EXH2026-038 - museum specimen
Biliau (Rai Coast)
Papua New Guinea - Biliau, Rai Coast (Madang, near Saidor) - Oceania
Function not recorded
Source term: Schwirrholz
Schwirrholz = German for bullroarer (literally "whirring wood").
A 47-centimetre bullroarer cut with two notches at its upper end, collected near Biliau on the Rai Coast and now held at the University of Fribourg among the objects assembled by Georg Höltker, the Society of the Divine Word missionary who worked the northeast coast of New Guinea between 1936 and 1939. Höltker reproduced it as figure 8 in his survey of Rai-Coast material culture for the 1965 festschrift honouring the Basel ethnologist Alfred Bühler, where he set the spun slat alongside the tapa cloaks, pubic bands, and house ornament of the same stretch of the Madang coast and named the earliest written notice of the Rai-Coast bull-roarer: Otto Schellong's account of the Barlum festival at Finschhafen, witnessed on the first of April, 1887.
Schwirrholz aus der Gegend von Biliau (Rai-Küste)
Bullroarer from the Biliau region (Rai Coast)
Höltker, "Tapa-Mäntel und Schambinde, Schwirrholz und Häuserschmuck von der Rai-Küste," Festschrift Alfred Bühler (Basel 1965), fig. 8
- Object
- Bullroarer 47 cm with two notches at the upper end; Universite de Fribourg, Collection Hoeltker Nr. 578; figured Festschrift Buhler fig. 8 p. 216.
- Function
- Biliau specimen/locality attestation; function not recovered from the checked snippet.
- Map confidence
- medium_high - Biliau near Saidor, Rai Coast
- Source location
Page references
Festschrift Alfred Bühler (Basel 1965), p. 216, fig. 8 (Sammlung Höltker, Universität Fribourg, Nr. 578); Fig. 9/Nr. 386 (separate Höltker specimen, generic Rai-Küste origin) not to be conflated with this row's Fig. 8/Nr. 578