MUS2026-209 - museum specimen
Central Arctic baleen bullroarer
Canada - Central Arctic - North America
Function not recorded
Source term: Bullroarer
A strip of baleen twenty centimetres long, cut from the plates of a whale's jaw and worked down to a narrow blade, with rows of deep teeth cut along both edges and one end drawn to a point. Its cord is still tied on at the other end. It reached Oxford in May 1907, bought by the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the register attributes it - not quite confidently - to Cecil Vincent Goddard, somewhere in the Central Arctic of Canada. Beyond that the paperwork thins out: the museum's own culture field reads Inuit, and also Inuit (Greenland), for an object it places in Canada. Nobody recorded who made it, who swung it, or what for.
- Object
- Carved baleen blade, 200 x 30 mm. The museum photograph shows a long narrow strip with deeply serrated edges running most of its length, one end tapered, and a surviving cord attached at the opposite terminal end - single-end free-air suspension rather than an axial double-cord buzzer.
- Function
- Not recorded.
- Map confidence
- low - Broad regional anchor for the Canadian Central Arctic, the only geography the museum records. This is a region-level point somewhere in the Kitikmeot / central mainland-and-islands area, not a community, camp or collection locality, and it should not be read as a findspot.
- Source location
Page references
PRM catalogue record 1907.72.1 and photograph PRM_RS486220_1907.0072.1.jpg (retrieved 2026-08-01)