MUS2026-025 - museum specimen
Mulga Downs (rock-art) bull-roarer (museum specimen)
Pilbara, Western Australia
Function not recorded
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 Cave cluster, Pilbara, Western Australia. This is one row spanning four wooden bull-roarers/bullroarer-attributed objects from the same Davidson cave-collected series: Penn Museum accession 43-4-110 (object 132843, the row's anchor, L 44 cm x W 9.2 cm), Penn Museum accession 43-4-106 (object 283708, L 49 cm x W 7.2 cm, "Westernmost appearance of interlocking key design"), Metropolitan Museum of Art accession 1979.206.1535 (object 313724, currently titled "Churinga" / "Ceremonial object," 117.5 x 8.3 cm), and Metropolitan Museum of Art accession 1979.206.1537 (object 313726, titled "Bullroarer," 50.8 x 7 x 0.8 cm).
- 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
Page references
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