The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-046 - museum specimen

Mi'kmaq

Maritime Canada - North America - Eastern Woodlands

Function not recorded Candidate only

A board painted with paired semicircle motifs in two pale panels set between solid dark bands, a chevron near the tail, photographed in black...
Representative image. A board painted with paired semicircle motifs in two pale panels set between solid dark bands, a chevron near the tail, photographed in black and white — a Bororo bull-roarer held by the Pitt Rivers Museum, shown for the general form; not the Mi'kmaq bull-roarer of Maritime Canada documented here. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1903.40.1) Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

A small worked-wood object catalogued as Mi'kmaq, it reached the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1886 in the transfer of ethnographic material from the Ashmolean Museum. The museum's own record leaves both its function and its form open, carrying it as "?Noise-maker (bullroarer) or ?box lid" — the identification undecided.

?Noise-maker (bullroarer) or ?box lid

Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, object record 1886.1.870
Object
Bull-roarer of the Mi'kmaq, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1886.1.870).
Function
Not recorded.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
1886.1.870

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