The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-025 - museum specimen

Mulga Downs (rock-art)

Pilbara, Western Australia

Function not recorded

A broad wooden board carved with concentric-circle clusters and short radiating dashes near its tip — an Aboriginal Australian bull-roarer held...
Representative image. A broad wooden board carved with concentric-circle clusters and short radiating dashes near its tip — an Aboriginal Australian bull-roarer held by the Wereldmuseum, shown for the general form; the Mulga Downs bull-roarer of the Pilbara is known here only through rock art, not a surviving object. Wereldmuseum / NMVW (acc. RV-2087-5) CC BY-SA Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

A wooden bull-roarer, 44 centimetres long, lifted from a cave at Mulga Downs in the Hamersley country of the Pilbara — Banjima land — and given to the Penn Museum in 1943 by the American anthropologist Daniel Sutherland Davidson, who had collected it on his Australian expeditions of the 1930s. It is one of a set of nine Davidson catalogued from the same locality, and a companion churinga and bull-roarer from "Mulga Downs Cave" travelled on from Penn through Nelson Rockefeller's Museum of Primitive Art to the Metropolitan Museum. Across all these records the object is logged only by its wood, its measurements, and the single word "Cave"; the rite it served, and who was permitted to hear it, were never written down.

Object
Bull-roarer of the Mulga Downs (rock-art), in the collection of Penn Museum (Penn (Mulga Downs)).
Function
Penn Museum cached records verify a Mulga Downs bull-roarer cluster; object-specific use and gender context are not recorded in the checked metadata.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
Penn Museum object 132843 / accession 43-4-110 (Locus: Cave; Donor: Daniel Sutherland Davidson; Credit: Gift of Daniel Sutherland Davidson, 1943); Met Museum "Churinga / Bullroarer — Mulga Downs Cave," object 313724

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