Singing Stairs

Science News, Jan 16, 1999 by Peter Weiss

Does an echo at a Mayan temple pay homage to a sacred bird?

Clap your hands in front of the ancient Pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza, Mexico, and an odd echo replies. It's a quick, descending tone that might ring a bell in your memory--if you have ever heard a resplendent quetzal bird's call.

The fast-disappearing quetzal lives in shrinking mountain forest areas of Central America and Mexico, hundreds of miles from the Mayan temple. Yet its long, blue-green tail feathers adorned the helmets and robes of the kings of the Mayan people across a region stretching from present-day El Salvador through the state of Tabasco in Mexico.

Tour guides say that echoes off the massive pyramid recall the screams of virgins sacrificed on its summit. Archaeologists dismiss such sounds as accidents of the 1,300-year-old building's design. Now, an acoustics expert is making the remarkable claim that the ancient Maya knowingly planned the building to echo with a quetzal chirp as a way of paying homage to the revered bird.

"This might be the world's oldest known sound recording," says David Lubman, a consultant based in Westminster, Calif. He and other acoustics specialists agree that a cascade of reflections from the temple's flight of 92 stone steps generates the echo's sliding pitch, but only he proposes that the effect was intentional.

Lubman says that the idea of comparing the sound to the quetzal's call came to him after reading that the bird was considered the "messenger of the gods." At the October 1998 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Norfolk, Va., he played recordings of the bird's call and the echo while he displayed their sonograms, which are curiously alike.

The pitches of both sounds fall at about the same rate from a frequency of about 1,500 hertz to less than 1,000 Hz. He suggests that the stairs' echo is, in effect, a 1,000-year-old recording of a quetzal call. "It's not perfect," he admits, "but if you listen to a Caruso recording from 100 years ago, would you expect perfection?"

Lubman's theory of quetzal homage has evoked a dissonant echo from Maya scholars who say it is out of tune with much of what is known about ancient Mayan culture and construction. Although to some it's a tantalizing speculation, the Maya researchers say they would be better convinced if other ruins also produced such echoes.

Also, Lubman needs to explain in terms of the indigenous culture why the Maya would have created the chirp, says archaelogist Karl A. Taube of the University of California, Riverside. "I don't think he's made a very good case for that."

Endowing the building with a quetzal chirp might have helped the Maya feel as if the cherished-but-faraway bird was nearby, Lubman says. A number of aspects of the approximately 30-meter-tall pyramid suggest that it was built specifically in homage to the quetzal. A Mayan picture, for instance, depicts Kukulkan, the temple's namesake, as a person with a quetzal draped across his back.

The ancient Maya demonstrated in numerous ways the technical prowess to knowingly create the world's first "soundscape," Lubman maintains. Besides the obvious marvels of the temples and vast cities constructed without benefit of the wheel or metal tools (SN: 1/24/98, p. 56), the Maya were also the sole ancient New World people to have developed a written language, he says.

Scholars don't dispute that the ancient Maya were builders sophisticated enough to erect a structure intentionally with such an echo. However, says art historian Samuel Y. Edgerton of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., it would have to have been a copy of a building accidentally made that way.

More at issue is to what extent the Maya were enamored of the quetzal and inclined to use their skills toward such goals as birdlike echoes. Edgerton says of Lubman's idea, "He's trying to make a lot out of the quetzal bird, which was much admired by the Maya, but mainly so they could kill it to get its tail feathers for their helmets."

According to both Edgerton and Taube, Lubman has also overstated the bird's relevance to the temple where the echo is heard. The temple honors not the quetzal but a serpent, named Quetzalcoatl, that was covered with quetzal feathers, they say.

Lubman retorts that Quetzalcoatl is half quetzal, so it is not such a stretch to think that the Maya highly honored the bird half. "It could be that the Maya scholars themselves are underrating the significance of the quetzal," he suggests.

Richard D. Hansen of the University of California, Los Angeles also has doubts about Lubman's idea, but, he says, "[it] is a fascinating discovery, if it's true." He urges tests at other Mayan pyramids to see if they also chirp. Lubman reports that he has found a similar echo at a temple at Uxmal in Mexico, but in a lower, less quetzal-like, frequency range.

The skepticism of the Maya scholars comes as no surprise to Lubman because archaeologists are rarely sound-savvy, he says. "If they paid more attention to subtle sounds, they might learn more about the world in which we live," he asserts.