Llullaillaco Spondylus buzzing plaques

placa zumbadora

Source term: placas zumbadoras

placa zumbadora (Spanish): 'buzzing plaque', the standard South American term for a bullroarer; Gentile 2018 p. 19 n. 9 gives churinga, bullroarer, bramadera and rombo as synonyms, after Perez Bugallo 1993.

In 1999 archaeologists opened a shrine on the summit of Llullaillaco, six thousand seven hundred metres up in the Puna de Atacama, and found three Inca children and the miniature people sent up with them. One of the small figures standing at the level of the girl called La Doncella wears a bright woven band across her dress, and from a cord tied near its middle hang two polished plaques of orange Spondylus shell, drilled through and still tied. Catalogues read the assembly as a sash, or as the cord holding her dress pins. Margarita Gentile reads it as an instrument in miniature: two plaques on cords which, whirled fast enough, would clack together and then fly apart into a buzzing at once high and low, called up, she suggests, to make a serpent present at the sacrifice.

Dichos cordeles y las placas sujetas a sus extremos son arreos que, al girar con rapidez, producen zumbidos agudos y graves, además de intensos, con los que se podría haber acompañado la ceremonia en cuanto a evocar la presencia de un ofidio.

Those cords and the plaques fixed to their ends are gear that, spun rapidly, produce buzzing sounds high and low, and intense besides, with which the ceremony could have been accompanied so as to evoke the presence of a serpent.

Gentile 2018:33

Particulars

Object

Two polished pierced Spondylus plaques, one tied at each end of a cord fastened near the middle of the multicoloured tubular textile that wraps miniature female figurine LL-99-058, one of three figurines set at the same level as the mummy known as La Doncella. Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña, Salta. The plaques are miniature.

Function

Miniature sounding gear in an Inca capacocha offering: Gentile reads the paired corded Spondylus plaques as rapidly rotated placas zumbadoras whose collision and separation produced intense high and low buzzing.