{"id":"EUROPE-004","label":"Lortet cave","people_or_site":"Lortet cave","country_current":"France","historic_region":"Magdalenian IV-VI (Hautes-Pyrenees)","macroregion":"Europe / Pyrenees","local_name":"rhombe","source_term":"rhombe","source_language":"","object_description":"Six fragmentary bone bramaderas (five decorated, one plain), Piette excavations, now in the Musée d'Archéologie nationale: MAN 47299 (158 x 20 x 5 mm), 47349 (59 x 16 x 2 mm), 48213 (73 x 10 mm), 48244 (75 x 13 x 3 mm), 48762 (60 x 20 x 2 mm), 47283 (55 x 26 x 2 mm). All six are fragmentary.","function_summary":"Whirled-cord aerophone.","attestation_type":"secondary_catalog","source_key":"mining2026","source_type":"secondary_literature","source_url":"https://www.bizkaia.eus/fitxategiak/04/ondarea/Kobie/PDF/7/Kobie_BAI_06_web-7.pdf","page_or_plate":"Veleia 29:318 (widths); Kobie BAI 6:154 (chronology only)","map_confidence":"high","plot_status":"plot","coordinate_basis":"approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)","jade_complex_role":"","blurb":"Six fragmentary bone bullroarers were recovered from the Grotte de Lortet in the Hautes-Pyrénées by Édouard Piette in the late nineteenth century: five carry engraved decoration, the sixth is plain. They belong to a thin, elongated, fusiform type cut from rib bone, pierced at one end for a cord and whirled rapidly to produce a roar. Marthe Chollot's 1964 catalogue of the Piette Collection, in what is now the Musée d'Archéologie nationale, placed them in the Magdalenian, one in stage IV–V and the other five in V–VI. The first piece of this kind recognized by archaeology was the Lalinde holotype, which D. Peyrony in 1930 proposed had been whirled to make sound in the manner of the Australian churinga. Reviewing the whole corpus, Barandiarán cited the ethnographic interpretation his predecessors leaned on: that among some Australian groups the whirled roar was held to be the voice of the ancestors, a voice the Magdalenian hunters were said to have expected to hear resound through their own ceremonies. Piette's Lortet material also holds a second, closely related family of objects, which Barandiarán calls ellipses: slender reindeer-antler rods about as long as the bull-roarers but much thicker in section, hung by a constriction pinched into the end rather than by a hole, and too thick to buzz when whirled. Four of them survive. The finest, MAN 47418, is complete at 138 mm: a viper engraved at the centre of the piece, its head clearly drawn, its body carried in ranks of aligned transverse cuts — and the rod itself cut to the shape of a viper's body, with the head sculpted, and the eye, and the mouth. Two more were never finished. On one, the museum record reads a raised median rib as possibly stylising a viper's body, one end thinned into a suspension button that may be the animal's head; the next is a blank in preparation, like it. The fourth is a broken piece carrying chevrons. Whatever the ellipses were for, the workshop at Lortet was making serpents in series.","pull_quote":"seis fragmentarias (cinco decoradas y una lisa) de Lortet (Hautes-Pyrénées) recuperadas por E.Piette a fines del XIX y atribuidas (Chollot 1964, 143-145) una al Magdaleniense IV o V y las otras cinco al Magdaleniense V o VI","pull_quote_translation":"six fragmentary [bullroarers] (five decorated and one plain) from Lortet (Hautes-Pyrénées), recovered by E. Piette at the end of the nineteenth century and attributed (Chollot 1964, 143-145) one to Magdalenian IV or V and the other five to Magdalenian V or VI","pull_quote_cite":"Barandiarán Maestu, \"La bramadera de hueso: análisis y discusión cronocultural,\" Kobie BAI 6 (2015): 154","term_gloss":"rhombe — French for the whirled-cord aerophone known in English as a bull-roarer.","cls":"sacred","class_label":"Sacred / spirit","color":"#8A5A2B","is_candidate":false,"flags":["spirit_voice","snake"],"f_jade_complex":false,"f_women_taboo":false,"f_women_special":false,"f_snake":true,"f_archaeology":true,"archaeology_kind":"object","date_display":"c. 13,000–9000 BC","date_qualification":"","date_basis":"cultural_phase","date_confidence":"high","date_citation":"mining2026, p.154","etymology":"From Greek rhombos, a spinning, whirring thing.","literal_gloss":"French bullroarer / rhombus term","semantic_cluster":"classical_spinning_object","etymology_confidence":"medium","sources":[{"citation":"I. Barandiarán Maestu, 'Forma vs. función en tipología prehistórica,' Veleia 29 (2012), pp. 318, 324-325; I. Barandiarán Maestu, 'La bramadera de hueso,' Kobie BAI 6 (2015), p. 154, after M. Chollot, Collection Piette (1964), pp. 143-145; Musée d'Archéologie nationale, Piette collection","url":"https://www.bizkaia.eus/fitxategiak/04/ondarea/Kobie/PDF/7/Kobie_BAI_06_web-7.pdf","archive":"https://web.archive.org/web/20240530134905/https://www.bizkaia.eus/fitxategiak/04/ondarea/Kobie/PDF/7/Kobie_BAI_06_web-7.pdf"}],"source_citations":"I. Barandiarán Maestu, 'Forma vs. función en tipología prehistórica,' Veleia 29 (2012), pp. 318, 324-325; I. Barandiarán Maestu, 'La bramadera de hueso,' Kobie BAI 6 (2015), p. 154, after M. Chollot, Collection Piette (1964), pp. 143-145; Musée d'Archéologie nationale, Piette collection","source_display":"I. Barandiarán Maestu, 'Forma vs. función en tipología prehistórica,' Veleia 29 (2012), pp. 318, 324-325; I. Barandiarán Maestu, 'La bramadera de hueso,' Kobie BAI 6 (2015), p. 154, after M. Chollot, Collection Piette (1964), pp. 143-145; Musée d'Archéologie nationale, Piette collection","date_citation_display":"Mining 2026, p.154","object_display":"Six fragmentary bone bramaderas (five decorated, one plain), Piette excavations, now in the Musée d'Archéologie nationale: MAN 47299 (158 x 20 x 5 mm), 47349 (59 x 16 x 2 mm), 48213 (73 x 10 mm), 48244 (75 x 13 x 3 mm), 48762 (60 x 20 x 2 mm), 47283 (55 x 26 x 2 mm). All six are fragmentary.","function_display":"Whirled-cord aerophone.","confidence_display":"high","attestation_label":"secondary catalog","etymology_hedge":"","people_key":"lortet cave","display_name":"Lortet cave","image":{"full":"assets/objects/hunt_2026_10_03/EUROPE-004_lortet_man48762_man47349.jpg","thumb":"assets/objects/hunt_2026_10_03/thumbs/EUROPE-004_lortet_man48762_man47349_thumb.jpg","credit":"Musée d’Archéologie nationale, MAN 48762 and 47349; photo: Don Hitchcock (2015), Don’s Maps","license":"Anyone (e.g. students, teachers, lecturers, writers of scientific papers, libraries, writers of books, film/video makers, the general public) may use and reproduce, crop and alter the maps which I have drawn and photographs which I have made of objects and scenes at no charge, and without asking permission. Obviously this does not apply for any copies I have made of existing photographs, artwork and diagrams from other people, in which case copyright remains with the original photographer or artist. Nor does it apply where there is some other weird copyright law which overrides my permission.","source_page":"https://www.donsmaps.com/piette.html","rehosted":true,"representative":false,"caption":"Two engraved Magdalenian bone blades from Lortet, one finely incised, the other with toothed zigzag bands.","additional":[{"full":"assets/objects/pd_plates/piette1907_lortet_pl39.jpg","thumb":"assets/objects/pd_plates/piette1907_lortet_pl39_thumb.jpg","alt":"Numbered plate of engraved bone and antler from the Lortet cave assemblage, with long curved decorated pieces at the sides, narrow blades and small fragments between them.","credit":"Édouard Piette, L’Art pendant l’Âge du Renne (1907), pl. XXXIX","license":"Public domain","source_page":"https://www.pole-prehistoire.com/","rehosted":true,"representative":true,"caption":"Engraved bone and antler pieces from the Lortet cave assemblage."}]},"slug":"europe-004-lortet-cave"}