A functional investigation of southern Cape Later Stone Age artefacts resembling aerophones
Introduction
Music is a highly pervasive form of social and symbolic expression found in all human societies. An encompassing definition of ‘music’ is that it entails expression through organized sound as well as intentional rhythmical movement or dance. From this perspective music is much more than a Western concept of concert hall performances by trained individuals, it constitutes intentional action of sound production combined with entrained body movement (Wurz, 2009, see also Cross and Morley, 2008). Yet, despite its cultural importance, archaeomusicology and its components are under-researched in South Africa, indeed in Africa as a whole. In the southern Cape, for example, archaeological evidence for musical expression and sound production has received virtually no attention. While there is an intensive research focus on the origins and development of complex cognition and symbolic expression within the Middle Stone Age (MSA) (Wurz, 2018), and on social dynamics within the Later Stone Age (LSA), the role of sound and musical expression within these frameworks is infrequently addressed. This is undoubtedly because musical instruments are often made of organic materials, which easily decompose (Morley, 2003; Atema, 2014), but also because it has not been a prominent research question.
Aerophones are musical instruments that produce sound through “setting up vibrations in a body of air” (Brown and Palmer, 2001: 40). The air is propelled in various ways to set up a vibration (Cohen, 2015: 10). In terms of Von Hornbostel and Sachs' (1961) classification of musical instruments, aerophones are one of the four main classes of musical instruments, including idiophones, membranophones and chordophones (Brown and Palmer, 2001). Aerophones occur in two types, either as free aerophones or wind instruments. Free aerophones are whirring instruments that do not confine the vibrating air, whereas wind instruments enclose the body of air inside a tube or vessel (Brown and Palmer, 2001). This paper discusses two types of free aerophones: bullroarers and spinning disks. These instruments produce sound by creating vibrations in the air when they are spun around their axes (Montagu, 1971). A bullroarer is often a flat, oblong, piece of bone, wood or stone with a hole at one side, through which the string is attached (Dundes, 1976: 220; Morley, 2003: 33) whereas a whirring disk or spinning disk is a flat piece of, for example, wood or bone with two perforations in the middle (Kirby, 2013: 101).
Bullroarer shapes vary from oval to, rectangular, and sometimes have serrated edges (Wachsmann, 2001). Spinning disks also come in different shapes, for example rectangular, oval or circular (Kirby, 2013). A bullroarer is strung with a string and is sometimes attached to a stick that functions as a handle providing leverage and additional torque. The whip-action (torque) adds a means to manipulate sound output since the sound produced by a bullroarer is a function of airspeed. The bullroarer is spun above the head using one hand, or perpendicular and adjacent to the body. Spinning disks are also strung with string and played by spinning it in front of the whole body with both hands in either a clockwise or anticlockwise direction by alternately relaxing the string inwards and pulling the string outwards. Both bullroarers and spinning disks produce a whirring sound (Montagu, 1971).
Two bone artefacts that morphologically resemble bullroarers and spinning disks have been found in the Later Stone Age layers from Klasies River main site (KRM) and Matjes River (MR) in the southern Cape (Fig. 1) (Singer and Wymer, 1982; Louw, 1960). Singer and Wymer (1982: 127) say of the KRM implement “It was unfortunately broken in the course of excavation, but it was broken in such a way that we were able to reconstruct. It is made on a flat bone, probably part of a rib, tapering to a rounded point at both ends and having two small perforations in the middle. It could have been a child's toy (wirra wirra) or a pendant” (Singer and Wymer, 1982: 128). This implement was recovered from the lower levels of the Upper Midden, Later Stone Age (LSA) II dating to around 4800 BP (Singer and Wymer, 1982; Nami et al., 2016). According to Wymer's notebooks (Iziko Museums, Cape Town) the ‘wirra wirra’ was found in the same context as a human partial left mandible (SAM-AP6102, KRM 614). The LSA middens at KRM are associated with a variant of the Wilton techno-complex, the Kabeljous industry (Lombard et al., 2012; Binneman, 1995) and are characterised by unretouched quartzite artefacts and a few thick backed scrapers-knives, or giant crescents.
Louw (1960: 109) referring to the MR 5135 implement, mentions that ‘the most perfect bone tool recovered from site 4 is an oval-shaped bone “woer woer” (“bullroarer”)’ and that “the edges of this artefact are well rounded and polished”. The Matjes River implement was recovered from Layer C with dates ranging between 9580 ± 85 and 5400 ± 250 BP (Protsch and Oberholzer, 1975: 40, see also Sealy et al., 2006: 99). Layer C is associated with the Wilton industry in which small scrapers and backed tools occur. This layer was rich in human burials and ornaments made of bone, shell and ostrich eggshell (Louw, 1960: 17; Ludwig, 2005). Four pendants made of bone were also recovered from Layer C of Matjes River. Although they are described as pendants, we are investigating their possible functional use as aerophones due to their morphological and dimensional similarity to bullroarers, as discussed below.
Aerophones are also known from the southern African ethnographic record. One of these form part of this study, a ‘spinning disk’ KK058, (Kirby, 2013: 101, Fig. 4, 3. number 3) was collected in 1932 from the ‘red dune San’ at Haruchas in Namibia and is now archived in the Kirby Collection of Musical Instruments at The South African College of Music.
In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that the archaeological artefacts from Klasies River and Matjes River were used for sound-making and perhaps musical purposes. We report on our actualistic approach to study the sound and use-wear patterns that we reproduced on experimental replicas of these implements. The use-wear results are compared to the archaeological pieces.
‘Spinning disks’ (Kirby, 2013) are free aerophones consisting of rounded disks with two holes in the centre. Other labels for similar implements include “buzzing disks” (Montagu, 1971: 107), “whirring disks” (Von Hornbostel and Sachs, 1961: 24), “woer woer” (Louw, 1960: 109) and “wirra wirra” (Singer and Wymer, 1982: 125). These names are just convenient labels and do not necessarily describe the function of the implements (van Beek, 1989). Artefacts traditionally referred to as ‘buttons’ or ‘perforated disks’ (van Beek, 1989) may also be mechanically suitable to produce sound.
Two-holed disks dating to around 3000 years ago, made from potsherds, chalk and stone (van Beek, 1989: 53) occur in sites from Israel, Lebanon, Pakistan and India. For example, 17 two-holed disks have been recovered from the Tell Jemmeh site in Israel, dated to Early Hellenistic period (van Beek, 1989: 55), 323 BCE–31 BCE (McLean, 2002: 4). It is mentioned that these disks may have been used as toys (van Beek, 1989) but their sound producing quality is hinted at by Kelso and Albright (1968: 58, cited in van Beek, 1989: 53) who considered them to have been “bullroarers”.
Engraved examples of Magdalenian perforated bone disks have been cited as evidence to demonstrate an early form of animation, combined with sound (Azéma and Rivère, 2012). A convincing case is that of a 31 mm diameter bone disk excavated at Laugerie-Basse in the Dordogne strung through a single perforation and engraved on both sides with an antelope image. The disk produces audible sound (150–320 Hz) when rotated or spun, plus, as the disk spins, the alternating and juxtaposing images become an effective thaumatrope, creating the illusion of movement (Azéma and Rivère, 2012).
Another type of free aerophone is the bullroarer that is swung above the head or alongside the body (Fletcher et al., 2002; Morley, 2005; Kirby, 2013). Of the earliest free aerophones recorded by researchers like Dams and Scothern (see Morley, 2003: 45; Morley, 2005) are from the Magdalenian sites of La Roche de Birol, in Dordogne and Abri de Laugre Basse in southern France, dating to 17,000–11,000 years ago (Morley, 2003: 45). The iconic La Roche de Birol bullroarer is 180 mm in length (Table 1) and is made from a reindeer antler. It has linear incision motifs and is covered with red ochre. The bullroarer is oval in shape and has a hole near one end. Morley (2003: 34) infers the use of these implements as bullroarers based on the shape and the positioning of the perforation. The Solutrean period, broadly dating to between 22,000–17,000 years ago (Morley, 2003: 45), yielded two bullroarers from the sites of Lespugue and Badegoule in France (Table 1). Another, much younger bullroarer from the Kongemose site, Denmark, dated to 6000 BCE, has been recovered from the Mesolithic (Jørgensen, 1956: 30; Morley, 2005).
There are also 13 Pre Pottery Neolithic (PPN) (7200–6000 BCE, David Kingery et al., 1988) perforated bone implements interpreted as bullroarers (Dietrich and Notroff, 2016: 28). They are from Göbekli Tepe, Hasankeyf Höyük and Körtik Tepe in Turkey and Nahal Hemar Cave in Israel (Dietrich and Notroff, 2016: 19). In appearance they resemble spatulas and the complete pieces are leaf shaped with flattened edges with the narrow edge perforated (Dietrich and Notroff, 2016: 26–27). All the implements are decorated with geometric motifs, some depicting animals like goats, spiders and scorpions. The seven implements from Körtik Tepe were recovered from burial contexts (Özkaya and Coşkun, 2011: 99 cited in Dietrich and Notroff, 2016: 29) and the two from Nahal Hemar Cave came from a dump layer (Bar-Yosef and Alon, 1988 cited in Dietrich and Notroff, 2016: 29). A 64 mm long bullroarer in polished slate from Tuv in northern Norway dating to ca. 2800 cal. BCE is a fascinating addition to this group of archaeological aerophones (Bjerck, 2010: 11). These archaeological pieces have different sizes with their lengths ranging from 64 mm to 190 mm (see Table 1 for the available dimensions). Owing to their morphological and dimensional similarity to bullroarers, we are investigating the possible functional use of similar single holed bone implements from Matjes River site as bullroarers. They have previously been interpreted as ‘pendants’ (Louw, 1960; Ludwig, 2005) (see Table 2 for the dimensions). Function is often assumed on the basis of form, but such assumptions have been shown to be potentially misleading (Bradfield, 2016b). Sound is seldom, if ever, studied; therefore we include in our study the analysis of use wear and the sound-making capacities of these implements.
Kirby recorded ethnographic musical instruments from South Africa and devoted a chapter to “Bullroarers and Spinning Disks” (Kirby, 2013: 99–102). He discusses various types of spinning disks and bullroarers. There is much less information on the ethnographic use of spinning disks compared to bullroarers and to confound matters they are sometimes referred to as a type of bullroarer (Kirby, 2013: 101; Louw, 1960: 109). Kirby (2013:101, Fig. 4.3) illustrates spinning disks made by, for example, Bushmen, Zulu and Venda groups. Spinning disks are called by different names depending on the cultural group to which they belong (Table 2). The Xhosa, for example, name their spinning disk ‘uvuru’ while the Venda refer to it as ‘tshivhilivhi’. Kirby (2013) mentions that among the Venda, Zulu and Xhosa spinning disks are played by the children. The spinning disks illustrated by Kirby have different shapes ranging from rectangular, semi oval, to circular with serrated edges. The disks seem to have been made of wood. Buchner (1973, in Hagens, 2005: 4) illustrates a copy of a “Bushman buzzer from South Africa” with 12 symmetrical openings and a sharp serrated edge. As mentioned above, a replica of KK058 (Kirby, 2013 Fig. 4.3 no 3) was made using the original as a reference for accuracy (Fig. 4). The sound of the ethnographic instrument KK058 was recorded as a benchmark against which to compare the sounds produced by the archaeological spinning disks.
The bullroarer is much better known than the spinning disk, and its use has been recorded for groups as far apart as the Australian Aborigines and Malayans (Morley, 2005). As early as 1881, Edward Burnett Tylor remarked that the bullroarer was used in South Africa and that “the extraordinary correspondence in its ceremonial use” between widely different groups in South Africa, and Australia “calls for a careful enquiry” (Tylor, 1881: 265 cited in Dundes, 1976: 222). The bullroarers have a wide range of names. They are, for example, labelled as “whizzing sticks” (Kirby, 2013: 99), whereas the |Xam Bushmen refer to such implements as !goin !goin (Bleek and Lloyd, 1911: 354–355; Hollmann, 2004: 172; Wurz and Keene, 2008; Rusch, 2017). Other terms include ‘hisi’, ‘burubush’, ‘!xoe’ ‘kgabududu’ and ‘sevuruvuru’ (Table 2). According to ethnographic records children frequently took part in musical activities. Blacking (1973) and Kirby (2013) have recorded a few instances in which children in South Africa played musical instruments. The artefacts were frequently smaller in size, for example the small hand rattles used by the Venda children (Kirby, 2013: 13). The Tswana children also played hand clappers known as marapo and the bullroarers. For example, Kirby (2013: 98) has a picture of a Tswana boy with a bullroarer. Nurse (1972) noted the Kalahari Bushmen children playing bullroarers in Botswana.
The bullroarers illustrated by Kirby (2013: 100, Fig. 4.2) vary in shape from rectangular to oval. Most of the bullroarers comprise a single piece made of wood, but sometime it consists of a feather fastened to a stick (Kirby, 2013: 100; Swarts, 2008). Nurse (1972: 26) provides a detailed description of such bullroarers from the G/wi and G//ana of the central Kalahari as consisting “of a slender stick, about 30 cm long, with about 5 cm of free riem (leather lace) attaching a thinner (15 cm) stick to the end of which a carefully trimmed korhaan tail-feather was fastened”.
Lewis-Williams and Dowson (2000) discuss ‘buzzing in the ears’, a phenomena that is experienced by shamans when entering into altered states of consciousness (ASC): “All five senses, not just vision, hallucinate in trance, and the aural hallucination of buzzing is variously construed by people around the world as bees, rushing wind, falling water and so forth” (Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 2000: 63). The sound made by the !goin !goin is positively identified with buzzing and bees (Bleek and Lloyd, 1911: 354–355), and thus a strong association is made with ASC, synesthesia and enhanced states of association (ESA) (Keeney, 2003; Rusch, 2017), which aid entry into the spirit world. Spirit world encounters and spirits-of-the-dead ensure death's abiding presence (Rusch, 2016: 16–17; Blundell, 2004: 89–112). The significance that is accorded to the sounds of water (ocean), buzzing and wind (breath) and that produced by the replicas tested are discussed in Section 5, where we include evidence provided by ethnographic testimony, biopsychological data, plus the archaeological/burial context from which the artefacts were recovered.
Section snippets
Materials and methods
This study employed an actualistic approach (e.g. Marreiros et al., 2015). The investigation focus was the sound-producing potential and resultant use-wear characteristics of the artefacts. To these ends the Klasies River and Matjes River spinning disks and, an ethnographic example of a spinning disk from the Kirby Collection (KK058), and the four pendants from Matjes River were replicated.
The Klasies River spinning disk is missing from the collections at the Iziko Museum, and therefore the
Results of the sound production experiments
The KRM andKK058 artefact replicas functioned well as spinning disks and produced a sustained pulsed whirring sound (Supplementary material File 1, Supplementary material File 2). The Klasies River artefact replica has a range variation of 52 Hz to 142.85 Hz (Table 4). The frequency of the KK058 replica by comparison was approximately 57 Hz at the bottom of its range and 200 Hz at the top (Table 4). What is audibly and visually noticeable, in the sound and the wave pattern graphics, is the
Use-wear experimental protocol
Use-wear develops on bone relatively quickly (van Gijn, 2007; Legrand and Sidéra, 2007) with sufficiently diagnostic wear typically developing after 30 min of prolonged fricative contact (Bradfield, 2015). Although there is some degree of overlap between different contact materials, there are distinct differences between categories such as plant, ceramic and hide working (Griffitts, 1997; Backwell and d'Errico, 2004). Polish and striations usually develop along a continuum, and different stages
Discussion
Dual and singly perforated bone artefacts are occasionally recovered from Later Stone Age contexts in southern Africa and are usually interpreted as items of bodily adornment related to symbolic meaning and ritual (e.g. Deacon and Deacon, 1999). There is virtually no discussion of the possible sound producing qualities of such implements from this region. However, Singer and Wymer (1982) and Louw (1960) suggested the artefacts with double centred perforations may have been sound-generating toys
Conclusions
Here, we have demonstrated the sound-producing capabilities of dual and singly perforated bone disks and have illustrated the use-wear patterns that can differentiate sound production from other functions, possibly related to body adornments. In particular, the lateral placement of weakly-developed use-wear around a perforation in a spinning disk is contraposed to that of better developed wear confined to the upper sector of a perforation in a pendant. The use-wear findings of this study,
Acknowledgements
Joshua Kumbani is a Mellon Doctoral Fellow with the Wits City Institute. This paper acknowledges support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded through the Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities Initiative at the Wits City Institute based at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The financial support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed in this paper and conclusions arrived at are those of the authors and are
References (85)
- et al.
Criteria for identifying bone modification by termites in the fossil record
Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol.
(2012) - et al.
Bone and ivory points in the Lower and Middle Paleolithic of Europe
J. Hum. Evol.
(2001) Musical origins and the Stone Age evolution of flutes
Acoust. Today
(2014)- et al.
Animation in Palaeolithic art: a pre-echo of cinema
Antiquity.
(2012) - et al.
The first use of bone tools: a reapraisal of the evidence from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania
Palaeontol. Afr.
(2004) Nahal Hemar cave: the excavations
Atiqot
(1988)Symbolic Construction of Communities During the Holocene Later Stone Age in the South-eastern Cape
(1995)Brummeren Fra Tuv
(2010)How Musical Is Man?
(1973)- et al.
Specimens of Bushman Folklore
(1911)
Nqabayo's No-man's-land: San Rock Art and the Somatic Past
Use-trace analysis on bone tools: a brief overview of four methodological approaches
S. Afr. Archaeol. Bull.
Use-trace analysis on bone tools
Bone point functional diversity: a cautionary tale from southern Africa
Aerophone
Bone tool types and microwear patterns: some examples from the Pampa region, South America
Musical Instruments: An Illustrated History
Music: Its Language, History, and Culture
The evolution of music: theories, definitions and the nature of the evidence
Acoustics and the human experience of socially-organised sound
Son et Musique Paléolithiques
Les Dossiers D'Archéologie
The beginnings of pyrotechnology, part II: production and use of lime and gypsum plaster in the pre-pottery Neolithic Near East
J. Field Archaeol.
Human Beginnings in South Africa: Uncovering the Secrets of the Stone Age
Stone Age Soundtracks: The Acoustic Archaeology of Ancient Sites
A decorated bone ‘spatula’ from Göbekli Tepe. On the pitfalls of iconographic interpretations of Early Neolithic art
Neo-Lithics
A psychoanalytic study of the bullroarer
Man
Music Among the Zu'Ywa-si and Related Peoples of Namibia, Botswana, and Angola
Use-wear methodology on the analysis of osseous industries
New insights into use-wear development in bodily ornaments through the study of ethnographic collections
J. Archaeol. Method Theory
Australian aboriginal musical instruments–the bullroarer
Anthropological and ethnomusicological implications of a comparative analysis of Bushmen and African Pygmy music
Ethnology
Replication and analysis of bone tools
Archaic Period bone tools from the Los Pozos site in southern Arizona
The Naro Bushmen of Botswana (Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung vol 3)
Timbre of the spheres: The bullroarer and the magic wheel
Bushman music: still an unknown
Acoustics. Shock. Vibration. Signal. Processing
Kongemosen
KUML
Ropes to God: Experiencing the Bushman Spiritual Universe
The excavation of Bethel
Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa
Cited by (9)
Perforated bone artifacts from Indor Khera and Rohana Khurd, Upper Ganga Plain, India
2023, Quaternary InternationalThe Doring River bullroarers rock painting: Continuities in sound and rainmaking
2020, Journal of Archaeological Science: ReportsCitation Excerpt :This type of aerophone’s long history reaches back into the Upper Palaeolithic and Epi Palaeolithic of Europe and Scandinavia (Morley, 2013; Trehub et al., 2015; Kumbani et al., 2019). In South Africa, only one plausible archaeological free aerophone bullroarer has to date been recovered (Louw, 1960; Kumbani et al., 2019). This Later Stone age example was made of bone and was excavated at Matjes River (MR) in the southern Cape (Fig. 1), from Layer C with dates ranging between circa (ca.)
DRUMMING THINGS UP: A POSSIBLE DEPICTION OF A DRUM AT GROOTVLEI 158 (GOT 1), SOUTH AFRICA
2023, South African Archaeological BulletinArchaeoacoustics around the World: A Literature Review (2016–2022)
2023, Applied Sciences (Switzerland)