The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-010 - museum specimen

Lenca

Usulután, El Salvador - Mesoamerica - Central America

Function not recorded

The Lenca whip-style roarer documented here — a small end-pierced stone blade slung by cord from its bent whip stick — collected at...
The Lenca whip-style roarer documented here — a small end-pierced stone blade slung by cord from its bent whip stick — collected at Estanzuelas, El Salvador, by S. K. Lothrop. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (13/1157) Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

A Lenca bull-roarer from Estanzuelas in eastern El Salvador, gathered by the archaeologist Samuel K. Lothrop on the Museum of the American Indian's 1924 Central American expedition and now in the National Museum of the American Indian. The catalog fixes the object, the people, and the collector but records no ceremony or use, and the wider Lenca ethnographic record ties its documented ritual life to dances, drums, and flutes rather than to the whirled blade.

Object
Bull-roarer of the Lenca, 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
NMAI_140531 / catalog 13/1157

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