The Bullroarer Atlas

PEUR2026-003 - secondary catalog

Isturitz cave

France - Pyrenees-Atlantiques - Isturitz level II; Middle Magdalenian - Europe - French Pyrenees

Function not recorded

Line drawing of the plain Isturitz bone bramadera fragment from level II, presented by Barandiaran as Fig. 1.4 after his Musee Basque review.
Line drawing of the plain Isturitz bone bramadera fragment from level II, presented by Barandiaran as Fig. 1.4 after his Musee Basque review. Barandiaran Maestu, Veleia 29 (2012), Fig. 1.4 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 fo Image source

bramadera / rhombe Spanish

Source term: bramadera

Spanish for bullroarer, from bramar, "to bellow/roar"; rhombe is the French term for the same whirled instrument.

Etymology. Standard Spanish term for bullroarer, from `bramar`, to bellow or roar; used by Barandiaran for Paleolithic bone specimens. (medium confidence)

In level II of the Isturitz cave, in the French Basque country, excavators recovered two fragments of bone bramaderas — bullroarers — dated to the Middle Magdalenian. One is decorated and was published by the Comte de Saint-Périer in his 1936 study of the cave's Grande Salle; the other is plain and went unrecorded until Ignacio Barandiarán found it in 1966 while reviewing the Musée Basque collections in Bayonne, where it sat labeled "R. de Saint-Périer 1937/Ist.II." Barandiarán places Isturitz within a corpus of these objects strung along the northern Pyrenees — Bourrouilla, Lortet, La Vache — each a long, narrow, very thin blade of polished bone, lenticular in plan, the proximal end swelling into a constricted head flanked by a small lug on either side, the whole pierced and looped with cord so the blade could be whirled to roar.

dos fragmentarias (decorada y lisa) en el nivel II de Isturitz (Pyrénées Atlantiques) reconocido como del Magdaleniense medio

two fragmentary ones (one decorated and one plain) in level II of Isturitz (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), recognized as Middle Magdalenian

Barandiarán Maestu 2015, Kobie BAI 6:154
Object
Barandiaran Maestu 2015 lists two fragmentary Isturitz bramaderas from level II, one decorated and one plain, recognized as Middle Magdalenian.
Function
Whirled-cord aerophone; site-level member of the Southwestern European Paleolithic bramadera corpus.
Map confidence
high - Isturitz/Oxocelhaya cave site coordinate from tourism GPS; not object-level provenience GPS.
Source location
p. 152 and n. 9

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