BOURKE1892-003 - archaeological find
Verde Valley cliff-dweller rhombus
United States - Verde Valley, central Arizona - North America
Sacred / spirit
Source term: rhombus / bull roarer
Examining cliff-dweller ruins in the Verde Valley of central Arizona, the soldier-ethnographer John G. Bourke concluded that the prehistoric inhabitants had used the rhombus, or bull-roarer, in their dealings with their gods — the same rain-summoning whirled instrument he had documented among the living Apache. The Apache rhombus he describes was an oblong of pine or fir, seven or eight inches long, cut from a tree struck by lightning on a mountaintop, one end rounded to suggest a human head; medicine-men twirled it about the head to imitate the sound of a gust of rain-laden wind, and read the lines on its faces as the entrails and the many-colored, lightning-hued hair of the wind god. His 1884 Snake-Dance narrative dates the find and doubles it: digging in one of the old cliff-dwellings near the Rio Verde in 1882, he uncovered two small fragments of wood, "one shaped exactly like the snake sling of the Moquis, but unpainted," the other like an Apache fire-stick — and he offered them as evidence for the prehistoric reach of the snake cult, in the same breath as a potsherd from Camp Grant painted with a snake biting its own tail. Bourke gives no site name and no measurements, but he does describe what he picked up: a specimen of his "second pattern" — the form "serrated on both edges to simulate the form of the snake or lightning," the same pattern Washington Matthews had found among the Navajo — somewhat decayed, the tip of its triangle broken off, with "no vestige of painting left." He adds in the next breath that he found the rhombus also among the Rio Grande Pueblo tribes and the Zuñi.
Again, while examining certain ruins in the Verde Valley, in central Arizona, I found that the "Cliff Dwellers", as it has become customary to call the prehistoric inhabitants, had employed the same weapon of persuasion in their intercourse with their gods.
Bourke, The Medicine-Men of the Apache (1892), p. 477
- Object
- Bourke's section defines the rhombus as a bull roarer; his Verde Valley find was of his 'second pattern' — serrated on both edges 'to simulate the form of the snake or lightning' — somewhat decayed, the extremity of its triangle broken off, no vestige of painting left.
- Function
- Source-explicit old archaeological field observation of a rhombus/bullroarer form in Verde Valley cliff-dweller ruins.
- Map confidence
- low_medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or broad region in Bourke
- Source location
- printed pp. 477-478
- Snake-linked