Çatalhöyük Building 59 antler pendant

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.

Particulars

Object

Roughly flat antler blade tapering from a squared end pierced with a single hole, the tip broken away in antiquity.

Function

Not recorded.