The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-014 - museum specimen

Mohave (Mojave)

United States - Colorado River, Arizona - California - North America - Southwest

Function not recorded

A Hopi bull-roarer painted with zigzag chevron bands in red, black, and cream, a white cotton cord wound loosely around its middle — in the...
Representative image. A Hopi bull-roarer painted with zigzag chevron bands in red, black, and cream, a white cotton cord wound loosely around its middle — in the Pitt Rivers Museum; the Mohave (Mojave) instrument of the Colorado River documented here has not been photographed. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1928.9.99) Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

A bull-roarer collected from the Mohave of the lower Colorado River, now held in the anthropology collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. No rite or use is recorded for the object, and the wider Mohave ethnography suggests why: Kroeber found the Mohave had no initiation ceremonies and no jimsonweed cult, their religious life resting on individual dreaming rather than the initiation societies that, elsewhere in California, gave the bull-roarer its voice. Here the instrument survives as a thing without a documented cult.

Bull-Roarer

Smithsonian NMNH record nmnhanthropology_8381310
Object
Bull-roarer of the Mohave (Mojave), in the collection of Smithsonian NMNH (NMNH Anthropology).
Function
Not recorded.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
NMNH record nmnhanthropology_8381310; Kroeber, The Religion of the Indians of California (UC-PAAE 4(6), 1907), Mohave section

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