By Octavio Torres Gomariz (Margarita Salas Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Alicante, visiting post-doc at the University of Barcelona)
I had the opportunity to meet ICREA Research Professor Margarita Díaz-Andreu through the ArqueólogAs project, a project dedicated to uncovering the life stories of women who devoted themselves to archaeology in the last few centuries. Shortly thereafter, I also became deeply involved in another one of her major projects that captivated my attention, Artsoundscapes. This project studies the role played by sound and music in prehistoric rock art sites and this made me reflect on the knowledge we have about these aspects in other prehistoric and even protohistoric societies. This is the case of the societies that were the focus of my doctoral research—the Punic communities of Ibiza and Formentera and their post-Talayotic neighbours in the islands of Majorca and Menorca.
I was able to pursue this interest in my application to the Margarita Salas postdoctoral fellowship financed by the NextGenerationEU fund. I had the honour of obtaining this funding with the COBAS – Colonial Balearic Soundscapes – project. This project, currently in progress, is aimed at characterising the contact of the Punic and post-Talayotic societies looking at their acoustic landscapes. I am trying to think about contact looking at how each of these two societies perceived sound and music, and to interpret the mechanisms of cultural exchange and the synergies created by contact looking at aspects beyond their economic materiality.
Terracotta of an instrumentalist playing the aulos from Es Culleram (Museo Arqueológico Nacional, nº1923/60/519, photograph by Ángel Martínez Levas)
In the last few years, the topic of music in the Punic world in general, and in particular in Ibiza, has attracted some scholarly attention. I would like to highlight the work by archaeologists Mireia López Bertrán (University of Valencia) and Agnès Garcia-Ventura (Autonomous University of Barcelona). In their work, they have analysed the material evidence to explore the agency that music had in the rituality of the Punic communities both in Ibiza and in the central and western Mediterranean. At a presentation they made on Soundscape Archaeology at the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid in 2020 they noted the absence of an archaeoacoustic study of the main Punic sanctuary cave of Ibiza, Es Culleram.
Back in Barcelona I discussed this with Margarita Díaz-Andreu and she organised a meeting with a few member of her Artsoundscapes team to talk about the possibility of testing the project’s methodology and equipment in a completely different scenario – a cave – from what they had been working so far – mainly open-air rock shelters and hilly landscapes. This would help them with their unfulfilled project of working on enclosed spaces, something they had thought to develop in Palaeolithic sites due to the impossibility of international travel during the Covid pandemic. With this in mind, we promptly began laying the foundations for the archaeoacoustic analysis of the Es Culleram cave. Following meetings with the team, logistical arrangements, and the effective support from the administration of the Consell Insular de Ibiza (heartfelt thanks to Belén Garijo Falcó and Lina Sansano Costa for their help), we were able to make the necessary arrangements for fieldwork in Es Culleram in the second half of October 2023.
Entrance to the Es Culleram cave.
The Es Culleram – or Cuieram – cave (Sant Joan de Labritja, Ibiza) was discovered in 1907 by the Societat Arqueològica Ebusitana (Ibiza’s Archaeological Society). The finding of more than six hundred complete terracotta figurines, accompanied by another thousand fragments showing a winged woman with a headdress and hair on both sides of her head, soon led to the identification of the cave as a sanctuary dedicated to Tanit, the main goddess of Punic society. Throughout the twentieth century, several archaeological excavations took place. These led to the publication of a number of studies on the objects found there, including a votive plaque from the sanctuary which was deposited in the Archaeological Museum of Alicante (MARQ), but temporarily returned to Ibiza not that long ago.
Today the Es Culleram sanctuary has become an important pilgrimage centre for many New Agers who seek divine mediation and telluric connection through rituals and offerings from very different religions. Metaphorically, the cave has recovered, more than two thousand years later, a religious use. This is very interesting on an anthropological and heritage level but must also be accompanied by a pedagogical effort. The cave is currently closed to the public due to its illegal use by some for lucrative purposes, as well inappropriate behaviour by the New Agers who have lit fires inside it. This has created serious conservation problems to the archaeological site. One does not need to be a New-Ager to perceive the magic that the place has. The team who has undertaken the archaeoacoustic tests was not an exception: the ancient Punic sanctuary of Es Culleram is located in the middle of a beautiful mountain range full of pine trees overlooking the island of Tagomago. The scenery is truly spectacular.
Our fieldwork at Es Culleram started with a preliminary analysis of the cave, its condition and potential for the application of the Artsoundscapes methodology and equipment. This was followed by the acoustic testing of the cave. The first objective of our systematic analysis was the acoustic characterisation of the cave, both inside and outside, by analysing a set of impulse responses captured using the IAG DD4 dodecahedron as a sound source and MicW n201, Sennheiser Ambeo VR and Zylia Zm-1 microphones as receivers. We – Margarita Díaz-Andreu, Diego Moreno, Joshua Kumbani, Marie-Sklodowska Curie fellow Zorana Dordevic and myself – tried to identify the propagation of sound through the cave areas by analysing the sound level, using the IAG DD4 dodecahedron as the pink noise emitter in combination with the Cesva SC202 sound level meter as the receiver. Finally, we recorded two musical excerpts of instruments that are represented in some of the terracottas from Es Culleram: a flute and a frame drum. Both anechoic recordings were reproduced by the dodecahedron loudspeaker and recorded with the Ambisonics microphones.
Debates held during fieldwork carried out at Es Culleram
Because the closure of the cave is very recent, not many people have found out about it. During our fieldwork, there were many unexpected visits, and everybody was very interested to know what we were doing. As archaeologists, it is important that we take the time to engage with the public and share with those interested the information about what we do. This obviously applies both to the local and other communities. We are social scientists and without this social involvement we will never achieve the goal of our work: to transmit, teach and value the material traces that remain of the people who inhabited the territory.
Taking measurements inside the cave
Once the fieldwork was finished, the hard work of analysing and interpretating the data obtained has started, a task carried out by the team at the University of Barcelona. It is important to note that the team who went to the field had the support of other Artsoundscapes members: Neemias Santos da Rosa, Lidia Álvarez Morales, Daniel Benítez and Berta Berengueras. I would like to thank all of them for their help and cooperation in this work, which I hope will yield results that will help us to better understand the rituals and music that took place in Es Culleram during the Punic period.
Visitors to the cave at the time the archaeoacoustic fieldwork was being undertaken.