MUS2026-008 - museum specimen
Karok (Karuk) bull-roarer (museum specimen)
United States - Klamath River, California - North America
Function not recorded
Source term: bull-roarer
Worked from incised animal bone rather than wood, this bull-roarer is attributed to the Karuk of the Klamath River — one of the northwestern California nations of whom Alfred Kroeber wrote that the bull-roarer "was not used." Strung on cord and marked with carving and a single perforation, it entered the Museum of the American Indian in 1936, bought from the collector Margaret Alta Richards. Nothing of its own life was recorded: who made it, when, or how it was sounded is unknown. In a corner of California where the whirring instrument reportedly had no place, the survival of a Karuk example is itself the puzzle.
The bull-roarer has been reported from several scattered tribes. As might be expected, its function is religious, but is not well known and seems to have varied. To the Luiseno it was a summons. It was not used by the northwestern nations.
A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (BAE Bulletin 78, 1925), p. 938
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Karok (Karuk), in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).
- Function
- Not recorded.
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
Page references
National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI)