The Bullroarer Atlas

SAFR-002 - archaeological find

Matjes River rock shelter

South Africa - Southern Cape - Matjes River mouth near Keurboomstrand (Plettenberg Bay) - Southern Africa

Function not recorded

The Matjes River MR 40 bullroarer: a reddish-brown bone blade with a drilled hole at one end and a forked, notched tip at the other, shown...
The Matjes River MR 40 bullroarer: a reddish-brown bone blade with a drilled hole at one end and a forked, notched tip at the other, shown against a centimeter scale — the object documented here, and the earliest known archaeological bullroarer from southern Africa. Kumbani, Rusch et al., 'Aerophones in the Holocene archaeological record of South Africa' / Azania 2019, Fig. 5 Image source

MR 40 English

Source term: bone pendant / bullroarer

Catalogue number for a single-perforated bone object from the Matjes River rock shelter, long classed as a pendant and reinterpreted as a spun aerophone.

For decades MR 40 sat in the Matjes River collection as a decorated bone pendant, recovered from Layer C of the Matjes River rock shelter near Plettenberg Bay, a deposit so dense with graves that the site yielded the remains of some 120 people across several thousand years. Joshua Kumbani and colleagues, examining the southern Cape Later Stone Age material in 2019, made replicas, spun them mechanically for fifteen hours with a small electric motor in a sound studio, and compared the resulting wear to the originals. Spinning, they found, abrades the left side of the perforation, while wearing an object as a hanging pendant abrades the upper edge; on the pear-shaped MR 40, roughly 88 mm long and still carrying traces of ochre and a fatty substance around its single hole, the wear matched the spun replicas. The replicated pendants produced a sustained, pulsing whir between about 55 and 250 Hz, in the range of bullroarers elsewhere. The one implement that failed to produce that whirring sound when spun was the object the collection had labelled the woer woer, named for the echoic Afrikaans word for the spinning buzz-toy. The bullroarer reading rests on morphology, use-wear, and acoustic experiment rather than any recorded use, and its original role in the burial ground is reconstructed, not observed.

based on the shape and the placement of the use-wear on MR 40, we suggest that this implement could have functioned as an aerophone (bullroarer) that was spun to produce sound

Kumbani, Bradfield, Rusch & Wurz 2019, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 24:693-711
Object
Single-perforated Matjes River bone object long described as a pendant; use-wear, morphology, and sound experiments support reading it as a spun aerophone or bullroarer.
Function
Kumbani et al. identify MR 40 as a likely sound-producing aerophone or bullroarer; original use and context remain archaeological interpretations.
Map confidence
low_medium - representative coordinate; archaeological/ethnographic source does not warrant a precise ritual locality
Source location
JASR 24:693-694, 706-709

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