EUROPE-004 - secondary catalog
Lortet cave
France - Magdalenian IV-VI (Hautes-Pyrenees) - Europe
Sacred / spirit
rhombe
rhombe — French for the whirled-cord aerophone known in English as a bull-roarer; from Greek rhombos, a spinning, whirring thing.
Etymology. From Greek rhombos, a spinning, whirring thing. (medium confidence)
Six fragmentary bone bullroarers were recovered from the Grotte de Lortet in the Hautes-Pyrénées by Édouard Piette in the late nineteenth century: five carry engraved decoration, the sixth is plain. They belong to a thin, elongated, fusiform type cut from rib bone, pierced at one end for a cord and whirled rapidly to produce a roar. Marthe Chollot's 1964 catalogue of the Piette Collection at the Musée des Antiquités Nationales placed them in the Magdalenian, one in stage IV–V and the other five in V–VI. The first piece of this kind recognized by archaeology was the Lalinde holotype, which D. Peyrony in 1930 proposed had been whirled to make sound "in the manner of the Australian churinga" — the model that gave the whole barely three-dozen corpus of Magdalenian bone bullroarers its name. Reviewing that corpus, Barandiarán cited the ethnographic interpretation his predecessors leaned on: that among some Australian groups the whirled roar was held to be the voice of the ancestors, a voice the Magdalenian hunters were said to have expected to hear resound through their own ceremonies. Piette's Lortet material also holds a second, closely related family of objects, which Barandiarán calls ellipses: slender reindeer-antler rods about as long as the bull-roarers but much thicker in section, hung by a constriction pinched into the end rather than by a hole, and too thick to buzz when whirled. Four of them survive, and the museum's own records describe what is on them. The finest, MAN 47418, is complete at 138 mm: a viper engraved at the centre of the piece, its head clearly drawn, its body carried in ranks of aligned transverse cuts — and the rod itself cut to the shape of a viper's body, with the head sculpted, and the eye, and the mouth. Two more were never finished. Of one, the record notes that a raised median rib may be stylising a viper's body, with one end thinned into a suspension button that may be the animal's head; the next is logged simply as a blank in preparation, like it. The fourth is a broken piece carrying chevrons. Whatever the ellipses were for, the workshop at Lortet was making serpents in series.
seis fragmentarias (cinco decoradas y una lisa) de Lortet (Hautes-Pyrénées) recuperadas por E.Piette a fines del XIX y atribuidas (Chollot 1964, 143-145) una al Magdaleniense IV o V y las otras cinco al Magdaleniense V o VI
six fragmentary [bullroarers] (five decorated and one plain) from Lortet (Hautes-Pyrénées), recovered by E. Piette at the end of the nineteenth century and attributed (Chollot 1964, 143-145) one to Magdalenian IV or V and the other five to Magdalenian V or VI
Barandiarán Maestu, "La bramadera de hueso: análisis y discusión cronocultural," Kobie BAI 6 (2015): 154
- Object
- Six fragmentary bone bramaderas (five decorated, one plain), Piette excavations: MAN 47299 (23 mm wide, 5 mm thick; the often-quoted 158 mm length is a reconstruction of the fragment), 47349 (59 x 20 x 2 mm), 48213 (15 mm wide), 48244 (75 x 13 x 3 mm), 48762 (60 x 11 x 2 mm), 47283 (55 x 26 x 2 mm). Widths after Barandiaran Maestu 2012. All six are fragmentary.
- Function
- Whirled-cord aerophone.
- Map confidence
- high - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
- Source location
Page references
Veleia 29:318 (widths); Kobie BAI 6:154 (chronology only)
- Spirit voice
- Snake-linked