Vogelherd perforated ivory baton

Source term: Schwirrblatt

Schwirrblatt: German 'whirring blade', the archaeological term for a bullroarer plate.

Gustav Riek pulled a perforated blade of mammoth ivory out of the Aurignacian layer at Vogelherd in 1931 and published it three years later as a Schwirrblatt, a whirring blade: twenty-four centimetres long, four wide, with a single end hole whose bore carries helical drilling marks. That would make it among the oldest sound-makers anyone has claimed, some thirty-five thousand years old. The object itself is gone. What survives is Riek's plate, a modern measured drawing, and catalogues that now file the piece more soberly as a perforated baton - and even the identification wavers, since a later description of the Vogelherd Schwirrblatt gives it two holes rather than one.

Particulars

Object

Perforated mammoth-ivory baton, 237 x 41 x 13 mm, with a single helically marked hole; almost complete as Riek published it, and now lost.

Function

Not recorded.