The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-346 - museum specimen

Thirteen unprovenanced New Guinea blades

Papua New Guinea - New Guinea; locality unrecorded - Oceania

Function not recorded

Three of the eleven engraved blades in the Issoudun lot, each head carved differently.
Three of the eleven engraved blades in the Issoudun lot, each head carved differently. Image source
Neuchâtel V.826, its cord still hitched to the blade.
Neuchâtel V.826, its cord still hitched to the blade. Image source
Its companion V.827, pale designs banded across the midline.
Its companion V.827, pale designs banded across the midline.

Source term: Rhombe

Eleven blades came out of New Guinea as one lot, engraved and painted in red, black and white, catalogued at sixty centimetres, no two silhouettes alike. They ended up in Issoudun, a market town in the middle of France, because the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart keep their mother house there: more than a thousand objects came back to it from their Pacific stations between the late nineteenth century and 1939, and this handful of roaring boards came back with them.

Object
Eleven engraved wooden blades collected as one lot, early twentieth century, painted red, black and white. Two more unprovenanced Papua New Guinea rhombi, 38 and 31.8 centimetres, are in the Musée d'ethnographie de Neuchâtel, V.826 and V.827: near-twins in length, nothing alike in outline, the larger still carrying its cord.
Function
Not recorded.
Source
Musée de l'Hospice Saint-Roch / MIMO 2000.09.462.893; one lot of eleven; catalogue length 60 cm; four exact views
Source location
2000.09.462.893
Source confidence
low Papua New Guinea centroid used only because the catalogue gives no locality.

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