GIFFORD1940-005 - ethnographic attestation
Eighteen inches of sotol stalk
United States - Huachuca Mountains, Arizona - North America
Play / practical
Source term: bull-roarer
Most Apache roarers in Gifford's Southwestern lists run eight to twelve inches. The Shaiahene band's, from the Chiricahua country of the Huachuca Mountains in southeastern Arizona, is eighteen by three — and it is not cut from pine or ash at all but from the thick woody base of a sotol stalk, the desert rosette whose flower spike shoots up taller than a man and whose crowns the Apache roasted for food. The band named the wood, the size, and the use: a toy only. Gifford's column marks the grip stick present and everything else absent — no design, no lightning-struck wood, not used in dance, not in curing, not out of sight. In Chiricahua country, where the neighbouring San Carlos and White Mountain bands swung the roarer in curing and to announce the masked gan dancers, the Shaiahene band had the biggest blade in the whole survey and used it for play.
sotol-stalk base (Hu)
Gifford 1940:152, material note to element 2209.
- Object
- Unusually large blade, about 18 by 3 inches, cut from the base of a sotol stalk, on a cord about two and a half feet long.
- Function
- A toy only: Gifford's Huachuca column marks the roarer as a toy, with a grip stick, undecorated, and not used in dance, in curing or out of sight (Gifford 1940, elements 2208-2218).
- Source
- Gifford 1940 Hu column; dimensions and material notes
- Source location
- pp. 58-59, 151-152
- Source confidence
- medium Huachuca Mountains regional anchor.
- Toy / secular survival