MUS2026-184 - museum specimen
English folk / Duxford
United Kingdom - Cambridgeshire - Duxford - Europe
Function not recorded
Source term: Bullroarer
Someone in Duxford cut a row of blunt teeth down both edges of this small blade, scorched it, and knotted a cord through the hole at one end. In 1906 the finished roarer went to the Pitt Rivers Museum, presented by Dr. Seligmann — Charles Gabriel Seligman, the anthropologist whose expeditions had taken him to the Torres Strait and New Guinea, where the bullroarer was a guarded men's secret. The one he handed over from an English village needed no guarding: the museum shelves it among children's toys, cord still in place.
"bull-roarer," Duxford, near Cambridge. Presented by Dr. Seligmann.
Pitt Rivers Museum Annual Report, 1906
- Object
- Carved wooden blade, 203 x 54 mm, serrated along both edges and burnt, with one terminal perforation retaining its single cord; exact PRM photograph.
- Function
- Function not recorded.
- Map confidence
- high - OpenStreetMap Duxford village anchor matching the museum provenance 'Duxford near Cambridge'; not a documented use site.
- Source location
- PRM 1906.34.10; PRM Annual Report 1906