Mattocks bowl bullroarer scene

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 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

Particulars

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.