The Bullroarer Atlas

GAMBLE2025-001 - archaeological find

Muwu cache of three bullroarers

United States - California - Ventura County - Mugu Lagoon-Point Mugu - North America

Archaeological dateUndatedArchaeological cache; exact recovery context and date remain unpublished.

Sacred / spirit

Saw-toothed wooden bullroarer excavated from a Chumash-area cave in Los Angeles County.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Saw-toothed wooden bullroarer excavated from a Chumash-area cave in Los Angeles County. Image source

Muwu English

Source term: bullroarers

Muwu: the site label Gamble 2025 publishes for CA-VEN-11; per Van Valkenburgh (1935), the site was earlier recorded as Wihatset/Wixatset, with "Muwu" called an error -- both names are carried here.

At Muwu, on the marshy shore of Mugu Lagoon in Ventura County, a Chumash cache once held eight bone whistles alongside three bullroarers. The whistles survive in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, cut from deer tibiae and decorated with asphaltum and beads, ranging between about 22 and 26 centimetres; archaeologist Lynn Gamble named the cache's other three objects bullroarers in 2025, citing Travis Hudson and Thomas Blackburn's 1986 catalogue of Chumash ceremonial paraphernalia. The place itself carries an old disagreement: one ethnographic report gives CA-VEN-11 the older name Wihatset, calling "Muwu" a mistake, even as the current literature keeps using it.

These five are from a cache of eight found with three bullroarers.

Lynn H. Gamble, "Navigating cooperative marketplaces," Frontiers in Human Dynamics 7 (2025), article 1606256, fig. 7 caption
Object
Three bullroarers recovered from a cache with eight deer-tibia whistles decorated with asphaltum and beads; Hudson and Blackburn's 1986 catalogue (pp. 358-360) records the assemblage, but object-level material, dimensions, and manufacture details for the three bullroarers themselves are not given in the sources consulted, and must not be inferred from the whistles' 22.1-26.5 cm range.
Function
Three bullroarers cached with eight decorated deer-tibia whistles. A regional archaeoacoustics study identifies bullroarers and bone whistles as sacred objects for south-central Californian Native peoples; the exact rite represented by this cache is not recorded.
Map confidence
low - Mugu Lagoon centroid, Point Mugu cluster, Ventura County; Gamble publishes only the label "Muwu, VEN-11," and Van Valkenburgh (1935, reported in the NPS Chumash cultural-affiliation report p. 74) states CA-VEN-11 was itself historically Wihatset/Wixatset, "erroneously known as Muwu" -- no precise village or cache find-spot coordinate is published, so this pins the lagoon cluster, not an exact site.
Source location
Page references

Gamble 2025, fig. 7 and caption; cited to Hudson and Blackburn 1986, pp. 358-360

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