The Bullroarer Atlas

CATAL2007-001 - archaeological find

Çatalhöyük Building 59 antler pendant

Turkey - Konya Plain - Central Anatolia - Near East

Archaeological datec. 6610–6250 BCBuilding 59 context; object undated.

Function not recorded Candidate only

Çatalhöyük 14620.F1, the exact published photograph and scale; described as an antler pendant of the bullroarer type.
Çatalhöyük 14620.F1, the exact published photograph and scale; described as an antler pendant of the bullroarer type. Image source

Source term: crude antler pendant of the bullroarer type

An oven fill in Building 59 at Çatalhöyük gave up a rough antler blade - flat, tapering, holed near its squared end, its tip snapped off long before it was buried. The worked-bone report filed it as a crude antler pendant of the bullroarer type, a phrase that catches the site's standing puzzle: a whole class of these plain perforated plaques is catalogued as pendants despite their rough finish, and Nerissa Russell has floated loom weights, plumb bobs and bullroarers for the class alike. This one is small and dated only by the house it lay in.

a crude antler pendant of the bullroarer type

Çatalhöyük 2007 Archive Report:175
Object
Long, roughly flat antler blade tapering from a squared, single-perforated end, the tip broken away in antiquity; the report publishes no measurements, and the surviving length of roughly 7 cm is only a read off the figure's scale bar.
Function
Not recorded.
Source
Çatalhöyük 2007 Archive Report, Worked Bone section, printed p. 175 and Fig. 127; the wider crude-antler-pendant class is Nerissa Russell's and is explicitly tentative; Dietrich and Notroff, Neo-Lithics 1/16 (2016), p. 28, cite the class as PPN bullroarer evidence while cautioning that the objects are rather small
Source location
Page references

Çatalhöyük 2007 Archive Report, printed p. 175, Fig. 127; find 14620.F1; Neo-Lithics 1/16 p. 28

Source confidence
high Çatalhöyük site anchor, the same coordinate carried by the 2005 antler bullroarer row; not a building or unit coordinate.

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