JSTEWARD1941-003 - primary ethnography
Death Valley Shoshoni mountain-sheep-horn bullroarer
United States - Northern Death Valley, Inyo County, California - North America - Great Basin
Play / practical
Source term: Bull-roarer
Alone in Steward's Nevada survey, the Death Valley Shoshoni cut a bullroarer from mountain-sheep horn. Everywhere else in the Basin the instrument was wood — a flat slat on a thong and handle stick — and Death Valley had that form too, the horn blade standing beside it. Both were playthings. Neither was swung to bring the wind: that belonged to the northern Basin, and the boundary between the toy country and the weather country ran just above this valley.
- Object
- Two forms: a whirrer of wood, and one of mountain-sheep horn. The horn form is recorded at Death Valley and nowhere else in the survey.
- Function
- A toy; the wind-making use was denied here.
- Source
- Steward 1941, printed p. 307, element 1870 'Bull-roarer' + for column Sa, with sub-elements 1871 'whirrer of wood' +, 1872 'of sheep horn' +, 1873 'used as toy' +, 1874 'used to make wind blow' -. Column Sa is the only + on 1872 in the whole table; Informant dossier, printed p. 213: 'BD, full-blood Shoshoni man, born ca. 1865 at Grapevine Springs in…
- Source location
Page references
printed p. 307, element 1870 and sub-elements 1871-1874 (column Sa); informant p. 213
- Source confidence
- medium to high Midpoint of Surveyors Well and Grapevine Springs in northern Death Valley, the country the list covers. Territory anchor for the named people; not a use site.
- Toy / secular survival