The Bullroarer Atlas

SAFR-005 - archaeological find

Doring River rock-art shelter

South Africa - Cederberg - Doring River valley - Southern Africa

Sacred / spirit

Doring River shelter, Western Cape, South Africa: a row of eight red human figures, interpreted as depicting bull-roarers in use in a...
Doring River shelter, Western Cape, South Africa: a row of eight red human figures, interpreted as depicting bull-roarers in use in a rainmaking context (Rusch & Wurz 2020, Fig. 2). Neil Rusch & Sarah Wurz, “The Doring River bullroarers rock painting” (2020), J. Archaeol. Sci.: Reports 33:102511, Fig. 2 Image source

Source term: bullroarer aerophones

On a quartzitic sandstone shelter wall in the Doring River valley, in the Cederberg country where /xam-speaking San lived into the nineteenth century, a group of eight ochre figures each hold what Neil Rusch and Sarah Wurz read as a bullroarer in play. Using digital image recovery to pull faded detail from the rock, they reconstructed the depicted instruments, built replicas, and recorded their sound; the panel itself, they argue, is a palimpsest of two painting events, the scene painted at least two thousand years ago. Rusch and Wurz tie it to "working with rain" — an attempt to act on !Khwa, the rain, who in /xam belief took animate shape as !khwa-ka xoro, the rain's beast, a cow, bull, or eland that ritual specialists captured and led across the country so that rain would fall wherever it went. Dia!kwain drew that water-bull in May 1875, while Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd were recording /xam narratives at the Cape. In the painting the roar of the bullroarer accompanies the same effort to bring water to the arid Karoo.

The painting and the sound-making depicted is most likely related to 'working with rain', an intervention aimed at influencing !Khwa and the hydrology in the arid Karoo region.

Rusch and Wurz 2020, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 33:102511 (abstract)
Object
Rock-art panel showing eight human figures playing bullroarer-like aerophones; replicas were made and acoustically tested.
Function
Rusch and Wurz interpret the Doring River painting and replicated instruments as a rain-working scene involving group bullroarer playing.
Map confidence
medium - representative coordinate; archaeological/ethnographic source does not warrant a precise ritual locality
Source location
JASR 33:102511

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