MUS2026-024 - museum specimen
Wardaman
Australia - Northern Territory - Top End
Function not recorded
Kuraba English
Source term: bull-roarer
Kuraba: the Wardaman native name recorded by Davidson (1931) for these bull-roarers, labelled with a "Snake Totem" association.
Etymology. Kuraba is the Wardaman name recorded for these bull-roarers by Daniel Davidson on his 1931 Australian Expedition. The Penn Museum register marks each specimen a 'Snake Totem' object, so the bull-roarer belongs to a Snake Dreaming, but the word itself is not glossed as 'snake,' and the association is totemic rather than a shared lexeme. (medium confidence)
A cluster of large wooden bull-roarers from Wardaman country in the Northern Territory, collected by the American anthropologist Daniel Sutherland Davidson on his 1931 Australian expedition and now held by the Penn Museum. The objects are sizeable, roughly 77 to 80 centimetres long, and the field labels record a native name, Kuraba, and a snake-totem identity; one note reports that they were "Buried in cave No. 6," cached rather than carried. Beyond that totemic and find-spot detail the records say nothing of a ceremony, a restriction on women, or a spirit's voice, so the instruments' role within Wardaman ritual life goes unrecorded here.
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Wardaman, in the collection of Penn Museum (Penn (Wardaman)).
- Function
- Not recorded.
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
- Penn objects 261493 (acc. 31-34-117), 318436 (acc. 31-34-115), 223463 (acc. 31-34-116); Davidson Australian Expedition, 1931