HOUGH1914-001 - archaeological find
Mogollon ("Ancient Pueblo") / Bear Creek Cave, Blue River
United States - Bear Creek Cave - Blue River - upper Gila, Arizona - North America - Southwest
Sacred / spirit
Source term: whizzer (museum) / bull-roarer (Hough)
In a dry shrine cave above the Blue River, on the Arizona edge of the upper Gila, Mogollon people left offerings that open ground would long since have rotted away: prayer-sticks, painted rods, and - grouped on Walter Hough's plate 26 - bull-roarers cut from thin strips of wood and pith and painted red, green, and black. Hough judged them no different in shape from the ones Hopi and Zuni priests still whirl for wind, thunder, and rain, and counted them among the cave's paho, its prayer-offerings. One reached the Smithsonian catalogued simply as a "Whizzer." The cave was a sacred place for a wide territory, used over a long span; dry and left undisturbed, it kept its perishable wooden voices for centuries.
Figures 9, 11, 25, and 26 represent bull-roarers, not differing in shape from those used at present by the Hopi and Zuni.
Hough 1914:129 (USNM Bulletin 87)
- Object
- Painted perishable-wood bull-roarer from a dry shrine cave: a flat wooden sounding blade painted red with a separate cord-grip handle painted green and black, catalogued as two pieces (USNM A232234-0) - the handle and blade of one whizzer, or two whizzers. No dimensions are recorded. Hough figures four bull-roarers of thin painted wood and pith from the same votive series (Bulletin 87, pl. 26, figs. 9, 11, 25, 26), "not differing in shape from those used at present by the Hopi and Zuni."
- Function
- A painted wooden bull-roarer recovered from Bear Creek Cave, a long-used votive shrine cave on the Blue River, catalogued by the Smithsonian as a "Whizzer." Walter Hough classes the region's cave bull-roarers as ceremonial paho (prayer) offerings and notes they do not differ in shape from those the Hopi and Zuni still whirl for wind, thunder, and rain. Function for this exact object rests on that votive-cave context and regional ethnographic parallel, not on a recorded use.
- Map confidence
- low - Blue River drainage near Blue, Greenlee County, Arizona; Bear Creek Cave, the shrine-cave source, is not precisely located in public sources.
- Source location
Page references
p. 129; Plate 26, figs. 9, 11, 25, 26