After 18,000 years of silence, an ancient musical instrument played its first notes. The last time anyone heard a sound from the conch shell trumpet, thick sheets of ice still covered most of Europe.

Now you can hear a marine-inspired melody from before the time of the Little Mermaid’s hot crustacean band. Acoustic scientists put their lips to ancient conch shells to figure out how humans used ...

More than 3,000 years ago, an ancient Peruvian culture fashioned conch shells into instruments, creating sounds rarely heard in music. Back in 2001, archaeologists uncovered twenty of these marine ...

Archaeologists working in northeastern Spain say a cache of conch shells was not just decorative debris from ancient shorelines but a set of carefully modified instruments that once filled Neolithic ...

Archaeologists have modeled the auditory range of conch-shell trumpets in the 9th–11th century US Southwest, proposing that the sound was key in the structuring of pre-Columbian Pueblo communities. At ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. Modified conch shell used ...

Conch shells, found buried at ancient Pueblo sites in New Mexico, were likely used as communication devices across the arid landscape. James Wainscoat via Unsplash If you were standing on the edge of ...

Miquel López-García is an archaeologist. He’s also a professional trumpeter, performing in many styles from jazz and funk to salsa and Catalan folk music. And as a child, he told The Guardian, he ...

If someone hands you a large, spiral seashell, chances are that your instinct will drive you to hold it up to your ear. Thousands of years ago, however, prehistoric communities in modern-day Spain ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. Conch shell used for signaling. Has 1 ...