Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 68 (2022) 101459 0278-4165/© 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. The day the music died: Making and playing bone wind instruments at La Real in Middle Horizon, Peru (600–1000 CE) Aleksa K. Alaica a, * , Luis Manuel Gonz´ alez La Rosa b , Willy Y´ epez ´ Alvarez c , Justin Jennings b, c a Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Canada b Archaeology Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada c Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada ABSTRACT Musical performance and audience participation are important activities in both group celebrations and funerary practices. This paper considers the intersection of music and ritual in shifting local mortuary traditions during state expansion in the southern Peruvian Andes. It addresses musical activities and burial rites during the Middle Horizon (MH) (600–1000 CE), a period defned by social change, population expansion and greater infuence of the Wari state. We present new evidence for shifting sound-making practices from the site of La Real in the Majes Valley of Arequipa. We mobilize morphological and acoustic analyses to determine the variation in instrument production and the likely idiosyncratic ways that participants played these objects. There is a musical tradition of manufacturing wind instruments from animal bone in the early MH (600–850 CE) followed by abandonment of these practices in the late MH (850–1000 CE). We suggest this shift correlates to a higher valuation of formalized acoustic aesthetics over collective instrument production and group musical performance. Instead of playing their own instruments at mortuary events, communities listened to music as spectators. 1. Introduction Music is essential to sustaining and transforming societies (Ong, 1967; Schofeld, 2014). Decisions on who fashions the instruments, plays the music, and listens to the performance are rarely taken lightly, with signifcant changes often signalling that broader societal shifts are occurring. The processes involved in selecting raw materials and making instruments are routinely overlooked in favor of investigating how they are played. This article explores the cessation of a musical tradition at the elite Middle Horizon mortuary site of La Real in the Majes Valley of southern Peru (600–1000 CE). The Middle Horizon Period in Majes was a time of encroaching foreign ideas, political unrest, soaring violence, and rising social inequality (Owen, 2010; Tung, 2012). The people of La Real stopped burying the dead with bone wind instruments midway through this period of rapid social change. These instruments are clas- sifed as aerophones by musicologist because their sounds result from the vibration of air. We hypothesize that the making and playing of these osseous musical instruments was part of a widespread local tradition that was replaced in the ninth century by one that favored cane panpipes and emphasized musical performances for elites. In this article, we analyze 40 aerophones from La Real that were manufactured from large mammals (N = 34) and birds (N = 6) to un- derstand the musical practices of communities at this Middle Horizon mortuary center. Our approach utilizes both a chaîne op´ eratoire framework and the materiality of instrument production to evaluate raw material access, production, and performance. We also identify possible use-wear patterns. Finally, we report on the playing of these instruments to register their acoustic range and the way these artifacts were handled during performance. As in other areas of the world (Hambleton, 2013; Hill, 2011), animals in the Andes were, and remain, essential parts of ritual activities and active agents in communicating with the divine world. Understanding the stages involved in producing bone in- struments and the species from which these materials originate permit the tentative reconstruction of the meanings attached to the animals used to make La Real’s music. The way that bone material was procured, modifed, and interred suggests that all members of the community were engaged with musical activities during the early Middle Horizon (600–1000 CE) at La Real, with the instruments’ metric variation suggesting a diverse and personalized soundscape. While the identity of who played these in- struments remains unresolved, most of the aerophones were made from animals butchered at feasts that required widespread community collaboration. Making and playing these instruments therefore rein- forced a communal ethos—many had a role in the sounds that were produced and heard. This ethos may have been inherited from the previous Early Intermediate period (EIP, 200 BCE-600 CE) when * Corresponding author. E-mail address: aleksa.alaica@ubc.ca (A.K. Alaica). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Anthropological Archaeology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jaa https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2022.101459 Received 15 October 2021; Received in revised form 2 September 2022;