The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MUS2026-045

Triangular Sanumá blade painted in yellow

Venezuela · Yanomami (Sanumá), upper Orinoco · Caura · South America · Guianas

Function not recorded

Sanumá bullroarer in the Pitt Rivers Museum: a pale wooden blade widening from its corded narrow end to a flat broad end, painted with crossing brown strokes and groups of dots.
Plate I. Sanumá bull-roarer, Pitt Rivers Museum. Image source

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.

Particulars

Object
Bull-roarer of the Sanumá, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1981.33.75).
Function
Not recorded.

Source

Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, 1981.33.75 (collected by Marcus Colchester among the Sanumá, 1979-1980)

View the source · archived

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.