NAAIN-001 - museum specimen
Catawba / Rock Hill York County
United States - South Carolina Piedmont - North America - Eastern Woodlands
Function not recorded
Source term: Bullroarer
A bullroarer of carved wood from the Catawba of the South Carolina Piedmont, collected by the salvage ethnographer Frank G. Speck and sold by him to the Museum of the American Indian in New York, which recorded the purchase in 1942. Its place is given only as Rock Hill, in York County, where the Catawba reservation lay a few miles south of town. A companion piece in the same Catawba lot is a thin sheet of pine bark cut with incised lines rather than carved wood, a hint at how plain the form could be. What the slat sounded like in Catawba hands, and who was allowed to swing it, the museum record does not say: the object was kept, its voice was not.
Bullroarer ... Catawba ... Rock Hill; York County; South Carolina; USA ... Collected by anthropologist Frank G. Speck (1881-1950) ... purchased by MAI from Frank Speck in 1942
NMAI object record, catalog 20/5062 (Smithsonian, National Museum of the American Indian)
- Object
- Carved wood bullroarer collected by Frank G. Speck
- Function
- Material object record; function not specified beyond music/sound classification
- Map confidence
- high - Rock Hill/York County community-level source place from NMAI object provenance; representative anchor, not the museum location or an exact collection spot.
- Source location
- NMAI object record NMAI_219016 / catalog 20/5062 / barcode 205062