Maya Arqueoacoustic Trance

The Maya built many types of musical instruments, including rattling gourds filled with seeds or stones, turtle shells played with deer antlers, as well as whistles, ocarinas, modified seashells, and other wind instruments, said Zalaquett, who presented the Palenque findings at a recent meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Cancún, Mexico. "some rooms and their interconnected spaces multiply echoes and bounce them back at listeners so rapidly that sounds appear to emanate from every direction at once" The Maya apparently weren't the only ancient Americans to use architecture to manipulate sound, another research team suggests. In the Peruvian Andes, for instance, a stony underground maze may have been designed not only to amplify sound but to disorient minds. Beneath Chavín de Huántar (map), a 3,000-year old ceremonial center that predates the Inca, lies a roughly half-mile-long (one-kilometer-long) complex of underground rooms and twisty corridors, all connected by air ducts.