The Bullroarer Atlas

GREGOR1985-001 - secondary catalog

Ukraine Paleolithic claim

Ukraine, site not specified by Gregor - Eastern Europe

Function not recorded Candidate only

A model bullroarer at the Pitt Rivers Museum — an oval wooden board wound with plastic cord — used only to represent the general form; Gregor's...
Representative image. A model bullroarer at the Pitt Rivers Museum — an oval wooden board wound with plastic cord — used only to represent the general form; Gregor's claimed Ukrainian Paleolithic find names no specific site or object. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 2009.46.16) Image source

Source term: bullroarer

The much-repeated claim that the oldest bullroarer comes from Ukraine, dated to about 17,000 B.C., traces to a single uncited line in Thomas Gregor's 1985 ethnography of the Amazonian Mehinaku, where he writes that specimens from France and Ukraine reach "well into the Paleolithic period." Gregor names no site, excavation, or object. Tracked to the archaeological literature, the claim splits apart: the dated Ukrainian Paleolithic find — six mammoth bones from Mezin, about 20,000 years old, struck with beaters and found beside ivory rattles — is read by specialists as a percussion ensemble, a "Stone Age orchestra," and not as a bullroarer at all. The genuinely secure Paleolithic bullroarers are French, not Ukrainian: incised, ochre-stained reindeer-antler rhombes from Solutrean and Magdalenian sites such as La Roche de Birol at Lalinde, Lespugue, and Laugerie Basse, several reconstructed and shown to hum when whirled. No function survives for the supposed Ukrainian piece because no such piece is securely identified; the point is mapped only as the oldest circulating claim, with the real referent corrected. The atlas now carries the better-sourced form of this 'oldest bullroarer' claim as a separate Central-European point: French archaeomusicologists place the earliest bullroarers in the Pavlovian (Gravettian Moravia), about 22,000–25,000 years ago — a claim with named specialists behind it, even if still without a figured object — superseding this Ukrainian version.

Today we know that the bullroarer is a very ancient object, specimens from France (13,000 B.C.) and the Ukraine (17,000 B.C.) dating back well into the Paleolithic period.

Gregor 1985, Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People, p. 106
Function
Comparative antiquity claim only; not source-locked to a Ukrainian site or artifact.
Map confidence
low - Ukraine country anchor retained for the oldest circulating literature claim; Gregor gives no site or object, and Mezin/Mesin is only a possible attractor, not a confirmed bullroarer.
Source location
Gregor 1985, p. 106; Morley 2003, pp. 33-36 and pp. 66-67; Bibikov 1978; Dauvois 1989, pp. 2-11

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