PEUR2026-005 - archaeological find
Grotte des Eyzies / Grotte Richard
France - Dordogne - Les Eyzies; Magdalenian final attribution - Europe - Upper Paleolithic
Function not recorded
bramadera / rhombe Spanish
Source term: bramadera fragmentaria
Spanish bramadera (also rombo; French rhombe, English bull-roarer): the name for a Paleolithic whirled bull-roarer.
Etymology. From Spanish bramar, to bellow or roar. (medium confidence)
A decorated bone fragment dug out of the grotte des Eyzies in the Dordogne during the loosely controlled excavations of the nineteenth century, and long catalogued as a "pendant," is read by Ignacio Barandiarán as a probable broken bramadera, the perforated whirled-cord plate that Spanish archaeology counts as a Paleolithic bull-roarer. Henri Breuil published the piece in 1937 and, going by the style of its engraving, placed it in the final Magdalenian. The type itself was first read this way by Denis Peyrony, who in 1930 described the reindeer-antler object from Lalinde as in "the form of a fish without a tail," pierced at one end and decorated on a single face, and proposed it had been sounded "in the manner of the Australian churinga." Barandiarán's reassignment of the Eyzies fragment turns on that same likeness of shape, since nothing about the way the object was used survives; he offers it only as his own reading, that the broken pieces appear to him to be bull-roarers rather than ornaments.
sendos trozos de ‘colgantes’ decorados (me parecen bramaderas fragmentarias) de Raymonden/Chancelade y de ‘grotte des Eyzies’ se recuperaron en excavaciones no bien controladas del XIX y, atendiendo al estilo de sus figuras, se han adscrito respectivamente al Magdaleniense superior y al Magdaleniense final
two decorated “pendant” fragments (which appear to me to be fragmentary bull-roarers) from Raymonden/Chancelade and from the “grotte des Eyzies” were recovered in poorly controlled nineteenth-century excavations and, by the style of their figures, have been assigned respectively to the upper Magdalenian and the final Magdalenian
Barandiarán Maestu 2015, “La bramadera de hueso,” Kobie BAI 6:152
- Object
- A broken, decorated bone plate, perforated and engraved on a single face.
- Function
- Whirled-cord aerophone candidate; site-level member of the Southwestern European Paleolithic bramadera corpus.
- Map confidence
- low - Les Eyzies / Grotte Richard locality anchor from published site description; exact cave coordinate not recovered.
- Source location
- p. 152 and n. 12; Fig. 4 labels Les Eyzies