It’s one thing to sit in a comfortable armchair and see the world in a grain of sand. It’s quite another to hear it in a muddy shard of bone, a spool of wire or even an oddly shaped hole in the ground; to go searching for its voice on the sea bed, deep in the ice, beneath deserts, woods and cities.

Music archaeology, Graeme Lawson wryly explains, is often the study of ‘small and largely unexceptional fragments’: objects ‘we might easily have kicked out of the way’. And yet the magic, he demonstrates, is all the greater when these fragments begin to connect, slowly coalescing into sounds and stories extending back some four million years, beyond the beginning of civilisation itself.

We’re used to talking about music’s evanescence, tracing its history in documents, scores and biographies, while its sounds remain elusive. Enter Lawson – archaeologist, professor and historian, a sort of musical Indiana Jones – with a compelling alternative: music’s very tangible, material remains. What can the engraved design on a harp or the knife-marks on a bone tell us? What about the shape of a violin bridge or the tuning of a set of pan pipes? With his help, suddenly we can ‘eavesdrop on history’.

Taking a bird’s-eye view, Lawson swoops down to pluck a series of objects out of the ground – a harmonica from a 19th-century American battlefield, ‘flower flutes’ from Pre-Columbian Mexico (whose pretty name conceals a dark function), bells from a magnificent 5th-century tomb in China, a Paleolithic pipe made from a mammoth bone – spreading them out in front of us, turning inscrutable, unreadable things into lives and music.

The scope of Sound Tracks is dizzying, much more than a history of the world in 100 objects. A reverse chronology whose chapters take us from the present day back to pre-history deliberately challenges instinct and conventional wisdom. But this is not, Lawson stresses, a journey from rough music to sophistication, a linear progression of techniques and instruments. Often – startlingly – it’s the opposite.

Forget music history’s smooth teleology; music archaeology’s narrative is jagged and provisional, full of hairpin bends and dead ends. And if you ever assumed that musical innovations were the ‘casual by-product of human endeavours of a more serious, practical value’, then consider Lawson’s persuasively illustrated argument that the needs of music and musicians have themselves been drivers of technological or scientific progress.

Sound Tracks opens up plenty of big thoughts and questions. What is music? Where does it come from? What constitutes ‘meaningful’ music-making – and does it necessarily involve melody or fixed tuning? Lawson gives us a starting push into these topics, then steps back, always returning to the particular, the individual, to the objects themselves. These case studies, miniature page-turners which play out with the tension of a Sherlock Holmes mystery, are the heart of his narrative.

A secret passage in St Chad’s, Lichfield was designed to give disembodied
voice to statues on the façade

There’s the wreck of the 17th-century Swedish warship Kronan, which in 1982 yielded an ‘oblong wooden box… full to the brim with sea water’. Inside was a perfectly preserved violin and bow, as well as a perplexing number of ‘little black things like beetles’ wing cases’ – printed notes, it turns out, set free as sheet music rotted away around them. There’s the riddle of the secret passage in St Chad’s, Lichfield, revealed as an elaborate acoustic sleight-of-hand designed to give disembodied voice to statues on the façade. If you like that, you’ll love the tale of ‘medieval acoustic engineering’ in Germany: hundreds of clay pots embedded on their side in church walls, creating a resonant sound system of sorts.

The 14th-century ‘flower flutes’ from Mexico – instruments deliberately broken in two, then buried together – take on a sinister significance as part of an annual ritual slaughter, as does the magnificent orchestra preserved in the 433 BC tomb of Zheng Hou Yi at Leigudun (‘music’s equivalent of the Terracotta Army’), where bells were interred along with what we believe to be Yi’s wives, servants and followers.

Lawson’s portrait of archaeology is appealing, a discipline where humour and humility come as standard, whose most established insights can be cancelled overnight by a chance discovery. We feel his frustration with gentlemen amateurs who wrenched finds from their context, turning historical articles into ‘mere objets d’art’ . There are few more ignominious instances of this than the Aydin stone column, bearing a precious early example of musical notation, which was discovered during the construction of the Ottoman railway and used as a plant stand by the chief engineer and his wife.

Then there’s the exciting new world of instrument reconstruction – allowing us for the first time (safely, at any rate) to try to recapture sounds as well as imagine them. Lawson recounts the sad tale of the eminent Irish naturalist Robert Ball, who in 1857 became ‘the first known martyr to our cause’ when his attempt to sound an ancient bronze horn fished out of a peat bog brought on a fatal aneurysm.

The book ends with a final question: what traces will survive of our own music? It’s a chastening reminder in an age of digital ‘progress’ of the fragility of legacy, of technological transience. When our fragments are laid out on a table in their turn – gramophone records, woodwind keys, a metal piano frame – what will others learn of our lives, our priorities, our civilisation?