Why in the articulation of archaeological knowledge have wider sensory properties of
the material world been over looked? This article considers this question
in relation to sound. It argues that the neglect of sound is partly the product of
human transactions with instruments and media in practice. Moreover, the denial of
sound as a relevant category of archaeological inquiry arises out of modernist
notions of space-time that reside at the heart of the discipline. So while the
visual is linked with spatial properties that are resistant to change, the aural is
connected with the temporal and is considered momentary and fleeting in nature.
Still, it is argued that sound as a quality of things is fundamental to human
sensation - to being. In building upon a non-modernist notion of time where entities
and events quite distant in a linear temporality are proximate through their
simultaneous entanglement and percolation I suggest we might learn what we can
understand from tuning into the acoustic properties of the material past. But rather
than reproduce an unnecessary dualism between seeing and hearing, this endeavor will
require us to relearn how to see and hear at the same time through other,
complimentary modes of articulation and engagement.
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