{"id":"SAFR-002","label":"Matjes River pear-shaped bone bullroarer","people_or_site":"Matjes River rock shelter","country_current":"South Africa","historic_region":"Southern Cape / Matjes River mouth near Keurboomstrand (Plettenberg Bay)","macroregion":"Africa / Southern Africa","local_name":"MR 40","source_term":"bone pendant / bullroarer","source_language":"English","object_description":"Pear-shaped bone blade, 88.2 x 26.9 x 5 mm, pierced with a single hole; long catalogued as a pendant.","function_summary":"Spun to make a whirring, pulsed sound.","attestation_type":"archaeological_find","source_key":"kumbani2019","source_type":"archaeological_report","source_url":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2019.02.021","page_or_plate":"JASR 24:693-694, 697 (Table 3), 699 fig. 5, 706-709","map_confidence":"low_medium","plot_status":"plot_with_caveat","coordinate_basis":"representative coordinate; archaeological/ethnographic source does not warrant a precise ritual locality","jade_complex_role":"","blurb":"For decades MR 40 sat in the Matjes River collection as a decorated bone pendant, recovered from Layer C of the Matjes River rock shelter near Plettenberg Bay, a deposit so dense with graves that the site yielded the remains of some 120 people across several thousand years. Joshua Kumbani and colleagues, examining the southern Cape Later Stone Age material in 2019, spun replicas and compared their wear with the originals. Spinning, they found, abrades the left side of the perforation, while wearing an object as a hanging pendant abrades the upper edge; on the pear-shaped MR 40, roughly 88 mm long and still carrying traces of ochre and a fatty substance around its single hole, the wear matched the spun replicas. The replicated pendants produced a sustained, pulsing whir between about 55 and 250 Hz, in the range of bullroarers elsewhere. The one implement that failed to produce that whirring sound when spun was the object the collection had labelled the woer woer, after the echoic Afrikaans name for a spinning buzz-toy — and it failed because it is not a bullroarer at all, but an oval blade bored with two holes through its middle instead of one at its end, so lopsided that the team took it for unfinished work. Move the holes on the replica and it whirred.","pull_quote":"We conclude that one of the bone artefacts previously thought to be a pendant, MR 40, most likely functioned as an instrument to produce sound.","pull_quote_translation":"","pull_quote_cite":"Kumbani, Bradfield, Rusch & Wurz 2019, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 24:693","term_gloss":"Catalogue number for a single-perforated bone object from the Matjes River rock shelter, long classed as a pendant and reinterpreted as a spun aerophone.","cls":"unknown","class_label":"Function not recorded","color":"#6B7884","is_candidate":false,"flags":[],"f_jade_complex":false,"f_women_taboo":false,"f_women_special":false,"f_snake":false,"f_archaeology":true,"archaeology_kind":"object","date_display":"c. 7630–3450 BC","date_qualification":"Context date; object undated.","date_basis":"stratigraphic","date_confidence":"medium","date_citation":"kumbani2019, JASR 24:693-694, 706-709","sources":[{"citation":"Kumbani, Rusch, Bradfield and Wurz, “Sound producing objects from Middle Stone Age layers at Klasies River,” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 24 (2019), pp. 693-711, at pp. 693-694, 697 (Table 3), 699 (fig. 5), 706-709","url":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2019.02.021"},{"citation":"Joshua Kumbani, Sound and musical instruments in the Holocene archaeological record of South Africa, PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand (2020), article facsimile","url":"https://hdl.handle.net/10539/31086"},{"citation":"Louw (1960), via Kumbani et al. 2019"},{"citation":"Ludwig (2005), via Kumbani et al. 2019"}],"source_citations":"Kumbani, Rusch, Bradfield and Wurz, “Sound producing objects from Middle Stone Age layers at Klasies River,” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 24 (2019), pp. 693-711, at pp. 693-694, 697 (Table 3), 699 (fig. 5), 706-709; Joshua Kumbani, Sound and musical instruments in the Holocene archaeological record of South Africa, PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand (2020), article facsimile; Louw (1960), via Kumbani et al. 2019; Ludwig (2005), via Kumbani et al. 2019","source_display":"Kumbani, Rusch, Bradfield and Wurz, “Sound producing objects from Middle Stone Age layers at Klasies River,” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 24 (2019), pp. 693-711, at pp. 693-694, 697 (Table 3), 699 (fig. 5), 706-709; Joshua Kumbani, Sound and musical instruments in the Holocene archaeological record of South Africa, PhD thesis, University of…","date_citation_display":"Kumbani 2019, JASR 24:693-694, 706-709","object_display":"Pear-shaped bone blade, 88.2 x 26.9 x 5 mm, pierced with a single hole; long catalogued as a pendant.","function_display":"Spun to make a whirring, pulsed sound.","confidence_display":"low to medium","attestation_label":"archaeological find","etymology_hedge":"","people_key":"matjes river","display_name":"Matjes River pear-shaped bone bullroarer","image":{"full":"assets/objects/SAFR-002.jpg","thumb":"assets/objects/SAFR-002_thumb.jpg","credit":"Kumbani, Rusch et al., 'Aerophones in the Holocene archaeological record of South Africa' / Azania 2019, Fig. 5","license":"Scholarly figure; non-commercial research use","source_page":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0067270X.2019.1619284","rehosted":true,"representative":false,"caption":"Matjes River MR 40: reddish-brown bone blade with a drilled hole and forked end."},"slug":"safr-002-matjes-river-rock-shelter"}