The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MASSEY1961-001North America

San Julio Basin ironwood bullroarer

Mexico · San Julio Basin · Baja California Sur · North America

Function not recorded

Archaeological dateUndatedSurface find; archaeological age unknown.
A plain wooden slat on its long cord, from Mesbilja in Chiapas, Mexico.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. A bullroarer from Mesbilja, Chiapas CC BY-SA · Image source
Hearst catalogue card for ironwood bullroarer 3-10308 from Site BC 60 in the San Julio Basin.
Plate II. Hearst catalogue card for ironwood bullroarer 3-10308 from Site BC 60 in the San Julio Basin. Image source

Source term: Bullroarer / wooden bull-roarer

A blade of ironwood twenty-one and a half centimetres long, oval in plan and swelling to a lens in section - the conventional shape, as Massey and Osborne described it - lay on the floor of a cave in the San Julio Basin, east of Comondú in the Baja desert, when Carl Sauer and William Massey collected it in the summer of 1946. The Hearst Museum's catalogue calls it what it looks like: Bullroarer. Nothing dates the object; it came off the surface rather than out of a layer, so 1946 marks only the year it was picked up.

This wooden bull-roarer has a conventional shape; it is a long oval-shaped piece of hardwood which is double-convex or lenticular in cross section and has a length of 21.5 cm.

Massey & Osborne 1961:344

Particulars

Object
Long oval ironwood blade, 21.5 cm, double-convex or lenticular in cross section; Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology 3-10308, accession 881 (catalogued in 1961 as the Robert H. Lowie Museum).
Function
Not recorded.

Source

William C. Massey and Carolyn M. Osborne, A Burial Cave in Baja California: The Palmer Collection, 1887, Anthropological Records 16(8) (1961), p. 344 and footnote 2; Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, object 3-10308, accession 881

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Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.