The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-006 - museum specimen

Jemez (Walatowa)

United States - Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico - North America - Southwest

Function not recorded

A pale wooden slat pierced at one end for its long braided cord — a Hopi bull-roarer in Oslo's ethnographic museum, shown for the general...
Representative image. A pale wooden slat pierced at one end for its long braided cord — a Hopi bull-roarer in Oslo's ethnographic museum, shown for the general Pueblo form; the Jemez (Walatowa) instrument documented here, held by the Smithsonian, has not been photographed. Kulturhistorisk museum, Universitetet i Oslo (Etnografisk) (UEM29633/b) CC BY-SA Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

Whirled on its cord, a bull-roarer makes a low, carrying moan — and at Walatowa, most tight-lipped of the New Mexico pueblos, such sacred things are not for outsiders to witness. It is still unlawful here to photograph, record, or even sketch a ceremony, and the National Museum of the American Indian keeps this one in that same silence: classed as sacred, shown as words with no picture. When Elsie Clews Parsons gathered tales at Jemez in 1925, one narrator left his deliberately unfinished, so no outsider would ever hold the whole.

Object
Bull-roarer of the Jemez (Walatowa), in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).
Function
Restricted sacred instrument — the holding museum withholds or flags it as culturally sensitive (a secret/sacred object, not a toy).
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI)

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