MUS2026-013 - museum specimen
Miskito bull-roarer (museum specimen)
Nicaragua - Río Coco (Wanks River) - Mesoamerica - Central America
Function not recorded
Source term: bull-roarer
A Miskito bull-roarer from the Río Coco — the Wanks, or Segovia, River that now divides Nicaragua from Honduras — held in the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. It was gathered by David E. Harrower, who spent two months in 1924 collecting among the Miskito, Sumu, and Rama for the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, working out of Río Coco villages such as Asang and Krasa. The object record fixes the people and the place but not the purpose; what the instrument was sounded for here is not set down, and its ritual character is inferred from the wider region rather than from anything noted of this specimen.
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Miskito, 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_142388 / catalog 13/2528