Archaeologists discover 6,000-year-old musical shells which are as loud as a lawnmower

10 December 2025, 09:38

Carol of the… shells?

Miquel López-García is an archaeologist. He’s also a professional trumpeter, performing in many styles from jazz and funk to salsa and Catalan folk music.

And as a child, he told The Guardian, he spent hours experimenting with the sounds he could produce from a conch shell his parents kept in the bathroom at home. It had been used by previous generations of his family to warn their neighbours of rising flood waters.

So there was no one better placed to investigate a museum collection of 12 conch shells, believed to have been used as instruments in the Neolithic period.

The shells of Charonia lampas (the pink lady conch, now on the verge of extinction) were found in Catalonia in north east Spain, and date from around 4500 – 3000 BC. They all had their tips cut off to form a round hole that could be used as a mouthpiece.

López-García and his colleague Margarita Díaz-Andreu wanted to know what sound the conch shells made, to help them understand how they were used. They explain in their paper, published in Antiquity: “We had the extraordinary opportunity to carefully play the original instruments under the strict supervision of museum curators.”

Their first question: “Were the shell trumpets of Neolithic Catalonia capable of producing a high sound intensity that could have made them effective as signalling devices over long distances?” The answer: a resounding yes.

Read more: Uncovered 9th-century manuscript could contain earliest Western music notation

The sound from several of the shells was about as loud as a lawnmower – loud enough to be heard beyond visual range, perhaps over several kilometres.

Some shells were found within the galleries and tunnels of a complex of mines, so they may have used by the miners to communicate when they couldn’t see each other. Others could have been used to signal between settlements, or from a settlement to people in the surrounding landscape – just like the shell López-García’s ancestors used to send a flood warning.

Their second question: “Could the Neolithic shell trumpets found in Catalonia also have served as musical instruments?”

López-García’s skills as a trumpet player meant that he was able to produce two or three notes from the harmonic series on some of the shells.

He could produce more different pitches by hand-stopping, in the same way a horn-player uses their hand in the bell of the horn, and by bending the sound using his embouchure (lip position and tension). He could change the timbre of the notes, for example by blowing with a t-sound or a r-sound, and the loudness too.

So experienced players could have used the Catalan shells to make what we would call music – though whether that was their intention or not we may never know for certain.

Conch shells used to produce sound are found in societies from South America to Asia, and in archaeological sites dating back 17,000 years.

They are still used today, in ritual, folk and classical traditions. You’ll find a conch in depictions of the Hindu god Vishnu and the Roman god Neptune, as a symbol of civilisation in William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies, in Jerry Goldsmith’s Alien soundtrack and Mychael Danna’s score for Where the Crawdads Sing, in concert music by composers including John Cage and Peter Sculthorpe, and even, in the hands of conch-player extraordinaire Don Chilton, used to play Christmas carols.

“These are basically among the first instruments – or pieces of sound technology – that we know of throughout all human history,” López-García told The Guardian.

“The way you produce sound with them is very similar to modern-day brass instruments… the shells are their most ancient ancestors. These shell trumpets have made me think about what the origin of humans’ musical expression was. Was it a question of necessity and of survival? … Or was it a question of other kinds of needs that are also important to humans – to express ourselves, to create bonds and to show our love and feelings within groups?”