The Bullroarer Atlas

No. BOURKE1892-004

Rio Grande Pueblo rhombus

United States · Rio Grande Pueblo region, New Mexico · North America

Function not recorded

Fewkes’s painted plate of the Ciwikoli katcina, knees bent, swinging a whizzer on a cord above a raised hand.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Fewkes’s painted plate of the Ciwikoli katcina swinging a whizzer overhead. Public domain · Image source

Source term: rhombus

Captain John G. Bourke first saw the rhombus, or bull-roarer, swung at the snake dance of the Tusayan at Walpi in August 1881, and went on to report it across the American Southwest. Among the places he found it were the Rio Grande Pueblos, alongside the Zuni, the Apache and the 'Cliff Dweller' ruins of the Verde Valley; what the Rio Grande towns swung it for, he did not say.

I found the rhombus also among the Rio Grande Pueblo tribes and the Zuñi.

Bourke 1892, The Medicine-Men of the Apache, p. 477

Particulars

Object
Bourke says he found the rhombus among Rio Grande Pueblo tribes.
Function
Not recorded.

Source

Bourke, The Medicine-Men of the Apache, Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (1892):443–603, p. 477

View the source

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.