Schletz cattle-scapula plate

Source term: Schwirrknochen / Schwirrblatt

Schwirrknochen: German 'whirring bone'; Schwirrblatt, 'whirring blade' - the archaeological German terms for a bullroarer.

Someone in the last generations of the Linear Pottery culture cut a plate out of a cow's shoulder blade, ten centimetres long, no thicker than three millimetres, and drilled a single hole through the narrow stem at its top. It was thrown into a rubbish pit at Schletz, the fortified village in Lower Austria better known for the dead in its ditch, and dug up again in 1987. The thing is broad and curved like a small scoop, and the archaeologist who catalogued it lists pendant, whirling bone, spoon and scoop side by side. Helmut Windl thought it a whirling bone and cast a copy, which hummed when he swung it; a generation later Beate Maria Pomberger made her own and measured the note, down at the bottom edge of hearing.

Particulars

Object

Flat plate cut and scraped from a cattle scapula, 10 cm long, 4.1 cm at maximum width and 2-2.9 mm thick; the lower half is elongated-oval and broadened like a scoop while the upper half narrows into a stem perforated at its end. Fnr. 599.3, excavated 1987. Fehlmann's Taf. 28 draws front, back, side and section at 1:1. The surface is poorly preserved, with no polish and no diagnostic manufacture or use-wear recorded.

Function

Not recorded.