Maya pyramids pose acoustic riddle
"I think the pyramids were essentially echo machines, built to inspire spiritual feelings," says acoustics expert David Lubman, who will chair a meeting on the "archaeoacoustics" of Maya temples and other archaeological sites this Tuesday in Cancun.
The Pan-American/Iberian Meeting on Acoustics will cover lots about the physics of sounds, but the session looking at the acoustics of Maya centers such as Chichen Itza, Palenque and the 1,000 B.C. Chavin culture of Peru (predecessors to the Incas), looks to be a noisy one. "Archaeologists used to give me funny looks when I talked about this," Lubman says. "But now they are definitely coming around."
In 1998, Lubman published a Journal of the Acoustical Society of America study suggesting that when someone claps in front of the " El Castillo" pyramid at the famous site of Chichen Itza in Mexico's Yucatan, a chirp echo results that sounds like the song of a quetzal bird. Subsequent studies supported the idea, and gave rise to hordes of tourists now clapping away in front of the famous monument, once a temple to the feathered snake god, Kukulkan.
Based on a lot of what I've read (here and elsewhere) I don't think there's any question the Maya were purposely incorporating echos and sound in their pyramids, but the question will always be "how" - they didn't have the science to know how to create, tune, or design for acoustics. So perhaps the first pyramid just "happened" to be perfectly suited to create an echo that played into their spirituality, and that fueled their compassion for building more pyramids.
