Make noise at home: Iron Age rattles from Chatal Höyük in the Levantine context

In the last twenty-five years, the topic “ancient music and sounds” in Western Asia are a topic that has been addressed and has become the focus of several research projects from the point of view of archaeologists, linguists and musicians, who used artefacts, language structure and sound reproduction to understand the immaterial heritage of sound and sound reproduction. In the realm of archaeology in particular, music instruments, noise making tools and representations of dance and music are the major tangible elements that can help in better understand the social contexts in which specific sounds were produced and employed. This contribution focuses on five closed ceramic rattles from the Iron Age levels from the site of Chatal Höyük in the Amuq that were excavated and collected by the American archaeologists who investigated the mound in the 1930s and have been processed and analysed with all other artefacts and stratigraphy.