Meet the Metalhead Turned Anthropologist Who Plays Ancient Instruments Inspired by Birds

At an outdoor concert in Cali, Colombia, Esteban Valdivia is selecting his next instrument from what looks like a museum display. There’s an Incan deer skull, a Carchi syrinx, a flute made from the hollow quills of a condor. In all there are three dozen replicas of artifacts from ancient American civilizations that Valdivia, a classically trained flautist with a master’s degree in history and anthropology, has spent more than two decades mastering. But the object he picks up is one that he doesn’t play at all, strictly speaking: It is an instrument that plays itself.

“This is one of the most incredible objects,” Valdivia says, holding up a two-chambered clay bottle decorated with a bird perched on a tiny house. It’s a replica of an artifact from the Chorrera culture on the Ecuadorean coast, circa 1500 BCE. “It’s a sound machine,” he says. “You activate it, and the sound it makes is the same as 3,000 or 4,000 years ago.”

Valdivia lifts the bottle to his headset microphone and tilts it gently to one side, as if about to pour out the water it contains. I close my eyes and try to let it transport me back in time: before coins, before glass, before books. There is an amplified gurgle, and then, as the water pushes air through a small chamber inside the birdhouse, it bursts into song: a high whistle that leaps, wavers, and goes silent.

Whistling bottles like this one have been found from Peru to Mexico, and the otherworldly music they make has gained them a cult following. They’ve appeared on souvenir tables and in New Age ceremonies and have even been said to cause out-of-body experiences. But their original use has remained an archaeological mystery. A description from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is typical: “Little is known of how they were used before Spanish invaders ravaged the native cultures.”

Valdivia, though, has a theory, born from years traversing the globe with a rotating team of collaborators, convincing museum curators and private collectors to let them study, replicate, and play their ancient instruments. “The whole issue of sound—it’s one of the really unstudied things,” says James Zeidler, an expert on the Jama-Coaque culture that succeeded the Chorrera. “Esteban is the first person who has really gone at the issue systematically.”

Valdivia believes that this bottle isn’t just decorated with a bird; its sound is a deliberate imitation of the Gartered Violaceous Trogon’s call. In books, classes, concerts, and online videos, he argues that it’s one of dozens of artifacts that, sonically or visually, evoke particular avian species. He refers to the whistling bottles as recording devices that store for millennia the calls of birds like the Great Black Hawk and the Peruvian Screech-Owl, akin to an ancient version of the Merlin app. He calls the artisans who made them the world’s first ornithologists.

It’s an argument he hopes will resonate with attendees at today’s concert at the 2026 Colombia Birdfair, the largest annual gathering of bird enthusiasts in the world’s most bird-rich country. “The way that we are bird fanatics, they were too,” he tells the crowd. Every birder knows how the simple search for living things in the world around us can be a gateway to more fully inhabiting the present moment; Valdivia wants us to see it also as a gateway to the past.

Around the time a Chorrera potter was making the first surviving whistling bottle, the Roman philosopher Lucretius posited that the origin of human music came from imitating “the liquid voices of birds.” A continent away, Lü Buwei wrote that China’s 12-tone musical scale was copied from the birdsong of the mythical fêng huang. But by the 20th century, this kind of speculation was seen as unscientific. “Did Australopithecines sing? Did Homo erectus drum? Did Neanderthals dance?” wrote cognitive biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch. “These questions, however fascinating, will probably never be answered with certainty.”

The same could be said of the questions that interest Valdivia. Most of the cultures he studies didn’t leave behind written records. Most of the artifacts were discovered by treasure hunters, who aren’t known for record keeping, either. And then there are the Western academics who followed. When archaeologists study artifacts, they are typically looking: There’s a pervasive visual bias. “We’re looking for authenticity, for aesthetic qualities. But then that means that we often don’t even realize that there are sound qualities to the object,” says Ellen Hoobler, a specialist in ancient American art at William Paterson University.

The limited conclusions made for limited exhibit text in the museums Valdivia visited as a child. If he found flutes with birdlike decorations, they inevitably carried the vague catch-all adjective zoomorphic, or “animal-shaped.” More important to Valdivia was their silence. “The instruments were always behind glass,” he recalls. “I always wondered: How would they sound?” In hindsight, his career has been one long elaboration of that theme.

“In my life, there are two currents that flow,” says Valdivia. On one side are his undergraduate studies in musical composition and his graduate studies in history and anthropology. On the other is what Valdivia calls the esoteric, where his path unfolded in an improbable series of lucky breaks. As a teenager growing up on the coast of Argentina, he was briefly famous as the drummer for a nü-metal band. (“Metalheads get into the ancestral stuff,” he says.) As he turned to ancient instruments, he was accepted as an apprentice by Tito La Rosa, a Grammy Award–winning Peruvian sound healer. He met French medieval music specialist Pierre Hamon, who brought him to Europe to perform flute duets. A politician got him a gig preparing an exhibition for the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, granting him access to instruments in museum collections across Ecuador. Valdivia’s dad, a radiologist, helped him X-ray artifacts to understand their internal structure. 

“They say that after a train passes, there’s no way to get onboard. I’m the kind of person that, as soon as I see a train, I get on it,” Valdivia says. “Later maybe I’ll jump off, but I always get on at first.”

Perhaps the most important train he boarded was YouTube. In 2010, he and filmmaker Carolina Segre started one of the first channels dedicated to ancient American instruments. It was surprisingly popular. “To have 10,000 followers in 2010 is like having a million today,” Valdivia says. They posted interviews with historians and musicians and short documentaries about Mayan murals and the roots of Afro-Colombian music. But most of the videos feature Valdivia doing what he dreamed of as a child: explaining, crafting, and playing instruments previously locked away in museums.

Along the way, Valdivia noticed that a large percentage of ancient flutes were shaped like birds, but he never pursued the observation further. Then in 2020, when the pandemic canceled his travel plans and his son was born, he began leading online classes on how to replicate ancient instruments, teaching students all over the world how to transform clay into resonance chambers and rectangular bevels. One of his most diligent students was Darío Rocha, a young Ecuadorean ceramicist who worked as a tour guide at an astronomy museum. When travel became possible again, Valdivia came to visit. “It was like meeting a celebrity,” says Rocha. Soon he was playing bass drum at Valdivia’s concerts and co-teaching his ceramics classes. Rocha also introduced Valdivia to his sister, Diana Rocha, a budding ornithologist. She asked Valdivia a question that she had been wondering about ever since she saw a sculpture of a man with a headdress made of birds at an exhibition in Quito: Might it be possible to identify the species depicted in ancient sculptures?

Valdivia was onboard in a flash. Before long, he and the siblings were in the storeroom of the Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art in Guayaquil hunting for bird-related objects. They expected to find a few dozen; they encountered more than 4,000. “I never imagined there was such an enormous collection of pieces with birds,” Diana says. “It was incredible.” Each one gave her the feeling of spotting a new species for the first time, like a birder seeing a lifer. There was so much material that Valdivia suggested they write a book. It was the beginning of something even larger.

In the past three years, Valdivia and his collaborators have published eight books. They’re slim volumes with large print in English and in Spanish. Nearly every page shows an artifact, a drawing of a bird, or a QR code that leads to a brief YouTube video of Valdivia or Darío Rocha demonstrating an instrument. Although he says he hopes the books will help win the respect of traditional archaeologists, they’re also, like everything he does, designed to appeal to a broad audience. 

Valdivia held a launch event for his latest work in February, in between concerts at the Colombia Birdfair. A copy of Ancestral Birds: Archaeo-Ornithology of Colombian Ceramics sat on a tiny easel, its cover photo of a squat smiling vase identified as a Crested Owl. In recent years archaeo-ornithology has been used by archaeologists, zoologists, and paleontologists to characterize a new academic subfield focused on ancient human–avian relations. But Valdivia claims it to describe his own more unorthodox approach. “What is archaeo-ornithology? Basically, it’s going birding in museums,” he says.

He pioneered this approach in Ecuador with the Rochas before bringing it to Colombia. This year, he hopes to extend it to Costa Rica and Peru. First, he photographs, X-rays, and records the sounds of an assortment of bird-related artifacts. Then he works with local ornithologists to identify the species. For the book he unveiled at the Colombia Birdfair, he collaborated with biologist and scientific illustrator Fernando Ayerbe-Quiñones, author of An Illustrated Field Guide to the Birds of Colombia. By cross-referencing the provenance of the artifacts that Valdivia documented with historical vegetation cover and the geographic distribution of birds, Ayerbe-Quiñones was able to match drawings and sculptures to specific birds of prey, parrots, and hummingbirds, and to match the sounds of wind instruments to owls and nightjars.

As Valdivia projected on the screen above him a plate encircled by stylized line drawings of a bird identified as a Sparkling Violetear, I heard murmurs in the row behind me from a pair of biologists, Verónica Valencia Montero and Natalia Vargas. As birders themselves, they knew how difficult it was to identify one of Colombia’s 163 species of hummingbirds, even when the creature was perched in front of you. How could the authors accurately determine a species from only a whistle or a line drawing on a plate? “That was the one doubt I had about the presentation,” Montero told me afterward. “How does one arrive at something so specific?” added Vargas.

Ayerbe-Quiñones acknowledges that his hummingbird identification was less definitive than some of the others in the book. “I put the species that’s most logical,” he says. There are multiple hummingbirds in the Andean montane region where the plate was found, but the electric-pulse call of the social, aggressive Sparkling Violetear is ubiquitous.

A half-dozen experts I spoke to for this story debated some of the other identifications. A King Vulture on a Magdalena Medio funeral urn might be an Andean Condor. A Jama-Coaque statue of a Harpy Eagle might be a bat. The sound of a Chorrera whistling vessel is pitched a little too low to be a Great Black Hawk. This uncertainty is why most traditional academics who have attempted to identify animals from ancient artifacts or even bones shy away from species-level identifications in their own work. Yet everyone I spoke with also defended Valdivia’s method. “If I go too far out on a limb, I increase my chances of being wrong, and I’d rather be right,” neotropical zooarchaeologist Peter Stahl told me. “But is it okay for him to go out on a limb? Yeah, definitely.”

For one thing, speculation is part of the scientific process. “I tell my students: Just call speculation ‘hypothesis formation’ and continue,” says Ecuadorean ornithologist Markus Tellkamp. It’s also a corrective for a fundamental defect in an academic’s approach to history: In places with scanty records, the meagerness of what can be said with scientific confidence about the past can give the false impression that these cultures themselves were meager. “We ought not to assume that people back then didn’t understand the natural world,” Tellkamp says. “They did. They lived from the natural world in a way that we don’t.” 

They woke up to the songs of birds, hunted birds for food, and left behind images of birds in ceramics, stone, and gold. Tellkamp’s own research shows there was an extensive bird trade stretching from the Amazon to the coast in Ecuador. He has no doubt that birds were deeply meaningful, even if he hasn’t concluded exactly what meaning they held. “You don’t carry a bird for 1,000 kilometers because you don’t care about it,” he says.

The significance of what Valdivia and his colleagues are doing rests less on any single finding than on the simple fact that they are putting the knowledge of ancient Indigenous cultures on the same plane as Western science—and bringing it to a public that will never set foot inside a museum’s locked vaults. “I think we’re doing something transcendental,” Darío Rocha told me, “like the Indigenous cultures did thousands of years ago. We’re just helping that echo reach the new generation so that they can hear and feel and perceive a little bit. Because who knows when it could disappear, be lost, be broken, be damaged, and there could be no contact with what was.”

After the final performance at the festival, a crowd formed around a folding table, as the audience took up Valdivia’s invitation to try out the instruments themselves. “It’s important that you understand that this isn’t music for musicians,” Valdivia told them. “It’s for everyone.”

This story originally ran in the Summer 2026 issue as "Listen to This." To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.