The Flute

Archeological texts often list “perforated bone tubes” among artifacts unearthed from early humans’ caves and burial sites. “Perforated bone tubes,” in its clinical language, is a name that aims to describe the artifacts without assigning function. Archeologists theorize that these bones may have been brought to one’s lips and used as whistles or bird calls. Objects made for utility, for drawing birds from the air during a hunt. Maybe this is so. Yet, they could also be interpreted as flutes — things made to please the soul.

Such artifacts may hold evidence of human minds awakening to music — signs of our ancestors turning bone and air into song and of an ancient ability to feel beauty piercing our chests. An innate yearning to be beauty’s mimic.

One late January day, I visited a grassy point overlooking the bay on the west side of Maine’s Schoodic Peninsula. The Point, within Acadia National Park boundaries, has picnic tables, fire rings, and a pier jutting out into the water. The wind had swept a recent snowfall into drifts along the field. A few Buffleheads bobbed in the turning tide’s cobalt waves. I walked along the cobble shore, studying the edges of the field that are crumbling into the water.

Archeologists found a perforated bone tube at this place in 1978. They excavated it along with tools, bits of pottery, mammal and bird bones, and soft clam shells — traces left by the ancestors of the Wabanaki. Meaning “People of the Dawnland,” Wabanaki is the collective name for the tribes — the Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot — who live in what is now Maine and the Canadian Maritime provinces, their indigenous homeland.

Wabanaki ancestors lived on Schoodic Peninsula, hunting and gathering food at the Point long before it became a place where tourists like me eat their turkey sandwiches and potato chips.

Following the lead of Wabanaki community members, Olivia Olson, who recently earned a master’s from the University of Maine, calls this bone a flute. She studied the artifact and other animal bones from the Point, which is one of an estimated 2,000 “shell-bearing sites” found along the coast and islands of present-day Maine. These sites, which range in age from 2,000 to 5,000 years old, are composed of the shells of oysters, mussels, and clams and the bones and teeth of vertebrate animals — items deposited by Wabanaki ancestors.

These piles of calcium carbonate and collagen, through which blood once pulsed, are a throughline of deep Wabanaki relation with the region’s coastline and islands. Bonnie Newsom, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maine and a Penobscot Nation citizen, and her coauthors of a 2023 paper describe the significance of these sites: “For the Passamaquoddy and other Indigenous communities living in these regions, coastal shell-bearing sites are remnants of a built heritage that evoke cultural connections to place.”

Sadly, many of the sites, which may have been used until European settlers displaced Wabanaki communities, are eroding into the sea. Intensifying coastal storms and rising sea levels that wash away shell sites are yet more forces displacing the Wabanaki from their cultural heritage.

To do her research, Olson sifted through boxes of bones collected from the site, asking which species each belonged to, what each shard of bone may represent — an instrument, a fishhook, dinner. These objects, including the flute, had been housed with the National Park Service for decades and went unshared with Wabanaki communities. Reports from excavations were written dryly, with the language, emotion, and relations of the people who had been home at this place largely removed from the narrative.

For her master’s work, Olson dug into reanalyzing the once-obscured bones and into reconstructing the Point’s ecology, and she did so with Wabanaki communities at the heart of the story — sharing findings and interpretations, connecting past and present cultural practices, incorporating Indigenous language for objects and animals.

From the archive of 829 bird bones, she identified geese, cormorants, gulls, ducks, extinct Great Auks, loons, and an eagle. In her thesis, Olson traces how each of the birds was sustenance for body and spirit. From their patterns of occurrence, she suspects that Wabanaki people harvested birds on the Schoodic Peninsula predominantly during spring and fall migration. Their meat and eggs were eaten, their fat rendered into oil, their feathers woven into hats. Birds fly through Wabanaki legends: Eagles appear as fearsome leaders, loons as harbingers of good weather, and the sight of swans at dawn signifies the Great Spirit.

Places throughout the region bear their names. The town of Casco, for example, has as its root the Penobscot word kasqu, which means “heron.” Frankfort was once called “black duck stream” (kʷikʷimə́ssəwihtəkʷ in Penobscot); the Penobscot name for the Sheepscot River (Sipsaconta) meant “little birds flock or rush.” Depictions of birds also appear in both ancient and contemporary Wabanaki art — petroglyphs, baskets, beadwork, and masks.

In her thesis, Olson summarizes, “[Birds] were not only food items, but also teachers, bone providers, messengers, weather forecasters, feather repositories, guides, and musical inspiration… The multiplicity of uses points to the commonly held Indigenous philosophy of using the whole animal once harvested. The whole animal, in this case, means its meat, eggs, feathers, bones, and spirit.”

I picture the long-hidden bones she analyzed for her research. I see them lifting from their storage boxes into the sky — the lives and deaths of these winged beings finding their place in the ongoing story of Wabanaki connection to Schoodic Peninsula.

When I ask what the flute looks like, Olson pulls up images on her computer screen of the sandstone-colored bone against a black background. Roughly 5.1 inches (13 cm) in length, the flute has a larger hole on one side for the mouthpiece and three smaller holes along its length. Its edges are jagged, having splintered over the years. The flute, she has hypothesized, is made from the ulna (a wingbone) of a swan or a goose. It may be 2,000–3,000 years old.

Swans are an atypical sight in Maine today. Tundra Swans occasionally winter in the region, and Trumpeter Swans have been sighted in southern Maine in recent years. Tundra Swan bones have been identified from another Wabanaki shell heap on the island of North Haven, off the state’s central coast.

The specific bone that became this particular flute may have ended up on the Schoodic Peninsula through trade with people from another region. Or, the flute may have been an heirloom, passed down from a generation that had migrated from elsewhere. Olson said it is still unknown if people used the hollowed bone in ceremony, casual music-making, or attracting birds during a hunt. She notes that it’s possible that the flute had many uses, as these instruments appear as both pragmatic tools and magical objects in Wabanaki lore. (In Wabanaki languages, there is no known distinction between a “flute” played for music and a “whistle” played for utility.)

Flute playing may have accompanied spoken poetry and dancing; it’s thought that songs played on flutes elicited feelings such as sweet love and deep loneliness. Wabanaki legends tell of Megtimoowesoo, a fairy-like creature who played the flute, and of flutes charming people into dance. Notes drifting from a flute were said to draw lovers, game animals, and whales to the player.

Regardless of the Schoodic flute’s purpose, Olson said the artifact underscores deep spiritual connections between people and birds. These bonds are seen across cultures. Flutes made of the wing bones of vultures, swans, cranes, condors, and turkeys have been uncovered from around the world, at archeological sites in Germany (30,000–40,000 years old), France (28,000–32,000 years old), China (7,400–8,300 years old), and Peru (about 4,450 years old).

Sites across present-day Maine and the Canadian Maritimes have produced more than 30 bird bone flutes. In Port au Choix, Newfoundland, researchers uncovered 15 flutes made from the ulnae of swans, geese, and eagles at the burial site of 117 people. At the site, which appears to have been active from 3,450–4,870 years ago, caribou antlers carved into bird effigies were also found with the dead. The oldest of the flutes from the Northeastern coast of North America, from 8,000 years ago, was found in Labrador buried with a child, only 11–13 years old. Was this flute placed tenderly with the body of the child to bring them joyful music in the afterlife? To accompany their soul in its flight from the Earth?

When I read about these flutes carved from avian bones — found across cultures and ages of human existence — I wonder about the convergence of wonder. About the origins of music. About humans across space and time looking to the sky, marveling at the long-winged beings passing overhead. Mimicking the beauty of flight with notes resonating from the bones of wings.

At the Point on Schoodic Peninsula, my mind reels back 2,000 years. The picnic tables, fire rings, pier, vacation homes across the bay, and my body all melt away. Someone stands at the edge of the water. They gaze at Buffleheads bobbing on cobalt waves. Their belly is full of the meat of an eider. Later, they will sharpen the eider’s bones into fishhooks, linking life and death between land, water, and sky. They press their lips to the bone of a swan. The bone that once supported lean muscle and white feathers. The bone that once soared through the sky. The bone that still connects the Wabanaki to the music of this coast — salt and wind, waves and forest, wings and scales and shells and hands drilling holes into bone.

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This essay and the accompanying artwork are published with the permission of Olivia Olson, Emily Blackwood, Bonnie Newsom, and Rebecca Coe-Will, who each conduct research on Schoodic Peninsula’s shell heap sites in collaboration with Wabanaki communities. The author, Alice Hotopp, and artist, Coco Faber, are European descendents and not members of the Wabanaki community. Alice and Coco are both trained bird biologists. We have worked to present this story with scientific integrity and deep respect for Wabanaki histories, knowledge, and sovereignty.

The National Park Service stewards thousands of archeological sites as cultural resources. Archeological sites within Acadia National Park are now co-stewarded with the Wabanaki Community. As such, NPS preserves and protects them under federal laws, including the Archeological Resources Protection Act that regulates the excavation and removal of archeological resources and can impose penalties for unauthorized activities.

Read Olivia Olson’s 157-page master’s thesis about human-bird relationships in the Wabanaki homeland in Maine.

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This article originally appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Bird Conservation, the Member magazine of American Bird Conservancy. Learn more about the benefits of becoming an ABC Member and join today.