PEUR2026-005 - archaeological find

Grotte des Eyzies wolverine blade (BM Palart.102)

Dordogne - Les Eyzies; Magdalenian final attribution - Europe - Southwest France

Function not recorded

A wolverine, sixty millimetres long, is engraved along a sliver of bone a millimetre and a half thick - a fortieth of its own length - with its hackles laid in as fine hatching and an oblique line running into its shoulder that the British Museum reads as a spear. The engraver fitted the animal so tightly to the blank that there was no room left for its right paws. At the far end, past the tail, a single small hole is bored through, and the reverse face is scraped smooth and polished but left entirely blank. The piece has a disreputable history: Edouard Lartet always maintained it had been stolen by one of the workmen from Henry Christy's diggings in the Vezere valley and sold on, and it surfaced in Paris at the Exposition Universelle of 1867 before A. W. Franks bought it back for the Christy Collection in 1887. Its findspot, the grotte des Eyzies, is an attribution made on style alone - the thin bone blanks and fine hatched shading are peculiar to that cave. Wolverines are among the rarest animals in Ice Age art, fewer than twenty known, and this is generally reckoned the finest of them. Ignacio Barandiaran, cataloguing the Magdalenian bone bull-roarers, counted it instead among his instruments: a thin decorated plate, pierced at one end, engraved on a single face - the same three grounds on which Denis Peyrony had read the Lalinde blade in 1930 as a bramadera sounded 'in the manner of the Australian churinga'. He offers it as his own reading, and nothing about the way the object was used survives to settle it.

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

Thin engraved bone blade, 60 x 17.5 x 1.5 mm, carrying a wolverine in left profile on one face and left blank on the other; a single 2 mm hole is bored through one end, beyond the animal's tail.

Function

Whirled-cord aerophone candidate; site-level member of the Southwestern European Paleolithic bramadera corpus.

Map confidence

medium - Les Eyzies / Grotte Richard locality anchor from published site description; exact cave coordinate not recovered.

Source location

Page references

Barandiaran 2015 Kobie BAI 6 p. 152 and n. 12; Fig. 4 labels Les Eyzies. Barandiaran 1974 Zephyrus 25:184 no. 3, fig. 4.1, lam. I.3. British Museum Palart.102. Breuil 1937, De quelques oeuvres d'art magdaleniennes inedites ou peu connues, IPEK 1936/1937:1-16, at p. 6 fig. 6.

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