Before Anyone Wrote a Word, Someone Was Already Making Instruments

The first makers worked in bone, hollowed and pierced so it would sing, and in hide, pulled tight so it would answer a hand. Those objects came before any town and before any script, which means the things themselves outran the records of them by thousands of years. For a reader who cares about craft, that order matters: the maker arrived first, and the archive followed. Any American who has stood in a gallery admiring a well-shaped instrument is looking at the far end of that same line.

With reporting from The Collector.