RockArtBlog has had a number of columns in the past about music and rock art. This column is to present a painted panel from Cedarburg, South Africa (Matjes River), that seems to show a group of four anthropomorphs who are whirling bull-roarers. Neil Rusch and Sara Wurz published a paper (2022) on this panel and the sounds made by reconstructions of the instruments portrayed.
In 2020, Joshua Kumbani called for more research into ancient music in archeological contexts. “Research in music archaeology in southern Africa has just begun. Available evidence dates back from around 10,000 years ago, from the Later Stone Age up to the Iron Age. The artifacts fall into two groups, namely aerophones, where sound is produced by vibrating air, and idiophones, where sound is produced by solid material vibrating. These artifacts include spinning disks, bullroarers, bone tubes that could have been used as flutes or whistles, clay whistles, keys from thumb pianos (also called lamellophones or mbiras), musical bells and an ivory trumpet. The list is not exhaustive and more research needs to be conducted.” (Kumbani 2020) This actually strikes me as a pretty comprehensive list. Kumbani has certainly been doing his homework.
“These music-related or sound-producing artifacts are made from various materials, including bone, ivory, metal and clay. The artifacts show how integral sound and music production was in the socio-cultural practices of people in the past, most likely for entertainment and rituals. Sound production and music making is a sign of being fully human. Recent experimental work established that some Later Stone Age bone implements from the Klasies River Mouth and Matjes River sites are a spinning disk and a bullroarer respectively. Their replicas produced powerful whirring sounds and they can be referred to as sound-producing implements even though the purpose of the sound or their use cannot be clearly ascertained. They could have been used as signalling implements, toys, in ritual settings or in musical contexts, among others. Nowadays these implements are seldom found in the region.” (Kumbani 2020) Music making – yes. But, the manufacture of these implements to control sound, yes, that is pretty human. There is, of course, the Australian Palm Cockatoo that breaks off a stick to drum on a limb or tree trunk. This is, in fact, apparently a case of non-human intentional music making – but it is a really isolated example (see Heinsohn et al. 2017).
When we are talking about art history we often overlook the importance on non-visual arts: music, poetry, etc. Rusch and Wurz have focused on the instruments indicated in the rock art panel from Cedarberg. “Our archaeoacoustic research is focused on bringing to life sounds made by people living in the past. No aural record remains but people did dance, sing and clap. Instruments either no longer exist or are extremely rare. One exception are the gong rocks, known as lithophones, which ring when struck and produce purposeful, percussive sounds. Occasionally, unfamiliar and rare musical instruments are depicted in rock paintings. In a new study we turned our ears to a rock painting in the Cederberg Mountains in South Africa’s Western Cape province. The human figures in this painting have previously been interpreted as healers holding fly-whisks and doing a trance-dance. Fly-whisks were an important accessory for the dance because they were thought to keep arrows of sickness at bay.” (Rush and Wurz 2022) Concerning ‘gong rocks’ (lithophones) I have previously written a number of columns on RockArtBlog. Go to the cloud index at the bottom and look for the word ‘lithophone.’ But this is about bull-roarers.
Rusch and Wurz interpreted what they observed on the panel as what
in western sources are known as bull-roarers. I have to agree with this. Given
that the figures seem to be waving slender cords with something on the end
bull-roarers would seem to be the logical interpretation. “But our results suggest that the fly-whisks are in fact musical
instruments of a type known as a !goin !goin – a name that only exists in the
now extinct ǀXam language that was
spoken by hunter-gatherers in central southern Africa. The !goin !goin is
an aerophone; these instruments produce sound by creating vibrations in the air
when they are spun around their axes. To reach this conclusion we combined
digital image recovery techniques with instruments created from life-size
templates based on our findings. The eight instruments were played in a Cape
Town sound studio and the sounds were recorded. Sound produced by the recreated
instruments convincingly matches the sound spectrum (90 – 150 Hz) produced by a
similar 19th century model of the !goin !goin aerophone, which is
archived in the Kirby Collection of Musical Instruments, curated by the
University of Cape Town’s College of Music.” (Rush
and Wurz 2022) So, this particular panel is the group of figures with
bull-roarers.
Noticing that the pictograph panel shows multiple musicians playing the !goin !goin aerophone Rush and Wurz also recorded multiple examples played at the same time. They found that by varying the speed of one or the other instrument they could create a number of different sound effects. They call this ability ‘compositional.’ “This compositional aspect of the instrument was not well known at all so we delved deeper. In the Special Collections archive at the University of Cape Town we found an obscure description of the !goin !goin which confirmed, as does the Cederberg painting, that groups did play the instruments together. ‘An instrument consisting of a blade of wood attached to a little stick, which is held in the hand. The performer grasping the little stick whirls the blade about in the air, producing a whirring sound. It is used by both !sexes among the Bushmen [another name used for the San and today considered derogatory by some] and, at times, by a number of persons together with the view to causing rain.’ ǀXam-speaking hunter gatherers associated the sound of the !goin !goin with honey bees They even went so far as to say that with the !goin !goin they could “move bees”. This complements the previous statement linking the instrument’s sound with “causing rain”. The archive statement also confirms that both men and women worked with rain, using the sound of the !goin !goin for this purpose.” (Rush and Wurz 2022) It is really very easy to imagine the sound of multiple bull-roarers sounding like a swarm of bees.
Kumbani et al. (2020) also refers to a second type of aerophone which he calls simply a ‘spinning disc.’ Kumbani’s ‘spinnin disc’ is a piece of bone with two holes drilled near the center. A loop of cord is tied through those holes, held between both hands, and by rhythmically pulling the ends apart and then relaxing to let it spin and wind up the other way, one can achieve pulses of a whirring sound. But I know of no examples of these pictured in ancient rock art. So we turn our focus and attention back to the bull-roarers.
Such in-depth analysis of the recorded sound frequencies of !goin !goins goes past the point of my interest in the panel, but, I have frequently written about music related to rock art, and this is a marvelous example. Their identification of the instruments involved gives us a whole new aspect to appreciate. And, their innovation of playing more than one at the same time opens new areas of experimental archaeology of music.
NOTE: Some images in this column were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.
PRIMARY REFERENCES:
Kumbani, Joshua, 2020, What archaeology tells us about the music and sounds made by Africa’s ancestors, 24 August 2020, https://theconversation.com. Accessed online 2 January 2025.
Kumbani, Joshua et al., 2019, A functional investigation of southern Cape Later Stone Age artifacts resembling aerophones, Journal of Archaeological Science Reports, April 2019, DOI:10.1016/j.jasrep.2019.02.021. Accessed online from Researchgate, 26 August 2025.
Rusch, Neil, and Sara Wurz, 2022, How the music of an ancient rock painting was brought to life, 29 June 2022, https://theconversation.com. Accessed online 2 January 2025.
SECONDARY REFERENCE:
Heinsohn, Robert et al., 2017, Tool-assisted rhythmic drimming in palm cockatoos shares key elements of human instrumental music, 28 June 2017, Science Advances, Vol. 3, Issue 6. DOI:10.1126/sciadv.1602399. Accessed online 13 November 2025.
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