PAT-CHUR-001 - secondary catalog
Northern Patagonia / Tehuelche-Gunun a Kena / Patagonian-Pampas plaque-hacha corpus
Argentina - Northern Patagonia - Pampa - Bahia San Blas and related plaque-hacha find regions - South America - Southern Cone
Sacred / spirit
placas grabadas; hachas ceremoniales; tauk a ulungasum Spanish; local English translation available
Source term: churinga de piedra / stone churinga analogue
placas grabadas: Spanish, "engraved plaques" — the long-known class of decorated stone slabs from the Pampa and northern Patagonia that Bormida read as churinga analogues.
Etymology. Descriptive Spanish: 'placas grabadas' means 'engraved plaques', the archaeological label for the decorated stone slabs of the Pampa and northern Patagonia. It carries no indigenous etymology. (medium confidence)
These are not sounded instruments but engraved stone plaques from northern Patagonia and the Pampa, which the Argentine archaeologist Marcelo Bormida read as a New World counterpart to the stone churinga of central Australia. Studying three of the plaques held at the Museo Nacional de Nahuel Huapi in Bariloche in 1952, he found one plaque's decoration rubbed faint at its center, "as a consequence of prolonged friction," and classed the engraved-plaque series as a form of stone churinga of the type so common in Australia. He went further: a huge scatter of the crudest engraved plaques that Escalada and Garces had found along the coast of Bahia San Blas approached, he wrote, the condition of churinga "treasuries," the way such objects were kept among the Aranda of central Australia. The objects themselves complicate the reading: one of the three Bariloche pieces carried a loose museum card calling it a worked stone "and silversmith's mold (sic)." No evidence was ever produced that the plaques were swung, whirled, or made to sound, and later Argentine archaeologists set the Australia comparison aside, treating the plaques and engraved axes as late-Holocene portable art exchanged within regional and long-distance networks; the churinga identification is Bormida's, preserved here as history of interpretation.
En cuanto a mi interpretación de la placa grabada como una forma de «churinga» de piedra del tipo tan común en Australia, nuestras piezas no agregan nada importante y una confirmación definitiva de mi teoría debe esperar aún la aparición de nuevos hallazgos.
As for my interpretation of the engraved plaque as a form of stone "churinga" of the type so common in Australia, our pieces add nothing important, and a definitive confirmation of my theory must still await the appearance of new finds.
Bormida 1956:203 (Tres nuevas placas grabadas de la Patagonia Septentrional, Runa 7(2))
- Object
- Engraved lithic plaques and ceremonial axes from northern Patagonia and the Pampa.
- Function
- Sacred engraved-plaque / ceremonial-axe complex plotted as a user-requested churinga analogue: Bormida's interpretation supplies the churinga comparison, while Fisher, Casamiquela, Gradin, and Belloli supply sacred Elengasem-Walichu-Gualicho context.
- Map confidence
- low - representative on-land anchor at Northern Patagonia / Tehuelche-Gunun a (regional coordinate fell just offshore of the rendered coastline); not an exact findspot
- Source location
- Bormida 1956 pp. 203-204, especially opening discussion and note 2
- Spirit voice