MUS2026-028 - museum specimen
Bensbach bull-roarer (museum specimen)
Papua New Guinea - Western Province (Morehead) - Oceania - Sahul
Function not recorded
Source term: bull-roarer
A dark wooden blade half a metre long and scarcely two fingers wide, a scrap of cord still threaded through the hole at its wider end. The Cooke Daniels expedition carried it out of the Bensbach River country of the far southwest in 1904-05 — one of three bull-roarers it brought home from separate corners of British New Guinea — and Henry Balfour entered it at the Pitt Rivers Museum as simply 'bull-roarer, Bensbach River,' with not a word about who swung it or why. A sister blade at the British Museum, 'Bensbach' handwritten across the wood, was later second-guessed as work from Waima, a Roro-speaking town on the distant coast; this one kept its river. What the roarer meant to the people of the trans-Fly went unwritten.
bull-roarer, Bensbach River
Henry Balfour, "Report of the Curator of the Pitt-Rivers Museum, 1905," Cooke Daniels Expedition accessions list
- Object
- Long, thin, undecorated bull-roarer of dark wood, 515 x 33 mm, a single hole at the wider end retaining a short cord remnant; collected by the Cooke Daniels expedition 1904-05 (Cooke Daniels number 49) and donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1905 (PRM 1905.63.49).
- Function
- Not recorded.
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
Page references
PRM 1905.63.49; Balfour, PRM Curator's Report 1905, Cooke Daniels accessions list ('bull-roarer, Bensbach River'); comparison: BM Oc1906,1013.1448