BINGHAMTON, NEW YORK—According to an IFL Science report, leaders of the Puebloan peoples who lived in Chaco Canyon between A.D. 850 and 1150 may have been able to communicate with their communities through blasts of conch shell trumpets. Such trumpets have been recovered from elite graves in the region, and are thought to have been imported over at least 620 miles from the Pacific coast. To test this idea, Ruth Van Dyke of Binghamton University and her colleagues created digital models of the sound produced by conch trumpets and how it could have traveled through five different Chacoan settlements. The researchers determined that the settlements that spread around each sandstone great house fit into the sphere of sound produced by the trumpet blasts, and surmised that the settlements may even have been designed to ensure that every resident would have been able to hear the notifications. “If leaders atop great houses needed to quickly communicate with all community residents, a conch-shell blast would have been a more effective method than relying on community residents to look in the right direction at the right time to see, for example, smoke/mirror signals,” Van Dyke explained. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Antiquity. To read about the remains of imported scarlet macaws found in buildings at Chaco Canyon, go to “Early Parrots in the Southwest.”
