Stunner brummer

brummer

Source term: «brummer»

brummer: Norwegian 'hummer, buzzer' (brumme, to hum), the standing Scandinavian term for a bullroarer.

Potato harvesting turned up the first flints at Stunner in 1928, and the Mikkelsen family went on picking the ploughed field until more than seven hundred pieces had reached the Oslo museum from what had once been an island in an Early Mesolithic sea. Among them is a flat slate blade holed at both short ends, broken through one hole and, before that, through an earlier hole at the same end - the kind of damage that comes of hanging something and swinging it hard. Lil Gustafson set out the bullroarer reading in full, cord through the hole and the object whirled until it hums, then weighed the piece against the examples she knew, found it too heavy, and called it an enigma; the other reading she offers, a fishing sinker, has no known parallel at any Stone Age settlement of the period. The field it came out of cannot date it, and the ten and a half thousand years belong to the settlement rather than to the stone.

Siden denne gjenstanden har vært brukket to ganger ved et hull, tyder det på kraftig slitasje, som kan passe med tolkningen som «brummer». På den annen side er den tyngre enn de «brummer» som er kjent, så foreløpig er dette en gåte.

Because this object had broken twice at a hole, that indicates heavy wear, which may fit the interpretation as a brummer. On the other hand it is heavier than the known bullroarers, so for the present it remains an enigma.

Gustafson 1998:78, Fig. 7 caption

Particulars

Object

Flat elongated piece of slate with a hole at each short end; at one end the hole is broken through, and traces survive of a further, earlier hole at the same end that had also broken through.

Function

Not recorded.