The Bullroarer Atlas

FEWKES1898-001 - archaeological find

Ancestral Hopi / Sikyatki

United States - Arizona - Tusayan - Navajo County - North America - Southwest

Function not recorded Candidate only

The Sikyatki grave paho Fewkes hedged as a whizzer: a flat weathered blade with its catalog number inked on the face.
The Sikyatki grave paho Fewkes hedged as a whizzer: a flat weathered blade with its catalog number inked on the face. · Public domain Image source

Source term: whizzer or bull-roarer

Somewhere before the Spaniards reached Tusayan, Sikyatki was burned by warriors out of Walpi, and its dead were buried with prayer-sticks. When Jesse Walter Fewkes dug the graves in 1895 he found a run of what he called razor-shape pahos - broad flat blades, one face flat and one rounded, tapering at one end to a tang, pierced at the other as if to hang. He drew two of them, catalogued the lot as prayer-sticks, and then let one sentence out: it is barely possible, he wrote, that this was a whizzer, of the kind Hopi dancers still swung to imitate the wind, carried by the man who plays the warrior. He never said it again. The blade went to Washington in a lot of fifteen fragments and was never measured.

It is barely possible that this may have been a whizzer or bull-roarer, such as are used at the present day to imitate the wind, and commonly carried by the performer in a public dance who personifies the warrior.

Fewkes 1898, 17th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, part 2, p. 738
Object
One of a series of 'peculiar razor-shape' pahos (prayer-sticks) from the Sikyatki graves, figured as plate CLXXV, figure s: a broad flat blade, flat on one side and rounded on the other, narrowing at one end where Fewkes thought it 'was probably continued in a shaft', with a hole punctured at the opposite, wide extremity 'as if for suspension'. Wood. No dimensions were ever published, in the text, the plate caption, the list of plates or the museum record.
Function
Grave good from a pre-contact Sikyatki burial, recorded as a prayer-stick. Fewkes thought it might have been a whizzer, 'such as are used at the present day to imitate the wind'.
Map confidence
low - Sikyatki ruin, at the eastern base of First Mesa, Arizona; the coordinate follows Fewkes's own siting of the site.
Source location
Page references

p. 738; plate CLXXV, figure s (list of plates: "CLXXV. Pahos or prayer-sticks from Sikyatki . . . 738")

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