The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-003 - museum specimen

Carrier (Dakelh)

Canada - British Columbia - North America - Subarctic

Function not recorded

The Carrier (Dakelh) bull-roarer documented here — a pale wooden blade with its slender swinging stick and cord laid alongside.
The Carrier (Dakelh) bull-roarer documented here — a pale wooden blade with its slender swinging stick and cord laid alongside. Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution (USNM E381321-0) Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

This bull-roarer of the Carrier, or Dakelh, the Athabaskan people of the central interior of British Columbia, was collected by the anthropologist Julian Steward during his 1940 fieldwork at Stuart Lake and entered the Smithsonian that October through the Bureau of American Ethnology. The catalogue names the object and the people but records nothing of how it was sounded, by whom, or to what end. Nor does the standard survey of British Columbia bullroarers fill the gap: it treats the coastal Tsimshian, Kwakwaka'wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth but passes the interior Carrier by. The roaring slat survives here as an object without a recorded purpose.

Bull-Roarer

Smithsonian NMNH record nmnhanthropology_8416972
Object
Bull-roarer of the Carrier (Dakelh), in the collection of Smithsonian NMNH (NMNH Anthropology).
Function
Not recorded.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
NMNH record nmnhanthropology_8416972; USNM E381321-0

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