The Bullroarer Atlas

DAUVOIS2018-001 - secondary catalog

Pavlovian rhombe — the sourced 'oldest bullroarer' claim

Czech Republic - Moravia; Pavlovian (eastern Gravettian) - Central Europe

Archaeological datec. 22,000 BCPavlovian cultural horizon, not a direct object date.

Function not recorded Candidate only

Dolní Věstonice ivory carved pendant, shown as a museum facsimile.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Dolní Věstonice ivory carved pendant, shown as a museum facsimile. Image source
Archeopark Pavlov mammoth-ivory diadem/headband copy from Pavlov I.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Archeopark Pavlov mammoth-ivory diadem/headband copy from Pavlov I. Image source

Source term: rhombe / bullroarer

rhombe (French): bullroarer — a thin, bevel-edged blade whirled on a cord to produce a roaring hum.

Michel Dauvois — the French specialist who catalogued and acoustically tested the Paleolithic bullroarers — calls the Pavlovian examples the oldest known, older than the French Solutrean and Magdalenian rhombes. That puts the earliest bullroarers in Moravia around 24,000 years ago, deep in the eastern Gravettian of Dolní Věstonice, Pavlov and Předmostí (roughly 25,000–22,000 years ago). Dauvois points to no single specimen, but two Dolní Věstonice ivories, both filed as 'pendants,' fit the form. The one shown here is an elongated ivory blade, bevelled and pierced through one end — exactly a bullroarer's outline. The second its own catalogue records as a broken fragment: the drilled end of a larger object snapped away, which is just how a whirled bullroarer would survive. Both come from the culture that fired the world's first ceramics and carved the celebrated 'Venus' figurines, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice among them — a ritual world in which a roaring, whirled voice would be entirely at home.

En Europe occidentale, ils ne semblent pas de beaucoup antérieurs au Solutréen (environ -19 000) alors qu'ils sont plus anciens en Europe Centrale, au Pavlovien (environ -24 000).

In western Europe [bullroarers] seem not much older than the Solutrean (about 19,000 BC), whereas they are older in Central Europe, in the Pavlovian (about 24,000 BC).

Michel Dauvois, 'Néandertal et Cro-Magnon, le renne et le son,' Revue de Paléobiologie 37(2), 2018, section 7 'Rhombes'
Object
Two Dolní Věstonice ivories from the Pavlovian, both catalogued as 'pendants': an elongated blade bevelled and pierced through one end, and a broken fragment preserving the drilled end of a larger piece.
Function
Not recorded — asserted only as the earliest horizon for the instrument; no object-level function.
Map confidence
low - Anchored at the Pavlovian type-site of Dolní Věstonice, in the Moravian eastern Gravettian; the claim is culture-wide, and the two candidate ivories come from this site cluster.
Source location
Page references

Dauvois 2018, section 7 'Rhombes' (pp. 457–468)

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