Tito Bustillo rib spatula

Source term: espatula-bramadera (museum label); espatula decorada en proceso de fabricacion (original excavation reading)

bramadera: Spanish bullroarer; espatula: spatula, a flat bone tool typically read as a hide-working or decorative implement; the museum's compound label espatula-bramadera keeps both readings in one term.

From the base of Tito Bustillo's upper Magdalenian layer, square XII-C, came a worked rib 139 millimetres long, blade-shaped at one end and pointed at the other. Alfonso Moure published it in 1982 as a spatula caught mid-manufacture. Decades later, the Museo Arqueológico de Asturias displays the same accession, 07350, under a different name: espátula-bramadera, spatula-bullroarer. The layer around it dates to roughly 17,800 to 17,400 years ago.

Sobre una de las caras conserva dos representaciones de caballo dispuestas en hilera... El interior presenta un sombreado a base de trazos cortos que reproduce el pelaje...

On one face it preserves two figures of horses set in a row... Inside the outline, a shading of short strokes reproduces the coat...

Alfonso Moure Romanillo, La cueva de Tito Bustillo (Ribadesella, Asturias): El yacimiento paleolítico, p. 120

Particulars

Object

Proximal section of a rib, 139 mm long and about 20 mm wide, shaped at one end into a rounded, blade-like spatula and worked to a point at the other; no perforation is visible in the museum photograph.

Function

Not recorded.