COHEN2021-001 - archaeological find
Lagoa das Oncas, Upper Xingu (culture not identified)
Brazil - Upper Xingu - Mato Grosso - South America - Amazonia
Function not recorded
zumbidor Portuguese
Source term: zumbidor (Portuguese catalog term)
zumbidor — Portuguese, 'buzzer/whirrer'; the Brazilian catalog term for the bullroarer class.
Nearly every bullroarer in the world's collections is wood or bone; the one from Lagoa das Oncas is fired clay. Eighteen and a half centimetres of dark incised ceramic, bored at one end for its cord and worn smooth around the openings, it was brought out of the Upper Xingu by the archaeologist Pierre Becquelin and sits in the Goeldi Museum's catalogue of instruments made before the Portuguese came. The cataloguers class it by its mechanics — a rotary free aerophone — and can say nothing else: no maker's people, no date, no memory of what its clay voice was for.
Aerofone livre de interrupcao nao autofono giratorio.
Free interruptive aerophone, non-autophonic, rotary.
Cohen & Venturieri, Arqueologia musical amazonica (2021), p. 70
- Object
- Elongated incised ceramic zumbidor, 18.5 cm long, 6.4 cm at its widest, 2.0 cm thick, with a terminal bore of 0.5 x 1.2 cm and wear at its openings; distinctive incisions; MPEG inventory 2011.
- Function
- Not recorded: the Goeldi catalog classifies it organologically as a rotary free aerophone — the bullroarer class — but no cultural use survives with the object.
- Map confidence
- low - Upper Xingu headwaters anchor near Lake Ipavu, Mato Grosso — the district of Becquelin's Ipavu-phase archaeology; the specific Lagoa das Oncas could not be geolocated in open sources.
- Source location
- printed pp. 69-70 (photo p. 69, text p. 70)