The Bullroarer Atlas

MALTA2026-001 - archaeological find

Mal'ta (Mal'ta–Buret')

Russia - Irkutsk Oblast, River Belaya; Mal'ta–Buret' culture (Gravettian-age) - Asia - Siberia

Function not recorded Candidate only

Comparison image — The Mal'ta ivory plaque, snake-engraved face, with its central perforation (5 cm scale). The central hole is why it could...
Representative image. Comparison image — The Mal'ta ivory plaque, snake-engraved face, with its central perforation (5 cm scale). The central hole is why it could not have been whirled as a bullroarer; shown for the churinga comparison. R. G. Bednarik, Pleistocene Palaeoart of Asia, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 Image source

Source term: engraved ivory plaque / churinga analogue

churinga (tjurunga): among Aboriginal Australians, an incised sacred board or stone; whirled on a cord it is a bullroarer, unwhirled it is a sacred object in its own right.

Among the ivory carvings M.M. Gerasimov dug from the Mal'ta encampment on the Belaya River in the late 1920s is a small, flat plaque of mammoth tusk, engraved with nested dotted spirals on one face and three snakes on the other, and pierced by a single hole through its centre. Soviet scholars, V.E. Larichev among them, likened the engraved Mal'ta plaques to Australian churingas — the flat, incised sacred boards of which the whirled bullroarer is one form. The plaque itself cannot be a bullroarer; pierced through the middle, it will not spin. It is plotted for where it sits. Mal'ta is the type-site of the 'Ancient North Eurasian' population whose DNA later surfaces in both Europeans and Native Americans, and Joseph Campbell argued the bullroarer spread from exactly this Siberian world — carried east into America and south to Australia inside a single 'living compound' of shamanism, x-ray animal art, the spear-thrower, and totemism. On the diffusionist reading the atlas is built to test, this is the region the whole complex came from.

As it passed eastward across Siberia into America, and southeastwardly to Australia, [shamanism] traveled as but one element of a living compound that included — besides the x-ray style of animal painting and engraving, the atlatl, and the bull-roarer — an elaborate complex of social regulations, ceremonials, and associated mythological ideas designated by scholars as totemism.

Joseph Campbell, The Way of the Animal Powers (Historical Atlas of World Mythology, vol. I), 1983
Object
A flat mammoth-ivory plaque, 138 x 81 mm, carved and polished, engraved on one face with nested dotted spirals and on the other with three undulating snakes, and pierced by a single hole through its centre. Excavated by M.M. Gerasimov (1928–1930) at Mal'ta on the Belaya River west of Irkutsk; State Hermitage, St Petersburg.
Function
Not a sound instrument — recorded here for its likeness to Australian churingas and the diffusion argument.
Map confidence
low - Mal'ta site, Usolsky District, Irkutsk Oblast, on the Belaya River west of Irkutsk.
Source location
Bednarik 2013, fig. of the centrally perforated Mal'ta plaque

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