The Bullroarer Atlas

LOUD1929-001 - archaeological find

Lovelock Cave

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

Archaeological datec. 1000 BC–AD 300Site-level Late Holocene horizon; neither pendant is directly dated.

Function not recorded Candidate only

Loud and Harrington's complete Plate 15, ‘Objects of horn and wood’; the horn pendant is fig. c.
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.
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 assigned by the 1929 excavators to both 1-19326 and 13-4929; no Indigenous name or ancient function is recorded for either item.

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 long wooden blade, 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.

Plate 15c, 1-19326, 105 by 38 mm., 3 to 5 mm. thick, too thick and clumsy for use as a spoon, perforation at the narrower end, nearly flat, that is, without longitudinal curve.

Loud and Harrington, Lovelock Cave (1929), p. 51
Object
Two distinct pendant-class objects from Lovelock Cave. Catalogue 1-19326 (Plate 15c) is mountain-sheep horn, 105 x 38 x 3–5 mm, with one narrow-end perforation and an explicitly flat body. Catalogue 13-4929 (Plate 48f) is wood, 3¾ in. long and ¼ in. thick, with one hole at its narrow end; its width and edge profile were not published.
Function
Both are published as pendants; no ancient use is recorded.
Map confidence
low - Lovelock Cave Historic Site, Nevada (39.96254N, 118.55858W), as published by the Bureau of Land Management; the 1929 report places the cave in the Humboldt Mountains above the drained Humboldt Lake bed.
Source location
Page references

pp. 24, 51, 113; Plates 15c and 48f

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