December 13, 2024
Congratulations to the individuals, projects, and publications that received AIA Awards. They will be formally recognized at the 2025 AIA Awards Ceremony, which will take place during the 126th Annual Meeting. We have contacted this year’s winners to gather insights about their projects, experiences, and what inspired them to pursue a career in archaeology.
Alexandre Pinto (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Award: The AIA «Telestes» Award for Material Culture Research in Ancient Music and Dance
Project Description: My work involved producing the first comprehensive up-to-date synthesis of Aegean Bronze Age’s sound instruments since 1998 – meaning crafted objects intended to produce sound, though not necessarily for musical purposes. I abundantly worked on 4 different instruments to determine if they could actually produce sound and to identify any traces proving they had been used. Based on these studies, I then reproduced these instruments as close as possible to the archaeological originals to experiment with their capacity to produce sound within the landscapes where they may have been used, initiating new reflections and hypotheses about their function.
What drew you to archaeology?
It was curiosity about communities of the distant past that lead me to pursue archaeologic studies.
What’s next for you professionally?
I am now expanding my focus to different regions of the world to better understand how sound instruments function and have been used throughout history. I also aim to work as much as possible with recent reconstructions of past practices, such as craftsmanship, to record as much as possible every activity we attempt and manage to recreate. I aim at working with institutions to seek to capture and preserve sounds, as they might have been heard in the past.
How did you get started on your publication?
Although ancient music was not my primary focus, concerning my Aegean Bronze Age interest, recent discoveries and new insights into music and sound instruments, uncertainties to their identification and use, sparked my growing interest in this subject. Seeking an archaeologist approach to sound-making, I set aside music instruments for which there is no material evidence. Confronted with how understudied the other sound instruments were -meaning instruments crafted to produce sound, but not being able to produce melodies as we think it now, such as idiophones and trumpet shells- I naturally developed an interest in understanding how they have been worked, and identify any evidence of their used, proof that they were not mere replicas but actually produced sound within Minoan landscapes.
Gradually, this led me to develop a passion and a determination to pursue the research of sound as it may have existed in ancient landscapes and human environment.
Questions? Learn more about AIA Awards here or reach out to awards@archaeological.org
