VILSTEREN1987-002 - archaeological find
Portegies snorrebot
Netherlands - North Holland - Beverwijk, Portegies - Europe - Low Countries
Play / practical
snorrebot Dutch
Source term: snorrebot (type I)
snorrebot: Dutch for a 'whirring bone'; here, an end-holed blade swung freely on a cord.
A child in seventeenth-century Beverwijk sent this ivory blade circling overhead on a cord until it spun on its own axis and hummed, faster swings raising the pitch. Dutch speakers call the type a snorrebot. Van Vilsteren, naming this very piece one of his two examples, ventured that the form may once have started life as something more solemn — 'probably originating as ritual objects' — before it 'degenerated among us into children's toys.' By the time this blade was carved and pierced, Beverwijk knew it only as a plaything.
Waarschijnlijk ontstaan als rituele objecten, maar bij ons verworden tot kinderspeelgoed zijn de snorrebotten.
Probably originating as ritual objects, but among us degenerated into children's toys, are the snorrebotten.
Van Vilsteren, Het Benen Tijdperk (1987), p. 52
- Object
- A 17.6 cm blade of probable walrus ivory, rounded at one end and pierced near the other by a single large cord hole, found at Portegies in Beverwijk.
- Function
- A children's humming toy: swung overhead on a cord, spinning on its long axis and changing pitch with the speed of the swing.
- Map confidence
- low - Grote Kerk, Kerkstraat, in the historic centre of Beverwijk, used as a town-level anchor. 'Portegies' is the find place named in the catalogue and could not be resolved to a street, plot or excavation on any public gazetteer; this is not a findspot coordinate and should not be read as one.
- Source location
Page references
Van Vilsteren 1987, printed p. 52, cat. 84; Coll. Archeologische Werkgroep K.O.B., no inv. nr.
- Toy / secular survival