The Bullroarer Atlas

BRODY1983-001 - archaeological depiction

Mattocks bowl bullroarer scene

United States - Mimbres Valley - Grant County, New Mexico - North America

Archaeological datec. 1000–1150 ADStyle III / Mimbres Classic Black-on-white attribution; individual bowl not directly dated.

Function not recorded

Mattocks-site Mimbres bowl with the scene Brody reads as a man whirling a bullroarer.
Mattocks-site Mimbres bowl with the scene Brody reads as a man whirling a bullroarer. Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

Inside a Mimbres bowl from the Mattocks site a small man stands beneath a shape several times his size, tied to him by one curving line. J. J. Brody read the painter as working in perspective: the great flaring form is not a bird's tail but a small bull-roarer, far out at the end of its cord, whirling above the man's head. The bowl is nineteen centimetres across and was made somewhere in the Mimbres Classic centuries, around AD 1000-1150 - the one place in the ancient Southwest where the instrument was drawn in use rather than left in the ground. Everything turns on granting the foreshortening; refuse it and the shape goes back to being unreadable.

a small bull-roarer on a string whirling about the head of the man

Brody 1983:90
Object
Mimbres Classic Black-on-white bowl, Style III, 9 cm high and 19 cm in diameter, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico; the painted interior carries a small human figure joined by a single curved line to a much larger flaring shape.
Function
Painted scene of a bullroarer being whirled; no blade from the site is involved.
Map confidence
medium - Published site-vicinity anchor for the Mattocks Ruin, now the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site, on the upper Mimbres River near Mimbres, New Mexico; not an excavation-unit coordinate.
Source location
Page references

Brody 1983, Colorplate 21 and printed p. 90; Brown, Musical Instruments of the Ancestral Puebloans, p. 44

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