Radiocarbon Dating of Legacy Music Instrument Collections: Example of Traditional Indian Vina from the Musée De La Musique, Paris (original) (raw)
Related papers
Radiocarbon 63/2, pp. 545-574 : Quiles, A., Emerit, S., Asensi-Amorós, V., Beck, L., Caffy, I., Delqué-Količ, E., & Guichard, H. , 2021
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03218461/document Very little is known about the manufacturing and use of ancient Egyptian instruments, and their discovery is very rare. An extensive radiocarbon (14C) dating program has been conducted on 25 ancient Egyptian musical instruments currently held at the Louvre Museum (musée du Louvre) and the Lyon Museum of Fine Arts (musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon). This study includes cordophones (harps, lyres, lutes), membranophones (drums, tambourines), idiophones (clappers, crotales), as well as wind instruments (oboe) that have entered the museum collections during the 19th century or the first half of the 20th century; consequently, the original archaeological contexts of their discoveries are poorly understood. Approximately 50 14C dates enable drawing a general overview of the instruments manufacturing. A wide variety of wood material has been identified, representing both indigenous species and imported species. Results indicate that the native flora of Egypt was exclusively used until the Third Intermediate Period when the first imports could be identified. 14C results are not always consistent with relative dates previously thought, mainly based on stylistic criteria. They demonstrate these collections hold very well-preserved objects extending over 2500 years, from the Second Intermediate Period (ca. 1700 BCE) to the start of the Islamic Period (8th century CE). This project provides important results for the knowledge of ancient Egyptian musical instrument crafts.
In diesem Beitrag werden zwei Schildkrötenpanzer aus dem Museo Provinciale "S. Castromediano" in Lecce, Italien, vorgestellt. Es sind Schallkörper von Lyren, von denen einer noch einen Teil des metallischen Fortsatzes am Ende aufweist. Beide wurden in der alten Stadt Messapie von Roca Vecchia/Lecce geborgen und datieren in das späte 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr. Leider existieren keine präzisen Angaben hinsichtlich der Fundumstände. In diesem Beitrag wird versucht, die strukturellen Merkmale und das genannte Alter dieser Leiern aus hellenistischer Zeit zu bestimmen. Das wird durch Tests ermöglicht, die am CEDAC (Centre for Dating and Diagnostic) vorgenommen wurden. Dieses Laboratorium steht in vorderster Reihe in der Ermittlung von Datierungen unter Anwendung der Radiocarbonmethode (C14) und der Materialanalyse mit Hilfe nuklearer Techniken.
Journal of Archaeological …, 2010
A total of forty-nine stringed instruments of the Conservatory Cherubini collection, at the Musical Instruments Department of the Accademia Gallery in Florence, were submitted to a dendrochronological investigation in order to date them, check the validity of their attribution and to find out more about their construction characteristics. Thirty-seven instruments were successfully dated, thereby determining the terminus post quem date of manufacture. The correlation values of the statistical cross-dating tests were generally very high. The dendrochronological analyses determined which instruments had been made from wood of the same provenance and, in some cases, from the same tree trunk. The mean chronology built from the musical instrument series, named ''Accademia Master Chronology'', is 558 years long and dates from 1396 to 1953AD. The interval between the youngest ring dated dendrochronologically and the given date of manufacture increased constantly in the course of the centuries, from a mean value of just over eleven years for instruments built in the eighteenth century, to nearly 74 years in the twentieth century, when the use of old wood from other artefacts became more frequent. Furthermore, in the Cherubini Collection, the average tree rings on violins are smaller than those of other stringed instruments; in fact, they increase in proportion to instrument size and are widest in cello and double bass.
in “Journal of Archaeological Science”, 37 (2010), pp. 192-200, 2010
A total of forty-nine stringed instruments of the Conservatory Cherubini collection, at the Musical Instruments Department of the Accademia Gallery in Florence, were submitted to a dendrochronological investigation in order to date them, check the validity of their attribution and to find out more about their construction characteristics. Thirty-seven instruments were successfully dated, thereby determining the terminus post quem date of manufacture. The correlation values of the statistical cross-dating tests were generally very high. The dendrochronological analyses determined which instruments had been made from wood of the same provenance and, in some cases, from the same tree trunk. The mean chronology built from the musical instrument series, named ''Accademia Master Chronology'', is 558 years long and dates from 1396 to 1953AD. The interval between the youngest ring dated dendrochronologically and the given date of manufacture increased constantly in the course of the centuries, from a mean value of just over eleven years for instruments built in the eighteenth century, to nearly 74 years in the twentieth century, when the use of old wood from other artefacts became more frequent. Furthermore, in the Cherubini Collection, the average tree rings on violins are smaller than those of other stringed instruments; in fact, they increase in proportion to instrument size and are widest in cello and double bass.
Dendrochronological Dating and Provenancing of String Instruments
Journal of Visualized Experiments
As part of a larger project promoting the development of historical dendrochronology in the Iberian Peninsula, ship-timbers from the Arade 1 wreck (mostly planking and framing elements), stored at the DANS/IGESPAR in Lisbon, were examined. Of these, 52 samples were identified as deciduous oak (Quercus subg. quercus) and two as chestnut (Castanea sativa). Of 24 timbers selected for dendrochronological research, 23 could be dated, placing the origin of the wood in western France and the felling of trees between AD 1579 and 1583. Their homogeneity suggests they are part of the original construction, which probably took place shortly after AD 1583.
Radiocarbon dating and authentication of ethnographic objects
Radiocarbon (2013), 55(2-3), 1800-1810.
This paper describes the contribution of the radiocarbon dating method to the authentication of ethnographic objects on some significant examples coming from the collections of the Quai Branly Museum (Paris, France). The first one is a bludgeon of hard wood from the ethnic group of Tupinambá and supposed to be brought from Brazil (South America) by Andre Thévet, cosmographer of King Francis the 1st. This object is supposedly dated from the sixteenth century. Another example concerns a series of architectural columns, brought from Peru in 1910 by Captain Paul Berthon and coming from the archaeological site of Pachacamac, the largest sanctuary on the central coast of Peru. These pieces have induced great emotion in the French scientific community, which has described them as "some vulgar fake", because of a particular decoration and also a unique typology. We will present also the dating of two Tibetan textiles and two Pre-Columbian ponchos made with feathers, which were not very documented. The last example concerns a distorted skull. It is covered with a mosaic of blue and black turquoises and belongs to a civilization anterior to the Aztecs (1300-1500 AD). All these examples illustrate the decisive contribution of radiocarbon dating to the authentication of museum objects that lack information about their origin.
Publications of the ICTM Study Group on Music Archaeology, vols. 1-3 (2013-2020)
Publications of the ICTM Study Group on Music Archaeology is a book series published by Ekho Verlag, Berlin. The ICTM Study Group on Music Archaeology was founded in the early 1980s and has a prolific history of publications. The volumes of the new series are anthologies of peer-reviewed chapters focused around a specific topic. In reflecting the wide scope of music-archaeological research world-wide, the series draws in perspectives from a range of different disciplines, including related newly emerging fields such as archaeoacoustics, but particularly encouraging both music-archaeological and ethnomusicological perspectives.
Dendrochronological dating of the Cherubini stringed instruments collection, Florence
grandramdam.fr
In 2009, the general catalogue of the Conservatory Cherubini Collection was produced. 49 stringed instruments of the collection, the most important nucleus of the Florentine and Tuscan violin-makers' school, were submitted to a dendrochronological investigation to obtain information regarding the instruments' construction dates and attribution. Sampling was carried out using a portable tree-ring measuring device, equipped with a high resolution digital camera. 37 stringed instruments were dated. The correlation values of the statistical cross-dating tests were generally very high. Apart from dating the instruments, the dendrochronological analyses permitted to determine which instruments had been made from wood of the same provenance and, in some cases, from the same tree trunk. The mean chronology built on the musical instrument series is 558 years long and dates from 1396 to 1953 AD. The master chronology is well replicated along its entire length and cross-dates well with all the other alpine Norway spruce chronologies and with the master curves of numerous other species.