The Bullroarer Atlas

No. PEUR2026-012Europe

Balmori bull plaque

Spain · Llanes, Asturias · Europe · Iberia

Function not recorded Candidate only

Archaeological datec. 17,000–9500 BCMagdalenian to Azilian by attribution; the plaque itself is not dated.
A flat, roughly leaf-shaped bone plaque photographed on both faces, with a hole through its body, above a line tracing of the bull engraved on its front: head low at the left, back and horns stretching right.
Plate I. The Balmori plaque, front and back, with a tracing of its engraved bull. Image source

A great wild bull fills this flat bone plaque, its horns reaching toward one end and its sex carefully marked. It came out of Balmori cave, above the Asturian coast, in excavations of 1914 to 1917: nearly twenty centimetres of bone, broad and thin, with an old hole torn out at one end and a second bored through the body. Writing the prehistory of Asturias in 1977, Francisco Jordá Cerdá wondered whether it was a bramadera, a bullroarer.

Particulars

Object
Broad, completely flat bone plaque, 196.4 mm long as preserved, 54-60 mm wide through most of the body and 5.5-6.8 mm thick, engraved with a large bovine whose sex is marked; a broken-out hole survives at one end and a second hole is bored through the body.
Function
Not recorded. Jordá Cerdá raised the bullroarer reading as a question; the recent study treats it as a suspended plaque whose lower edge was first used to work soft materials.

Sources

  1. Francisco Jordá Cerdá, Historia de Asturias I: Prehistoria (1977), p. 134
  2. Iratxe Boneta, Corina Liesau and Adán Pérez-García, Kobie Paleoantropología 36 (2018): 21-30 View

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.