Flute Lines: Experiencing Reconstructions Concerning Music

Sammanfattning: This study elevates the importance of experience, the senses and tacit knowledge in relation to archaeology with a focus on music. With this I take up a thread drawing on theoretical aspects of Polanyi’s ‘Tacit Dimension’ and ‘Ingold’s Lines’.  I review paradigms in experimental archaeology and music archaeology, and the subject of reconstruction in both.  My case study is of four individuals, whose reconstruction models are connected to artefacts perceived as flutes in the archaeological record and/or notions of prehistoric flutes.  Combining the way in which we learn by understanding others’ experiences through gesture and experience as data, my work examines these ideas in relation to wanting to find out about these flute-making people, and how their work is related to the canon of archaeology to which one might expect that it belongs, and if we can call this a tradition.  What I found was that the praxis is complex and far reaching and stretches into various ontologies through philosophy, religion, emotionalism, intellectualism, symbolism, music, tradition, imagination, experience, sensation and identity, where interrelations of the past, present and future are very evident.  I finally consider archaeology as an art which reveals parallels between archaeology itself and music.  Paradigms in archaeologies in 2013 do not effectively support this praxis of flute making despite contextual experimentation showing welcoming promise for future change.