Palm-sized Iglulik plaything

Source term: bull-roarer

Iglulik children played at the work waiting for them: little harpoons, bows and arrows, model kayaks, small pots and lamps for a doll-sized household on the Foxe Basin coast. Among those playthings Mathiassen recorded a bullroarer barely longer than a finger — 7.8 centimetres of flat, slightly curved wood, both edges cut with deep notches, a hole at the narrow end holding seventeen centimetres of sinew thread that ends in a noose. Nearby in the same set of toys lay a spinning buzz made from a single whitefish vertebra, threaded with sinew and pulled to make it whirl.

A bull-roarer from Iglulik is of wood, 7.8 cm long, 1.8 cm wide, flat, slightly curved, with deep notches in the edges and, at the narrow end, a hole in which is fastened a piece of sinew-thread, 17 cm long, ending in a noose.

Mathiassen 1928, Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, chapter 10 (playthings).

Particulars

Object

Small wooden blade, 7.8 by 1.8 cm, flat and slightly curved, with deep notches cut in the edges and a 17 cm sinew thread through a hole at the narrow end, ending in a noose.

Function

A child's plaything, recorded among Iglulik toys.