MUS2026-045 - museum specimen
Sanumá bull-roarer (Pitt Rivers)
Venezuela - Yanomami (Sanumá), upper Orinoco - Caura - South America - Guianas
Function not recorded
Source term: bull-roarer
A triangular wooden bull-roarer of the Sanumá, the northernmost of the Yanomami, painted in yellow pigment with a cross and dots on one face and triangles and dots on the other, notched at the tip and bound with plant-fibre cord. It was collected in southern Venezuela by the anthropologist Marcus Colchester around 1979 and 1980 and bought by the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1981. No occasion or use was recorded with it, and Yanomami sacred sound is otherwise carried not by whirled wood but by the shaman's chant and the spirits inhaled in snuff; what these people did with the instrument is not documented.
Painted with a yellow pigment with a cross (X) and dots on one side and triangles and dots on the other. The tip is notched with a length of plant fibre string bound around it.
Pitt Rivers Museum object record, acc. 1981.33.75
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Sanumá, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1981.33.75).
- Function
- Not recorded.
- Map confidence
- low - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
- 1981.33.75