The above is an image of a 1,200 year old telephone as held in the Smithsonian Collection, you can read more
here. But this is an excerpt:
'The gourd-and-twine device, created 1,200 to 1,400 years ago, remains
tantalizingly functional—and too fragile to test out. “This is unique,”
NMAI curator Ramiro Matos, an anthropologist and archaeologist who
specializes in the study of the central Andes, tells me. “Only one was
ever discovered. It comes from the consciousness of an indigenous
society with no written language.”
We’ll never know the trial and error that went into its creation.
The marvel of acoustic engineering—cunningly constructed of two
resin-coated gourd receivers, each three-and-one-half inches long;
stretched-hide membranes stitched around the bases of the receivers; and
cotton-twine cord extending 75 feet when pulled taut—arose out of the
Chimu empire at its height. The dazzlingly innovative culture was
centered in the Río Moche Valley in northern Peru, wedged between the
Pacific Ocean and the western Andes. “The Chimu were a skillful,
inventive people,” Matos tells me as we don sterile gloves and peer into
the hollowed interiors of the gourds. The Chimu, Matos explains, were
the first true engineering society in the New World, known as much for
their artisanry and metalwork as for the hydraulic canal-irrigation
system they introduced, transforming desert into agricultural lands.'
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