Shells found in Spain could be among oldest known musical instruments | Archaeology

As a child, Miquel López García was fascinated by the conch, kept in the bathroom, that his father’s family in the Almería region of southern Spain blew to warn villagers of rising rivers and approaching floodwaters.

The hours he spent achieving that “typically powerful sound” paid off last year when the archaeologist, musicologist and professional trumpeter pressed his lips to eight conch shell trumpets. Their tones, he says, could provide insight into the lives of people in northeastern Spain 6,000 years ago.

In a paper co-authored with colleague Margarita Díaz-Andreu, the University of Barcelona researcher claims that 12 large shell trumpets found in Neolithic settlements and mines in Catalonia – and dated between the late fifth and early fourth millennia BC – may have been used as long-distance communication devices and as rudimentary musical instruments.

The fact that the shells appeared to have been collected after the Charonie lamps the sea snails they contained were dead, suggesting that they had been collected for non-culinary purposes, just as the removal of the sharp tip of the shells indicates that they were used as trumpets.

To test their theories, the two men obtained permission to conduct acoustic experiments on the eight shell trumpets, which were sufficiently intact to produce sound. In November 2024, López García managed to obtain a “really powerful and stable sound” from the shells.

“It’s quite astonishing that you get this recognizable sound from a simple instrument that is just a very slightly modified animal body,” he says. “I think the closest instrument today in terms of sound is the French horn.”

But he and Díaz-Andreu, a research professor at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies, also based at the University of Barcelona, ​​wanted to go beyond single sounds and determine the full musical potential of the shells.

“We wanted to see if any of the pieces we were playing allowed for improvisation or the exploration of sonic resources,” explains López García. “So we recorded the little improvisations that we played on these instruments. We realized that by doing different things we could shape the sound of the shell as well as the notes.”

By putting his hand in the opening of the shells, he discovered that he could change and lower their pitch, while blowing with a T sound or an R sound also changed the timbre.

“These are essentially the first instruments – or pieces of sound technology – that we know of throughout human history,” he says. “They work by the vibrations of your lips and the way you produce sound is very similar to modern brass instruments, such as trumpets and trombones; shells are their oldest ancestors.”

In their article published in the journal Antiquity, he and Díaz-Andreu argue that shell trumpets may have been used “as communication tools, either between the different communities inhabiting the region, or between these settlements and individuals working in the surrounding agricultural landscape.” They suggest that the conch shells may also have been used by workers in different galleries of the variscite mines where six of the shells were found.

“We know that this is one of the oldest and oldest sound production technologies known to man – at least on the European continent,” says López García. “The oldest conch trumpet with virtually identical characteristics to those found in Catalonia was found in the Marsoulas Cave in southern France, which is an Upper Paleolithic cave, and it is dated to around 18,000 BC. So you used almost identical instruments for 18,000 years, until the middle of the last century, when my family was using their conch in Almería.”

Like the Marsoulas conch – which lay forgotten for more than 80 years in a museum collection before it was discovered to have been modified by its prehistoric owners for use as a wind instrument – ​​the “expressive qualities of Catalan shells also suggest wider musical applications”.

As López García says: “Although these instruments had a very utilitarian ethnographic function, they are also instruments with sufficient melodic capacity to ensure an expressive musical function. We think it is plausible that beyond their utilitarian and pragmatic use, these instruments could also have been used for expressive speeches; they could meet the minimum requirements for developing music and developing expression.”

The trumpeter, who plays everything from brass band music and Dixieland jazz to salsa, funk and Catalan folk music, says the ancient shells got him thinking about how and why humans came to play instruments.

“The whole debate about how much music is a utilitarian issue and how much it is an aesthetic, expressive, emotional and much more personal issue has always really fascinated me,” he says.

“These shell trumpets got me thinking about the origins of man’s musical expression. Was it a matter of necessity and survival, as has been argued in some studies of the evolution of music? Or was it a matter of other types of needs that are also important to man – the less human material need to express oneself, to bond, and to show one’s love and feelings within groups?”