The native populations ofCentral America (like the Aztecs hey Maya) had a great tradition linked to the creation of whistles able to reproduce natural sounds (animal sounds, the hiss of the wind, etc.), of which one of the most particular and mysterious is theEhecachichtlialso known as “Aztec whistle of death“. This is a series of whistles in ceramic and decorated in the shape of a skull or owlknown for a long time in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology, but which have been at the center of attention since the 1990s, on the occasion of a very particular discovery which took place in Mexico City. On the site of the ancient city of Tlatelolcoin 1999, archaeologists found near a temple the remains of a beheaded young manpresumably sacrificedwho had been buried clutching two of these whistles in his hands.
The ceramic artefacts were decorated with a representation of the god of death Mictlantecuhtli. One of the symbols associated by the ancient Aztecs with this deity was also the owltherefore it is no coincidence that many other whistles found in different sites were decorated with skulls or owls. Having risen to prominence thanks to the discovery of Tlatelolco, the instrument was named Ehecachichtliterm in Nahuatl language (the native language of the Aztecs, still widely used in some areas of Mexico) literally meaning “Ehecatl whistle“. Ehecatl was the Aztec god of windto whom the temple of Tlatelolco was named, near which the sacrificed young man was found.
Despite having been known to archaeologists for a long time, these whistles had never been studied in detail from the point of view ethnomusicologicalAnd we couldn’t imagine what kind of sound they could produce. This was discovered later, when Salvador Guilliem Arroyo, the archaeologist who directed the excavation campaign at Tlatelolco, realized that when blown, the whistles produced a sound very similar to a scream of human terror or to that of stormy wind. This terrible sound is generated by the air pressure inside a small chamber, through which the air flow must necessarily pass before being expelled.
Archaeologists have wondered what these particular whistles were for. According to one theory no longer accreditedthese were used by soldiers in combat for terrorize their enemies, but none of the artefacts have ever been found in contexts linked to the Aztec military world. The Ehecachichtli were instead found in funerary contextsand were therefore interpreted as grave goods to accompany the deceased (sacrificed?) into the afterlife. Some sources seem to suggest that whistles played an important role in the context of human sacrifices celebrated by the Aztecs. In the Borgia Codexa manuscript Mesoamerican enshrined in the Vatican Library (one of few survivors of the Spanish fires), the god of death Mictlantecuhtli and the god of wind Ehecatl are represented togetherand in Florentine Codexa history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico written in both Spanish and Nahuatl, it is said that whistles were blown during human sacrifices.
In any case it is very likely that the use of these tools was linked to cult of the wind. Certainly the sound they produce closely resembles that of screams of terror, but it is probably a bias cognitive linked to our contemporary imagination. Antique whistles produce a sound very similar to whistling of the wind during a stormwhile some modern reproductions were made precisely to create scarier soundsso much so that Aztec death whistles are often used in the creation of soundtracks for horror films or video games.
