Building for the Ear (from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg) (2/23/25)

An image of Chaco Canyon ruins from 2012

Note: The current blog post is in dialog with Primeau and Witt (2018), and draws on my own wanderings through Vorarlberg during summer 2024 and on Herbert Kaufmann’s Sakrale Kunst und Kulturstätten to understand Vorarlberg church placement.

Primeau and Witt’s study of “Soundscapes in the Past” asks “how people heard in their wider surroundings,” and answer the question in part with GIS measures. Their insight is that landscape matters and consider significant the “location of features within the built environment and performance spaces” (875).  They use the term “soundshed” – akin to watershed – to capture the way in which sound carries or is disrupted by the topographical features of a place.

They center their study on the rich archaeological site at Chaco Canyon, proposing that the Chacoan builders utilized terrain and topography as acoustical elements in their planning. They suggest that “certain features may have been placed at their locations so individuals may have heard events occurring elsewhere” (p. 875). In other words, the Chaco Canyon residents built with an eye (an ear?) toward the soundshed that surrounded them, choosing building locations and orienting openings to best use the acoustical features of a resonant landscape.

Primeau and Witt acknowledge the embodied nature of hearing, but importantly point out that larger elements in the local environment can shape these embodied perceptions. As Tilley (2008) has shown, surfaces, inclinations, textures and other elements can reduce or amplify sound. Given the nature of a canyon environment, echoic and non-echoic surfaces abound, both as elements of the built environment and of the natural surroundings.

The stark nature of Chaco Canyon’s building ruins of mud-brick and stone (shown in Figure 1 in the left-hand column) might historically have been softened by furs and fabrics, and almost certainly had sound-absorbing storage or even people – in other words by surfaces with less resonance than the  present day. The landscape too with its swales and swells, the hills and cliffs, and even the plant life each contribute in positive and negative ways to noise propagation, particularly at distance.

  Four Views of Chaco Canyon, July 2012

Primeau and Witt  believe, with Hamilton and Whitehouse (2006) that there can be an effective and measurable distance for interactions including speaking and shouting. Their newer methodology, however, seeks to establish more objective parameters than merely personal experience. They propose SPreAD: a System for the Prediction of Acoustic Detectability.

They observe that there are various element at play, distance attenuation being only one. Sound source height plays into sound’s ability to carry, as does the atmospheric absorption loss, which varies by temperature and humidity. Nevertheless, they assert that “Like visibility, audibility can be an actively managed aspect of the built environment, and one can question the relationship between sound and site in the landscape.”

For them, the presence of ceremonial sites on higher locations had significance, for it might mean the audibility of a ceremony’s start or end by individuals elsewhere in the Canyon community. Events in one place were meant to be experienced by individuals in another, they argue, and topographical placement support that.

For a medieval monastic historian, their conch shell examples were readily translated into the positioning of churches in Austria’s Vorarlberg. Such churches had a marked preference for locations on the hills that jutted up out of the local landscape; it is the rare church indeed that lacks a view (or that can be visited without a hike or a climb!). The inventory in Kaufmann (n.d.) makes the point effective: in image after image, it is easy to get a photo of the church from down below (as it were), because they are so frequently higher than the surrounding neighborhood. This can be confirmed in person; wear good walking shoes if you want to climb to see the building in person.

The parish church of St Nikolaus in Damuls, for instance, is on a hill; if it were waterside, we’d describe its placement as on a promontory:

  Damuls -- church of St Nikolaus: image July 2024

Already more prominent than the surrounding landscape, the position of the bells for Vorarlberg churches were even further elevated through built bell towers, typically added in the 13th to the 17th centuries. Elevation proves to be even more important than central location; many of the central churches of my study are several blocks away from the heart of the medieval “downtown,” such as it was. Clearly, the acoustical benefits of being high, along with the defensible ones, made these locations prime real-estate from the perspective of church communications. Neighbors near and far could readily hear the ringing of bells for starts or ends of service – along with weather warnings or peals of other sorts (war, arrival, general announcements). This meant that the topographical benefits of height outweighed the inconveniences of a further walk or an uphill climb. Just as at Chaco Canyon, events in one place in medieval Vorarlberg were meant to be experienced by individuals somewhat distant, and, again like Chaco Canyon, the topographical placement of churches and their bells support that.

Primeau and Witt’s study reinforces the idea that sound is not just a byproduct of environment but an actively shaped and managed aspect of spatial experience. Their concept of the “soundshed” and the methodology of SPreAD provide tools for assessing how people in the past may have structured their auditory worlds with intention—whether for ceremony, communication, or social cohesion.

Applying this framework to medieval churches in the Vorarlberg highlights how different cultures have used elevation to project sound across landscapes. These parallels suggest that sound, like sight, was a crucial factor in how such historical spaces were designed and experienced. Soundshed and soundscape design mattered as much to the late medieval church-planner as to the Chacoan builder some three centuries earlier. Both actively sought to manage audibility as an element of their built environment. Building for the ear in this way reminds us that sound was never incidental—it was an integral part of how people of the past shaped and experienced their worlds.

WORKS CITED:
Hamilton, Sue, Ruth Whitehouse, Keri Brown, Pamela Combes, Edward Herring, and Mike Seager Thomas. “Phenomenology in Practice: Towards a Methodology for a ‘Subjective’ Approach.” European Journal of Archaeology 9, no. 1 (2006): 31–71.

Kaufmann, Herbert, ed. Sakrale Kunst und Kulturstätten: Landesausgabe Vorarlberg. Innsbruck: Süd-West-Presseverlag, n.d.

Primeau, Kristy, and David E. Witt.“Soundscapes in the Past: Investigating Sound at the Landscape Level.” Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 19 (2018): 875-885.

Not a Village, a Community: Building Thalbach’s Church (1609)

A glimpse of the Thalbach church and its windows

In 1609, it was time to raise the walls on the Thalbach convent church in Bregenz. Much labor went into the church, including that of the Tertiaries themselves, for the sisters helped haul stone, cleaned up the worksite, and generally contributed their own proverbial sweat of the brow to the project.

But supplies don’t come cheap, and the sisters turned to fundraising to meet their needs. Their reach was remarkably large, for contributions came from more than the local village and represented donors ranging from the princely to the servant. This suggests the importance of the Catholic network of the day, one which extended across social classes and geographical boundaries to connect the community of the faithful.

The Thalbach Chronicle records the gifts of 75 people, places, institutions, and families who supported the building enterprise. In the middle of the pack in terms of openness of purse fall the administrative gifts. The Lords of Bregenz-and-Hohenegg had their representatives pay for screens so that the sisters could be in seclusion in the church, and the representative of Duke Albrecht of Bavaria gave cash.

At first glance, the Chroniclist’s donor list appears fragmented, but a closer examination reveals patterns in the record. Most donors are identified by place, but 28 people are identified without geographical markers, including all of the donors who gave in Hellers rather than in florins. That probably reflects the convent’s (or at least the chroniclist’s) bookkeeping habits, since she clusters her entries by type of payment: florins, in kind, women’s donations (!), hellers. Some of the inconsistencies of identifying details simply reflect different decisions made at different times for the separate chapters that list donors.

A different situation holds, I think, for the women donors, who are separated into a chapter of their own (as if their cash were somehow different from their male peers). About half of the women donors lack geographical placemarkers, and are identified instead by marital status (wife, widow) and/or natal identity. This decision seems more gendered; marital affiliation “names” the woman, whereas for men, their community serves as part of their defining characteristics. This is perhaps confirmed by the fact that the unmarried women -- “noble and virtuous maidens” in the language of the chronicle – are tied to place. It seems an X+Y kind of equation: as a person one needs a name and either a place or a social connection – to be sure that the reader knows whose gift is being recorded.

For the remaining two-thirds of the gift-related entries, geography is part of this identity equation. Some donations might be predicted. Two former Thalbach sisters, now serving as leaders of convents elsewhere, sent contributions, as did the prioress of Hirschthal and a canonness from Lindau Abbey. Similarly, collective gifts came from several churches/monasteries and the city of Feldkirch, from whence many of the sisters came.  

Yet the donor pool extended far beyond the expected circles of monastic and clerical supporters. Of the 38 individual donors with geographical markers, nine are from Bregenz and five from Wolfurt – the “local citizenry” contributing their piece to the sisters whose prayers were said on their behalf. Two donations come from Hohenegg, which, though farther away, sent multiple sisters to Thalbach. But beyond these strongholds, the chroniclist records gifts from a whopping 22 other locations, one-off contributions from a mix of secular and sacred donors – the local parish priest, a member of the lesser nobility, a particular family, the mayor, an abbot.  Many donations come from Vorarlberg or the Allgäu, but others came in from places as far afield as Schwartzenburg, Zweifalten, and St Moritz in Augsburg.

What this pattern of support shows is the strength of the Catholic network, not just amongst clerical folk, but also, and especially, amongst the laity in the early seventeenth century. True, five individual parish priests donated to the building of the church. But so did widows, and tax collectors, and even a servant. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but evidently, it takes a whole Catholic community to raise a church.