The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-323 - museum specimen

Anga trio still bound together

Papua New Guinea - Morobe Province - Oceania - Sahul

Sacred / spirit

The Anga trio 1938.36.785 as accessioned: blades still bound in their fibre wrapping.
The Anga trio 1938.36.785 as accessioned: blades still bound in their fibre wrapping. Image source

Source term: Bullroarer

akwi-ó: the Anga word for the bullroarer, recorded in the Upper Watut.

Among the Anga of the Upper Watut the bullroarer is akwi-ó, and Beatrice Blackwood photographed one swung from the high seat while a boy sat waiting to have his nose pierced. Three blades out of her 1936–37 collecting arrived tied together and have stayed that way: each 24 centimetres long and 12 millimetres across, no wider than the edge of a ruler. Whoever knotted them treated the three as one thing, and the knot has outlasted everybody who could say why.

Object
Three Anga bullroarers of wood and plant fibre, each 240 × 12 mm, bound together as one group.
Function
Not recorded for this group.
Source
Pitt Rivers Museum 1938.36.785.1 / 1938.36.785.2 / 1938.36.785.3; Three 240 × 12 mm Anga bullroarers of wood and plant fibre, explicitly catalogued as bound together
Source location
Page references

1938.36.785.1; 1938.36.785.2; 1938.36.785.3

Source confidence
medium Morobe Province regional anchor; the exact collecting place is unrecorded.

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