Written by one of the world foremost experts in the field of music's origins, the book's fifty short chapters trace the fascinating story of archaeology's exploration of music's prehistory, from the present day back to the first modern humans and beyond.

Along the way we discover how we have come to know what we now know about this most remarkable thread in our species' story. We meet some of the archaeologists who are making the discoveries. We learn how materialities of music have become embodied in their finds, and how environmental conditions of different kinds have been found to favour different parts of the story - through desiccation, waterlogging and ice; in swamps and shipwrecks and tombs; in the ruins of our earliest cities; and in painted caves of the Upper Palaeolithic. Arriving at the present limit of the direct evidence, currently around 40,000 years ago, we cross the evidence horizon to explore signs of musical aptitudes preserved in discoveries of other sorts, from prehistoric technologies to modern human genetics, and ask what archaeologies of the future may make of our own varied musical lives.

In 350 pages the chapters follow the trail of discoveries across the globe, from medieval Europe to Aztec Mexico, and from Roman Egypt to ancient China. The evidence, it turns out, is everywhere: we only have to look for it.

Graeme Lawson is a Cambridge-based archaeologist, with a lifelong interest in music as material culture.