The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-102 - museum specimen

Solos

Papua New Guinea - Buka Island, Autonomous Re - Oceania - Sahul

Sacred / spirit

An elongated wooden blade with a smooth teardrop outline and a small perforation at the tip of its narrow tail — the Solos rhombe from Buka...
An elongated wooden blade with a smooth teardrop outline and a small perforation at the tip of its narrow tail — the Solos rhombe from Buka Island documented here, its face incised with a squatting figure picked out in whitened engraving. © Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

Swung in the wapi ceremony, its whir was the voice of the urar — the dead, returning to be heard among the living. Beatrice Blackwood, camped on both shores of Buka Passage in 1929, recorded the rite among the Solos, one of Buka Island's two peoples, and set the roaring slat down as the throat the spirits borrowed. Plain unpainted wood on a cord, kept now in Paris: the sound of a ghost, made by a hand.

Instrument de musique.

Musical instrument.

Quai Branly API object 11836
Object
Quai Branly object 71.1934.188.1425: Solos rhombe from Buka Island.
Function
Quai Branly API identifies a Solos rhombe from Buka Island as a musical instrument; broader Bougainville sacredness/upe material is not bullroarer-specific.
Map confidence
high - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
object record 11836 (Quai Branly API)

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