The Bullroarer Atlas

EUROPE-004 - secondary catalog

Lortet cave

France - Magdalenian IV-VI (Hautes-Pyrenees) - Europe - French Pyrenees

Sacred / spirit

Engraved bone and antler pieces from the Lortet cave assemblage, plated by Édouard Piette in 1907; the six fragmentary bone bramaderas from the...
Representative image. Engraved bone and antler pieces from the Lortet cave assemblage, plated by Édouard Piette in 1907; the six fragmentary bone bramaderas from the same excavations, five of them decorated, that Chollot later catalogued are not individually pictured here. Édouard Piette, L’Art pendant l’Âge du Renne (1907), pl. XXXIX Public domain Image source

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.

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.
Function
Whirled-cord aerophone.
Map confidence
high - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
Source location
p.154

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