LOEB1929-021 - ethnographic attestation
Maidu child-toy bullroarer
United States - Northern California - North America
Play / practical
Source term: bullroarer
Among the Maidu of northern California the bullroarer was only a child's toy. Surveying the secret societies of central California, Edward Loeb reported that the instrument turned up nowhere in the region except among the Pomo and Coast Miwok, and that Roland Dixon, who studied the Northern Maidu for the American Museum of Natural History around the turn of the century, had recorded it there merely as a plaything. Where it did carry weight, in the Pomo Ghost ceremony, bullroarers were swung inside the subterranean ghost house and the uninitiated were told the sound was the voice of the dead.
The bullroarer has not been reported for central California outside of the Pomo and Coast Miwok. Dixon describes it as a child's toy among the Maidu.
Loeb 1929, "Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies," Univ. of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 25(3):269
- Function
- Dixon describes the bullroarer as a child's toy among the Maidu.
- Map confidence
- medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Loeb
- Source location
- p. 269
- Toy / secular survival