The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MUS2026-211Oceania

Gulf Province eleven-bullroarer series

Papua New Guinea · Gulf Province (no district or village recorded) · Oceania

Restricted

Gulf Province blade with a carved face and fibre cord.
Plate I. Gulf Province blade with a carved face and fibre cord. Image source
Gulf bullroarer, its dark blade carved with a white-clay face and curved nested bands.
Plate II. Gulf bullroarer, its dark blade carved with a white-clay face and curved nested bands. Image source
Gulf bullroarer, a plain wooden blade with a small cord hole at its narrow notched end.
Plate III. Gulf bullroarer, a plain wooden blade with a small cord hole at its narrow notched end. Image source
A Gulf bullroarer blade with a carved face and geometric bands above a plain lower section.
Plate IV. Representative — not this record’s object. A Gulf blade with a face carved above the plain lower body. Image source
A plain Gulf palmwood blade with incised banding at the cord end.
Plate V. Representative — not this record’s object. A plain Gulf palmwood blade with incised banding at the cord end. Image source
A broad Gulf bullroarer blade with a pigment-rubbed face and an incised animal-like head, including round eye motifs, at one end.
Plate VI. A further Gulf blade, Edinburgh: a pigment-rubbed face carved at the head. Image source
A dark blade with a pale face and chevrons near its forked end.
Plate VII. A decorated Papuan Gulf blade, Pitt Rivers Museum 1938.34.35. Image source
A long dark blade with a prominent white face and curving ribbed lines.
Plate VIII. A decorated Papuan Gulf blade, Pitt Rivers Museum 1938.34.36. Image source

Source term: Bullroarer

Eleven bullroarers entered the Pitt Rivers Museum in May 1902 from somewhere on the Gulf coast of Papua, running the full range of Gulf forms: a plain notched blade, then shouldered and forked shapes, then blades serrated like teeth, and finally four carved boards — one stained black with a folded-line face in white clay, one carrying a head and zigzags, one inlaid with a face and dog-tooth shapes, and the longest, seventy-five centimetres and fish-shaped, ridged its whole length, its fibre string still tied on. Henry Balfour is named as collector, and no people is recorded for any of them.

Fish-shaped bull roarer with stylised pattern and face. Inlaid with white clay. Ridge running along the length. Fibre string.

Pitt Rivers Museum catalogue record 1902.16.24

Particulars

Object
Eleven wooden bullroarers accessioned as one series, from 310 to 750 mm long and 44 to 105 mm wide. The series runs the full range of Gulf forms: plain and lightly notched perforated blades at the small end (.16, 310 x 47 mm, notches by the perforation; .18, 418 x 58 mm, plain with a slight fork; .19, 447 x 51 mm, slim with shouldered end), then shouldered and forked blades (.17, 385 mm, pronounced shoulders and a slight ridge at the top; .20, 437 x 71 mm, forked end, shaped shoulders and a small raised oblong at the centre of one face), then serrated forms (.21, 410 x 47 mm, one forked end and one with carved serrated edges, with a length of fibre string; .22, 454 x 44 mm, serrated decoration over about two thirds of its length), and finally large carved and inlaid boards (.23, 742 x 105 mm, stained black, face and folded-line pattern inlaid with white clay, central ridge; .24, 750 x 71 mm, fish-shaped with a stylised pattern and face, white-clay inlay, a ridge running the full length and surviving fibre string; .25, 609 x 83 mm, carved head and zigzags in white-clay inlay with fibre string; .26, 535 x 70 mm, face, lines and dog-tooth shapes in white-clay inlay along a decorated ridge). Seven further Gulf blades sit nearby in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Five, 1938.34.33–37, carry conventionalized mask faces at the head, ranging from 510 to 760 mm long, including a 760 by 135 mm giant stained red over whitened ground and a 576 by 72 mm sliver; 1918.14.1 has a central ridge that ends on a carved figure's nose; 1940.12.308 is pointed palmwood, carved at one end only. A further Gulf blade in National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh (A.1951.369), is long and carved with a human face amid dense designs, pigment still lodged in the grooves.
Function
Across the Gulf of Papua the bullroarer was sounded as the voice of a malignant deity, and the disclosure of what really made that voice was the kernel of the boys' initiation; nothing finer is recorded for this series.

Source

Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, 1902.16.16-26 (Papua New Guinea; donated by Henry Balfour, 1902); National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh, A.1951.369 (Papuan Gulf); Edwin M. Loeb, 'Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies,' University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 25(3) (1929), p. 253

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