Sounds from a base camp

Different ways of reconstructing and playing the "Grubgraben" wind instrument

Abstract

Since the discovery of a fragmented Ice Age wind instrument was made in 1994 at a base camp of Palaeolithic reindeer hunters in Grubgraben/Kammern in Lower Austria, different attempts of reconstructing the aerophone have been conducted. Due to the fact, that both ends of the bone are broken predepositionally, varying options of reconstructions have been discussed since 1997. The most prominent research questions remain: How was the instrument likely played, how did it soundand how can the sonic results of reconstruction experiments be displayed and interpreted? This paper will build a bridge from the first detailed research, carried out in the late nineties, to today’s more wide-spread field of scientific research on Palaeolithic aerophones in order to shift the attention to possibilities of reconstructing the Grubgraben artefact additional to those first attempts and to contextualise it. In the course of this, the main focus is on studies of the instrument as an end-blown flute and the resulting tonal properties and pitch ranges, as they were presented and discussed at the 11th Symposium of the International Study Group on Music Archaeology in Berlin in November 2021by Author 1 and Author 2