Tischofer perforated bone needle

Source term: Schwirrgerät

Schwirrgerät: German 'whirring device', the archaeological cover term for a bullroarer or related whirled sound-maker.

In 1909 a cave above Kufstein in the Kaisertal gave up a handful of worked bone pins, drawn at natural size on a single plate: one with a ring head, one with a flat, spade-shaped head pierced by a small drilled hole. For most of a century such pins were filed as needles and awls of the Bronze Age. Lothar Zotz questioned that date, suggesting the large spade-headed needles might belong to the cave's much older Ice Age occupation. A recent survey of Stone Age music later named Tischoferhöhle, alongside Vogelherd, as the source of one of the earliest whirled sound-makers known: flat, long, tapered, drilled for a cord, and roughly forty thousand years old. It did not say which pin. The spade-headed one remains the strongest guess.

Die frühesten Funde dieser Art aus der Vogelherdhöhle auf der Schwäbischen Alb in Südwestdeutschland und der Tischoferhöhle im österreichischen Kaisergebirge datieren um 38.000 bis 32.000 v. Chr.

The earliest finds of this type, from Vogelherd Cave in the Swabian Jura of south-western Germany and Tischofer Cave in the Austrian Kaiser Mountains, date to around 38,000 to 32,000 BC.

Both and Praxmarer, "Musik in der Steinzeit" (2024/25), p. 137

Particulars

Object

Perforated bone objects from the 1909 Tischoferhöhle excavation include a ring-headed pin and a long pin with a broad, perforated spade-shaped head. Neither has been securely matched to the later bullroarer attribution; the spade-headed pin, whose form Zotz argued might be Upper Palaeolithic, is the likelier.

Function

Not recorded.