[Bonetools] Painted sperm whale tympanic bullae

[Sonia O'Connor]

Dear Christian,


Thanks for these. They are just like the example from Hull.  I wonder, though if they are actually puppet or doll heads. It would be interesting to know how they were attached to the rest of the object.  I don't think the 'head' from Hull had any other modification to enable attachment to anything.  Also it is a very dense, heavy material for a puppet or dolls head (which would be better made in wood or papier mâché) so dense that fragments of bullae have been mistaken for stone or fossil bone.  It might be worth chasing these questions with the museum but my money is on them being 'stand alone' pieces.


Has anyone else got any thoughts on this?


Sonia


Dr Sonia O'Connor PhD FSA FIIC ACR Honorary Visiting Fellow, University of York
Post-doctoral Researcher
Archaeological Sciences
Division of AGES
University of Bradford
Bradford, West Yorkshire, BD7 1DP

Tel 01274 236498


________________________________
From: Christian Küchelmann <info at knochenarbeit.de>
Sent: 06 September 2015 08:12
To: BONETOOLS; Sonia O'Connor
Subject: Painted sperm whale tympanic bullae

Dear Sonia, dear list,

while searching for something completely different, I came across a picture I took 2012 in an exhibition about whales in the Museum für Naturkunde Münster, Germany (see below), which recalled our recent discussion about painted bones and resulted in last month's bonetool on the WBRG website (http://www.wbrg.net/bonetool-archive).

The label to the exhibit describes the two painted sperm whale tympanic bullae as being dolls heads from Norway (mid 20th century). Taking up your thoughts on the expression of humour through modified bones, these examples may allow to put these thoughts even further as the items do not only express humour (or other emotions) in itself, but are obviously the surviving parts of composite objects. They may for instance have had bodies dressed with specific garments expressing typical characters and may have been used in theatre plays (not only by children). Would be a nice topic to investigate further (if there would be time...).

Best

Christian
--
Knochenarbeit

Hans Christian Küchelmann

Konsul-Smidt-Straße 30, D-28217 Bremen, Germany
tel: +49 - 421 - 61 99 177
fax: +49 - 421 - 37 83 540
mail: info at knochenarbeit.de
web: http://www.knochenarbeit.de


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