BERG2018-001 - archaeological find
Utrecht, Wittevrouwenstraat 8-10 (cesspit 2O and drainage system 3U)
Netherlands - Utrecht - city centre - Europe - Low Countries
Play / practical
snorrebot Dutch
snorrebot = Dutch, 'whirring bone' (snorren, to whirr + bot, bone), the standing Dutch name for the whirled blade toy.
Twice, centuries apart, a bone whirler was lost on the same Utrecht plot. A cattle rib, pierced at one end, lay in a cesspit whose fill closed before the mid-sixteenth century; a second rib, cut and pierced the same way, sank into a drain that served the street from about 1640 into the twentieth century. Children knew what the hole was for: knot in a cord, swing the blade in a circle, and the spinning bone whirrs — faster for a higher note, slower for a lower.
Het snorrende geluid ontstaat doordat de snorrebot tijdens het slingeren om zijn eigen as draait. Door sneller of langzamer rondslingeren verandert de toonhoogte.
The whirring sound arises because the snorrebot spins on its own axis as it is swung around. Swinging faster or slower changes the pitch.
Van den Berg, Wonen aan de Wittevrouwenstraat (2018), p. 71
- Object
- Two rib blades, each with one perforation at an end: vnr 105-1, a cattle rib from the surviving older fill of cesspit 2O (fill ends in the first half of the sixteenth century), and vnr 84-1, a cut cattle-or-horse rib from drainage system 3U, Phase 3 (1640/49-1914); exact report photographs, figs. 7.2 and 7.5.
- Function
- A children's toy: swung around on a cord through the end hole; the blade spins on its own axis and whirrs, and swinging faster or slower changes the pitch.
- Map confidence
- medium_high - Centroid of the four RD excavation corners in the report colophon (EPSG:28992 -> WGS84), matching the Wittevrouwenstraat 8-10 street address; one anchor for both finds from the same plot.
- Source location
- pp. 71, 73; figs. 7.2, 7.5
- Toy / secular survival