Sound Tracks

A dazzling archaeological journey that illuminates the unsung role of music and sound in shaping human civilization

What if you could hear the history of the world through a bronze bell buried deep in the ground? Or an old terracotta pot? Or a long strip of a boar’s tusk?

In Sound Tracks, Graeme Lawson explores our rich and ancient history of music-making through sixty instruments—or their surviving fragments—and the thrilling accounts of the archaeological digs in which they were discovered. We stumble upon a German harmonica found on a 19th century American battlefield, a Peruvian flask from 700 A.D. designed to trill like a bird, a prehistoric flute calcified within the unlikely depths of a cave in Southwestern France—all the while unearthing the vibrant worlds of the people that once made music and meaning with them. 

One of the world’s leading archaeologists, Lawson leaves no stone unturned, ushering the reader from the present day all the way back to the dawn of time, revealing music’s role as an essential medium through which we commemorate our histories, form our identities, and communicate our dreams for the future.

Expansive in its scope and brimming with lively, unforgettable insights, Sound Tracks lends an ear to an unheard past, offering an exhilarating new portrait of music as an ancient and magical force.GRAEME LAWSON is an archaeologist, musician, and historian with a lifelong fascination for music’s fossil record. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and has held senior research fellowships at Cambridge and the Freie Universität Berlin, pioneering the application of science to music’s prehistory and tracing musical continuities through time and across continents.