The Bullroarer Atlas

DIET2016-010 - archaeological find

Badegoule

France - Dordogne - Europe - Upper Paleolithic

Function not recorded

Dauvois/Morley comparative Paleolithic bullroarer plate, no. 4: Solutrean Badegoule, Dordogne; Don's Maps gives length 190 mm.
Dauvois/Morley comparative Paleolithic bullroarer plate, no. 4: Solutrean Badegoule, Dordogne; Don's Maps gives length 190 mm. Don's Maps; plate photo credited there to Dauvois (1989); source/text credited to Morley (2003) Image source

Source term: decorated Paleolithic bullroarer candidate

Oliver Dietrich and Jens Notroff, surveying Paleolithic objects with a likely bullroarer function, list Badegoule in the Dordogne among the prominent French sites, following Iain Morley's catalogue of such pieces. The Badegoule artifact in question is a small bone object that the abbé André Glory published in 1965 not as an instrument but as a "pendentif rhomboïdal osseux" — a rhomboidal bone pendant. Michel Dauvois, who reconstructed and acoustically tested Paleolithic rhombes, set out the criterion that divides the two readings: a true rhombe is thin, its thickness about a seventh of its width, so that it can spin on its own axis while swinging around the operator, and a comparably shaped object too thick for its width loses that double rotation and belongs instead with the pendants. Whether the Badegoule object was ever swung to make sound is undecided.

Un objet préhistorique de morphologie comparable, mais ayant une épaisseur trop forte par rapport à la largeur, ne présente plus la possibilité de la double giration, il s'apparente alors aux pendeloques.

A prehistoric object of comparable shape, but whose thickness is too great relative to its width, no longer offers the possibility of the double rotation; it then resembles the pendants.

Dauvois 1989, "Néandertal et Cro-Magnon, le renne et le son," p. 461 (citing Glory 1965, "Pendentif rhomboïdal osseux à Badegoule")
Object
Dietrich and Notroff cite Badegoule among prominent Paleolithic items with likely bullroarer function.
Function
This row keeps the named French comparison site visible with caveats until primary object reports are checked.
Map confidence
low_medium - representative coordinate; source passage does not warrant a precise findspot
Source location
Glory 1965, BSERP 15:149-150; Dauvois, "Néandertal et Cro-Magnon, le renne et le son," sec. 7 "Rhombes" (Badegoule cited by Morley/Dietrich from Dauvois 1989, p. 10; republished Revue de Paléobiologie 37(2):457-468, 2018, sec. 7 pp. 460-461); Morley 2003 pp. 34-35, Fig. 3.2(4); Dietrich and Notroff 2016, Neo-Lithics 1/16 p. 28

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