Live from the cave!
I’m just back from a holiday break in Sardinia, but Bryan and I weren’t simply lolling about on sunloungers. We had an Indiana Jones moment, thanks to a special archeological team who provided us with an amazing, transformational moment inside a 6400-year-old cave.
The lead investigator was Dr. Paolo Debertolis, a former surgeon and recently retired professor of medicine, surgery and forensic dentistry at the University of Trieste in Italy. After a broken back from a swimming accident left him unable to stand for long periods as required in surgery, he’d retrained as a forensic dental odontologist, examining the structure and diseases of teeth in order to help detectives solve crimes.
Eventually his interests had turned to bio-archeology, studying the bones and health profiles of the long dead in ancient archeological and sacred sites. To Debertolis’s mind, every skeleton contained a fascinating story.
But in 2010 he shifted his focus once more, this time to the ancient structures themselves, particularly their effect on sounds.
Debertolis is a cave hunter, who travels with a team of acoustic engineers to ancient sacred sites throughout Europe to see if he can ‘reverse engineer’ the culture of these ancient civilizations by examining the structures they created. He’s carried out tests in sacred sites in Malta, Italia, Macedonia, southeast Turkey, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia, and with every site he’s discovered rooms that had been ‘tuned’ to specific sounds to provide different types of effects, providing him with a small window into the practices of the original inhabitants.
In our trip, Debertolis and his team member Nina Earl took us us to two domus de janas (‘houses of the fairies’) in Ossi and Tissi in the center of Sardinia, so named for ancient legends that tiny fairies wove golden threads in the moonlight to guard children as they slept.
More than 3500 of these little structures were clustered throughout the island. Neolithic inhabitants, armed only with stone pickaxes, had painstakingly hewn them from solid granite and limestone cliffs. Aside from their use as burial chambers and for funerary rites Debertolis and other archeologists believe that the structures were also for sacred rituals, in spaces deliberately designed to greatly amplify the resonance of human voices.
In Ossi we gathered in a room where the pre-nuralgic people who’d build the structure 6400 years ago had carefully carved rectangular cavities out of the center of certain walls – a practice that would magnify the sounds, much as a modern concert hall does.
Bryan has a deep baritone voice, as does Dr. Debertolis, so the two of them began toning an A sound (approximately one and a half octaves below middle C on a piano). Several minutes later, Bryan felt his lips vibrating heavily and even trembling. He felt a deep sense of being, but also a sense of the sound building a force that was separate from the two of them, something they couldn’t control.
For those of us in another chamber, the sound boomed and echoed through the two other rooms. Bryan and Debertolis only carried on for five or six minutes, but had it gone on for about 20 minutes, they both said they would have entered an altered state.
I’ll be covering these kinds of sounds and experiences in depth in my forthcoming book The God Notes, which is being published in 2026 by HarperCollins.
I’ll tell you much more about it in the coming months. Suffice it to say that we experienced evidence these ancient people had a sophisticated knowledge of sound and acoustics – enough to give someone a taste of the divine.
