Guest Lecture by Gary Tomlinson
Acheulean bifacial hand ax from Tanzania, 1.4 million years old. Redrawn by Virge Kask after Thomas Wynn, "Archaeology and Cognitive Evolution." Source: Gary Tomlinson. A Million Years of Music. The Emergency of Human Modernity. Zone Books, 2015.
Sonic Taskscapes and Musical Niche Construction – A Paleolithic Perspective
When anthropologist Tim Ingold coined the term taskscape in 1993, he aimed to activate the rather static notion of a landscape—to set it in motion as a locale defined in both space and time by human social behaviors. At that moment, the theory of niche construction as a dynamic in the evolutionary unfolding of life was much less developed than it has come to be today. The subsequent elaboration of both these conceptions—taskscape and niche construction—has brought about a productive convergence, broadening taskscape out toward evolutionary dynamics and specifying one large arena for niche construction.
This talk will examine the convergence of these two conceptions from a deep-historical perspective reaching back before Homo sapiens. It will do so by attending to an aspect of both taskscapes and niche construction that is too-little considered: sounds. How did sounds construct both the space and the temporality of prehuman and early human taskscapes? How can we build sounds into our histories of human niche construction? How, finally, did sound come to be a fundamental ingredient from the first in all humanly built environments? Broaching such questions not only widens the idea of the activities comprised in taskscape and niche construction, but also urges distinctions in the deep histories of essential human behaviors such as technology, musicking, and language.