The Bullroarer Atlas

NAAIN-001 - museum specimen

Catawba Rock Hill NMAI 20-5062

United States - South Carolina Piedmont - North America - Eastern Woodlands

Function not recorded

Representative—not this record’s object: a Rappahannock bullroarer from the Eastern Woodlands.
Representative — not this record’s object. · a Rappahannock bullroarer from the Eastern Woodlands. Image source

yen' wihǝre English

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. Frank Speck's own 1944 survey of Catawba games supplies the name and the sound the museum record withheld: the Catawba called it yen' wihəre, "wind turns," cut from a notched blade of gourd rind, yellow pine bark, or cypress shingle six to seven and a half inches long, strung on about two and a half feet of cord, and whirled to a deep tremolo humming. Speck looked for a rite behind it and found none — his own footnote states plainly that no purpose or symbolism could be discovered attached to the toy.

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; a companion Catawba pine-bark blade in the same lot matches the notched gourd-rind/bark/shingle whizz-board Speck later described as yen' wihəre, roughly six to seven and a half inches long by two inches wide, strung on about two and a half feet of cord.
Function
Speck's 1944 games survey names it a children's toy and states plainly that no purpose or symbolism could be found attached to it; a separate two-cord friction 'Buzzer' is a distinct Catawba toy, not this object.
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
Page references

NMAI object record NMAI_219016 / catalog 20/5062 / barcode 205062

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