a kid. You might have encountered a magical one while playing a popular video game. You might even have an app on your iPhone or Android. Ocarinas captivate people today, just as they have for millennia.

These clay wind instruments, technically classified as “globular aerophones,” have one or more chambers. Players blow into, or sometimes over, a mouthpiece,

This four-hole ocarina, which came from northwest Costa Rica, is shaped like a mythical animal.

placing their fingers on “tone-holes” to create different notes. Archaeologists excavating Mesoamerican sites have found ocarinas with numerous tone-holes. The most complex instruments have multiple mouthpieces and chambers, and are capable of producing simultaneous notes—sometimes even unusual wailing or buzzing sounds. The larger the resonating chamber, the lower the pitch; the size and thickness of the tone-holes can affect pitch as well.

There’s speculation that ocarinas traveled to Europe in 1527 with Aztec musicians who visited the court of Spanish King Charles V. They got their name from Giuseppe Donati, a nineteenth-century Italian musician, who dubbed his instrument “ocarina,” or “little goose.” Many modern ones do resemble that shape, but ancient ocarinas were incredibly varied, both in size and design. They range from tiny birds and turtles to larger, complex figurines; others create

a mask-like effect when held up to the mouth. Still others have to be examined closely to discern that they’re musical instruments.

Archaeologists have found ocarinas in Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America; some of these instruments are more than 4,500 years old. They turn up in middens, elite residences, and burial sites. In some instances, archaeologists believe they were used in ceremonies, dances, processions, or even in battle, while in others, it seems they were toys or home entertainment. There is even speculation that ocarinas were used to achieve trance-like states or to cure illness.

An exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology at Harvard University, titled “Ocarinas of the Americas: Music Made in Clay,” showcases more than 100 ocarinas from the museum’s collection of roughly 1,500. In an unusual twist, the multimedia exhibit includes audio and video of anthropologist and musician José Cuellar playing the ancient instruments.

Most ocarinas in the Peabody’s exhibit are from Costa Rica and Honduras. Cuellar was enthralled by their complexity and diversity. One Honduran ocarina “looked like little birds with their mouths open so you could feed them; you blow across it like a bottle top,” he said. With another, a diminutive tapir, the player appears to be kissing the animal when it’s played. His favorite was an inch-long turtle. “You blow into the tiny tail,” he explained, and “the tone comes out a little hole and goes straight up to the nose and resonates in the sinuses above your eyes. It’s meant to be meditative, not loud.” On the other end of the spectrum are larger, more complex figurines (often warriors) from Veracruz, Mexico.

A number of the Peabody’s ocarinas were brought back in the late nineteenth century by George Byron Gordon, who led a museum expedition into the Ulua Valley in Honduras. His finds were mostly along the Ulua River banks, leading him to theorize that they were redeposited from flooded burial sites. Others were collected by Samuel Lothrop in the mid-twentieth century in Costa Rica and Nicargua. Gordon wrote of the instruments that that there is “a certain correspondence in construction, in the number of tones, and in the succession of intervals that indicates a tendency to conform to more or less definite standards. In the hands of modern musicians these instruments, played in unison, can be made to produce harmony....”

Norman Hammond, senior fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University, explained his finds at Cuello, a Maya site in northern Belize, somewhat differently. “Most are threenote, small effigies,” he said. “The three notes tend to be spaced in a major third—like the first line of Three Blind Mice.” One ocarina, in the shape of “the most interesting little man,” was about two inches tall. “You blow into the top of his head,” said Hammond, “and the holes are in his feet.

An assemblage of intact and reconstructed ocarinas recovered from Aguateca in Guatemala.

The more holes that are covered, the higher the note.”

Most of the ocarinas he discovered were broken and discarded in the trash; the intact ones typically served as grave goods. At Cuello Hammond found “a grave-offering for a child, probably a girl of six to eight years old, clearly quite high status, buried in one of the major houses around the central compound—the member of a ruling family.” There was an unusually large number of goods in the 600 B.C. grave, including an ocarina, a precious blue jade bead (sourced from several hundred miles away), a marine shell pendant, and four pottery bowls, which Hammond surmised she had made herself.

“The ocarina was a personal posession,” Hammond said, “in the form of a bird; you blew into its tail.” There were four tone-holes, producing five basic notes: do re mi fa so, “the first five notes of the tonic scale,” he explained. “What we have is Maya kids singing ‘do, a deer, a female deer,’ long before Julie Andrews ever did.” In a more serious vein, he observed, “This shows the tonal scale was just as present in the Americas, independently of it developing in the Old World in the historic period.”

During field work at Lubaantun, in Belize, Hammond’s team found a dump with a large number of ocarina molds, as well as flawed, discarded instruments. (The molds and instruments are now in the British Museum and the Museum of Belize.) “That dump contained a sufficiently large quantity of molds,” he said, “that we could tell that they [the ocarinas] had been made nearby” in assembly-line fashion. Most ancient ocarinas were constructed by pressing clay into a flat mold to create a design, then the sound-chamber was shaped by hand and attached. A mouthpiece was fashioned, “perhaps around a reed,” Hammond hypothesized, and, once the clay had dried leather-hard, a pointed stick was used to poke the tone holes. Hammond said the designs of the ocarinas he uncovered “are incredibly varied.” They include ballgame players; a ritual boxer in a helmet and heavy glove; women with baskets of fruit or dogs in their laps; and portraits of ancient Maya people engaged in social situations and occupations. “What’s important about that,” he concluded, “is that Maya art is usually about kings, but these are about the common people.”

“We have no evidence of how they were used,” Hammond said. “My suspicion is that they were actually toys. You don’t need a great deal of skill to play an ocarina, and there’s no particular reason to suppose that they were used in ceremonial occasions. We know they had proper instruments that they used on ceremonial occasions.”

Archaeologist Daniela Triadan of the University of Arizona tends to agree. She uncovered collections of Late Classic period (circa A.D. 600-850) figurine whistles—she prefers not to use the term ocarina—in five elite houses at Aguateca, a Maya site in Guatemala. “Every

A Costa Rican ocarina featured in the Peabody Museum’s exhibit.

house we excavated had a set of them,” she said, adding that the houses were rapidly abandoned. “We actually found them where they were probably used or kept, which is very diferent from other sites. The correlation with rooms where women and children had activities was very strong, rooms associated with cooking and weaving.”

The characters are small (three to four inches), but very detailed, and were discovered in groups ranging from eight to twenty-seven per house. Even more figurines were found in each home’s trash, ranging from nineteen to 186 per house. “Some are quite whimsical,” Triadan said, for example, a “comical, fat rodent, with big ears and a fat belly. Some are funny, like clowns or tricksters, but you also have these stereotypical roles, like a mighty warrior in a massive headdress, or a woman in highly ceremonial regalia. The characters themselves are not portraits. They’re kind of idealized, in their prime, all beautiful. Except for an old lady doing child rearing, they are all young.”

Despite Triadan’s belief that women made the instruments, there are almost no domestic activites depicted. “If women were indeed making these figurines, then I find it very interesting that they’re not emphasizing their daily activities,” she observed. “They seem to be emphasizing their other roles” of a more public nature. What’s more, “individual children are absent in the canon, which I also find interesting.”

Also missing are recognizible deities (aside from one “fat god”), which leads Triadan to conclude these figures were

Breathing Life Into Ocarinas

José Cuellar plays an ocarina at the Peabody Museum. “EVERY TIME I WENT NEAR THEM, I thought, please don’t let me drop this precious little instrument,” José Cuellar said. “If I break one it’s because the spirits don’t want me to do this. It’s a sign.” Spirits are one thing; conservators are another. When Cuellar, an anthropologist, musician, and professor emeritus musician at San Francisco State University, accepted a Hrdy Fellowship with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, he set out to catalog, play, and record ancient instruments in the museum’s collection. That caused some concerns among museum staff.

Plant-based instruments were immediately eliminated from consideration, because many had been treated with arsenic or other chemicals to deter pests. Clay ocarinas didn’t have that issue, but conservators were worried about their fragile nature and the effect that saliva and moist breath might have. It was always possible that there were toxic substances in the clay or coloration materials, too.

“We tried a number of things,” Cuellar said, to avoid direct contact with the ocarinas. “At one point I even went around Cambridge looking for those kids’ wax lips that I could use.” They settled on covering the mouthpieces with paper for the initial trial of each instrument, but for a select number that were of greater interest, Cuellar placed his lips directly on the mouthpiece, and played the ocarinas wearing gloves with the fingertips removed. “It was not viable to really play them otherwise, so it was either I die, or my DNA gets left” on the ocarinas, he concluded.

Cuellar examined more than 200 instruments in the collection, and recorded the sounds made by about 180. “At the beginning, I approached them as a scientist, systematically,” he said. “But then I found that approaching them like ancestor-spirits residing in these instruments gave me more confidence, knowing they’d teach me how to be.” The result? “I felt I was able to breathe life into them.” And the conservators could breathe a bit easier, too—not a single ocarina was broken. —Gayle Keck

not used for “official ritual done on a small scale.” Instead, she thinks the instruments were employed to create intimate theatrical scenes in houses. “They could have been used to enact tales for kids, like puppet theaters today. They all face outward—you play them so the other person sees it,” she explained. Because the characters are seen in ceremonial garb, Triadan theorized that they may have been designed as role models for children.

Christina Halperin, an archaeologist at the Université de Montréal, believes ocarinas were informal household items used for many different purposes. “They could have been used as noise-makers by the general populace during largescale ceremonies, as part of household rituals, part of the telling and re-telling of folktales and mythic histories, and/or as part of children’s play,”she wrote in an email sent from the field in Guatemala. Halperin agreed with Triadan that some figures could be seen as role models. In her book, Maya Figurines: Intersections Between State and Household, she wrote, “Arguably, imitations of state officials in the form of figurines were not just copies of particular personages or representational ideals of social categories but were also instrumental in molding how people thought about these identities and how these identities were performed.”

Paul Healy discovered musical instruments at three Late Classic period elite burials—one man and two women— located in a temple pyramid’s substructure at Pacbitun, in Belize. “I argued that perhaps the instruments were being played and used as part of funerary processions and maybe

A four-hole bird ocarina from central Costa Rica.

This two-hole human figure was found in Honduras.

deposited in the grave with the individual being buried,” said Healy, professor emeritus at Trent University in Canada. “We know from Spanish ethno-historical accounts in the sixteenth-century Yucatán that the music was sad-sounding, doleful, and melancholy,” he added. “I’ve also seen references to ocarinas being used as whistles and bird calls, or as signals in warfare or hunting. The Spanish also commented that a lot of instruments—drums, flutes, whistles—were used by the Maya at the onset of a military attack.”

The big question that intrigues most archaeologists is what these ancient instruments actually sounded like when played at the time. Dale Olsen, professor emeritus of ethnomusicology at Florida State University, studied more than 400 ancient ocarinas used by the Tairona civilization in Colombia, and others from the Moche and Nazca cultures in Peru. Most Tairona ocarinas he encountered had four toneholes. In that case, “you can have as many as sixteen different fingerings,” he explained. “But if you vary the air pressure, you can get many more tones.” Olsen worked with a shaman in Moche, Peru, who used an ocarina while performing ceremonies to cure illnesses. “It was a modern context of how ocarinas were used to contact spirits of the oceans and spirits of the mountains,” he said. “The shaman played the ocarina completely differently than I did, making notes slide up, creating an almost spooky feeling.”

While we’ll never understand exactly how ancient ocarinas were meant to be played, José Cuellar, who recorded them for the Peabody museum, knows the ocarina’s sound still has a capitvating effect. “One can’t help but see how people respond to it; it touches them in a really interesting way,” he said. Across the years, these small, everyday objects continue to bring a bit of wonder to the common people.

GAYLE KECK has written for National Geographic Traveler, AFAR and The Washington Post. Her article “Visiting California’s Historic Missions,” appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of American Archaeology.