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| 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.
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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:
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| 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.
