Hurricane Deck cave bullroarers (Santa Barbara County)

Source term: bullroarer

Deep in the sandstone backcountry of Santa Barbara County — the ridge country called Hurricane Deck, above the upper Sisquoc River — a cave yielded three wooden bullroarers, now in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History: flat staves up to 42 centimetres long, each drilled at one end with a small hole for its cord, one with a notched edge. The archaeologist Robert Heizer, surveying California's bullroarers in 1960, observed that Hurricane Deck lies in Chumash country, where the old religion turned on the ritual drinking of the narcotic toloache (Datura), and suggested these staves may have been ceremonial paraphernalia secreted in the cave. The Chumash whom the missions left knew the bullroarer only as a boys' toy; Heizer thought the early destruction of the native religion had let a sacred instrument dwindle into play.

The notched edge … is barely present in one of the three pieces from the Hurricane Deck region—this feature is not reported in any ethnographic specimens (cf. Kroeber, 1925, Pl. 44) but is attested elsewhere by Spier (1928:290-91) for the Arapaho and Havasupai.

R. F. Heizer, 'Some Prehistoric Bullroarers from California Caves', Reports of the University of California Archaeological Survey 50 (1960), p. 8.

Particulars

Object

Three prehistoric wooden bullroarers in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, from a cave in the Hurricane Deck region: a complete stave 42 cm long, a 14 cm hole-end fragment, and a 34.6 cm example with edge-notching; each pierced with a 0.5 cm string-hole.

Function

Not recorded.