DIET2016-002 - archaeological find
Körtik Tepe decorated perforated bone plaques
Turkey - Upper Tigris - southeastern Anatolia - Near East
Function not recorded
Source term: decorated perforated bone plaques / bullroarer
At least eleven decorated bone plaques from Körtik Tepe, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement on the Upper Tigris, were recovered from graves, the more complete examples perforated at the narrow end so they could be fixed to a cord. Where a perforation survives it is always a single hole, set at or beside a narrow tip and lying on the long axis -- never in the centre, never one of a pair, so none of these plaques was spun on a doubled cord in the manner of a buzzer. The carving is precise: two goats stacked in profile with eye and body-center left blank; a serpent with a lozenge eye and a slit mouth, its body doubling back in a long S-meander; a scorpion or centipede inside concentric circles, the bone still carrying traces of ochre; a painted panel of red lines and black triangles; and a band of three snakes worked as rows of hatched rhomboids. One plaque, KE-295, is cut to a symmetric lens in section, thinning evenly to both edges -- a shape chosen rather than inherited from the curve of the bone it was split from. Oliver Dietrich and Jens Notroff grouped these with similar perforated bone objects from Göbekli Tepe, Hasankeyf Höyük, and Nahal Hemar Cave and proposed they were bullroarers, instruments swung on a long cord to make sound; a hardwood replica built to the same forms and dimensions produced a deep vibrating tone. The identification stays undecided: no plaque has published dimensions, none shows the drawn-out wear a cord leaves in a whirled object, and their original use is not established.
An experimental reproduction of the presumed PPN bullroarers of hard wood serves its function very well and produces a deep vibrato sound.
Dietrich and Notroff 2016, Neo-Lithics 1/16:28-29
- Object
- Decorated bone plaques from funerary contexts, carved with goat, snake, scorpion/insect, painted geometric, and rhomboid snake-band motifs. At least eleven are figured, seven of them perforated: every intact perforation is a single hole, and in six of the seven it sits at or beside a narrow terminal on the long axis. No plaque in the assemblage carries a central hole or a pair of holes.
- Function
- Archaeological bullroarer row; original use is unclear.
- Map confidence
- low - DEFC/OREA Körtik Tepe WGS84 site coordinate; archaeological bullroarer use remains unclear.
- Source location
Page references
Neo-Lithics 1/16 pp. 27-29; Appendix objects 5-11; Siddiq, Sahin and Ozkaya 2021, Archaeological Research in Asia 26:100280, figures gr4-gr14 (publisher image sequence)
- Snake-linked