By archaeoacoustics I mean the recovery of sounds from the time before the invention of recording. This implies that such sounds would have been recorded inadvertently, while intending to do sometring else. Not much has been written about this subject and only very few experiments have been made.

...What is probably the first publication on the subject appeared in 1969, when Richard G. Woodbridge, III related four experiments in a letter in the Proceedings of the IEEE1. In the first experiment, he could pick up the noise produced by the potter's wheel from a pot...

...Years later, similar experiments were made in Gothenburg, Sweden, by archaeology professor Paul Åström and acoustics professor Mendel Kleiner2.

Their experiments were dedicated to the analysis of the forces acting on a stylus or its equivalent (feather, vane etc.) while working on a soft surface, and to the actual recording of sound on a clay cylinder that was subsequently fired.

1.Acoustic Recordings from Antiquity, by Richard G. Woodbridge, III (Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 57, No. 8, August 1969, pp. 1465-1466).

2.The Brittle Sound of Ceramics - Can Vases Speak? by Mendel Kleiner and Paul Åström (Archaeology and Natural Science, vol. 1, 1993, pp. 66-72, Göteborg: Scandinavian Archaeometry Center, Jonsered, ISSN: 1104-3121).

From Digg.com site:
Archaeologists get ancient audio from grooves on Pompeii pottery

fjarlq submitted by fjarlq 6 days ago (via www.zalea.org...)

French archaeologists have taken pottery from ancient Pompeii and played the grooves back like a record to get the sounds of the pottery workshop, including laughter. Click "Lire la vidéo" to play the short video which contains a sample of the audio.

some person on the message board:
The author of the clip, Bilge Sehir (as acknowledged on the story link) acknowledges that the story was for an april fool's edition on Belgian TV (at the top: "Poisson d'avril de journal televise", translates to: "April fools newscast") Theres a link back to the bilgesehir.com page I first quoted ^

Description of book "Time Shards":
A researcher attempts to listen to the voices of people from a thousand years ago by reading grooves on pottery. Amazingly, this is a hard science fiction story based on actual research, and it may be possible to do this some day!

someone on a message board
The concept dates from at least the early 1960s. It was mentioned by Arthur C. Clarke in an essay that was included in his book "Profiles of the Future: An Inquirey into the Limits of the Possible," published in 1962. I recall Clarke mentioning that the sound heard most clearly was that of the potter's wheel, although I can't recall if he heard a recording himself or was told about by someone. I don't recall if he cited a reference, but that should be easy enough to check...