This volume examines the perception of music’s past, in all its historical, geographical and cultural breadth. The wide-ranging collection of papers address the interpretation of past music cultures from the earliest records of antiquity until the present. Geographical coverage focuses on Europe, Latin America, Greece and the Near East.

The studies presented here highlight the extent to which music archaeology has been a flourishing field of research since at least the mid-nineteenth century until the present. Many of the topics discussed, especially the nineteenth century scholars, are largely unknown within either musicology or archaeology. Such early studies contextualise the history and background through which the contemporary discipline of music archaeology emerged. Secondly, such early enquiries into music’s earliest archaeology and history contribute towards an understanding of wider cultural and musical history in the nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, and by extension, the context in which the modern disciplines of musicology and ethnomusicology originated. As a complement to such studies, critical enquiries into ancient Greek historiography, early modern music outside Europe, and contemporary perspectives on music archaeology, are offered.