The Bullroarer Atlas

No. LOUD1929-001

Lovelock Cave horn and wood pendants

United States · Humboldt Valley, Nevada (Great Basin; historic Northern Paiute context) · North America

Function not recorded Candidate only

Archaeological datec. 1000 BC–AD 300Site-level Late Holocene horizon; neither pendant is directly dated.
Loud and Harrington's complete Plate 15, ‘Objects of horn and wood’; the horn pendant is fig. c.
Plate I. Loud and Harrington's complete Plate 15, ‘Objects of horn and wood’; the horn pendant is fig. c. Public domain · Image source
Loud and Harrington's complete Plate 48, ‘Snares, wooden pendants, etc.’; the perforated wooden pendant is fig. f.
Plate II. Loud and Harrington's complete Plate 48, ‘Snares, wooden pendants, etc.’; the perforated wooden pendant is fig. f. Public domain · Image source

Source term: horn pendant / wooden pendant

Pendant: the object class the 1929 excavators assigned to both pieces; no Indigenous name or ancient function is recorded for either.

At Lovelock Cave, a dry shelter above the old Humboldt Lake bed, horn and wood survived where they usually vanish. One pendant was worked flat from mountain-sheep horn; another, a slip of wood under four inches long, came from the sixth level of the 1924 excavation. Both were published simply as pendants. They belong to an older archaeological record at a place later associated with Northern Paiute communities, but the two finds themselves have no shared date or recorded use.

Too thick and clumsy for use as a spoon, perforation at the narrower end.

Loud and Harrington, Lovelock Cave (1929), p. 51

Particulars

Object
Two distinct pendant-class objects from Lovelock Cave. One is mountain-sheep horn, 105 x 38 x 3–5 mm, with one narrow-end perforation and a flat body. The other is wood, 3¾ in. long and ¼ in. thick, with one hole at its narrow end.

Source

L. L. Loud and M. R. Harrington, Lovelock Cave, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 25(1) (1929), pp. 51 and 113, Plates 15c and 48f (catalogue 1-19326 and 13-4929)

View the source

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.