The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-028 - museum specimen

Bensbach

Papua New Guinea - Western Province (Morehead) - Oceania - Sahul

Function not recorded

A dark, double-pointed wooden blade, largely unadorned but for its painted accession number, a torn scrap of paper label, and the name...
A dark, double-pointed wooden blade, largely unadorned but for its painted accession number, a torn scrap of paper label, and the name 'Bensbach' handwritten across the wood — the bull-roarer collected on the Daniels Expedition to British New Guinea in 1903–04 and documented here, though the museum's own register suggests it may in fact be Waima work. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Oc1906,1013.1448) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

A palmwood bull-roarer carried back from the Cooke Daniels Expedition to British New Guinea in 1903-04 and inscribed "Bensbach," for the trans-Fly river of that name in what is now Western Province. The expedition's curator's report logs it plainly as "bull-roarer, Bensbach River," one of three it brought home from separate places, with not a word about how it was used. A later British Museum note guesses "probably Waima" after Seligman, but Waima is a different, Roro-speaking locality on the coast, and the original Bensbach provenance was recorded first. What the roarer meant to the people who made it went unwritten.

bull-roarer, Bensbach River

Henry Balfour, "Report of the Curator of the Pitt-Rivers Museum, 1905," Cooke Daniels Expedition accessions list
Object
Palmwood bull-roarer from the Daniels Expedition to British New Guinea 1903-04; inscribed Bensbach; BM register says probably Waima (British Museum Oc1906,1013.1448).
Function
Not recorded.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
BM Oc1906,1013.1448; Balfour, PRM Curator's Report 1905, Cooke Daniels accessions list ("bull-roarer, Bensbach River")

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