NAAIN-004 - museum specimen
Rappahannock Virginia NMAI 20-5079
United States - Virginia - North America - Eastern Woodlands
Function not recorded
Source term: Bullroarer
A carved wooden bullroarer from the Rappahannock of tidewater Virginia, collected by the anthropologist Frank G. Speck and now in the National Museum of the American Indian, where it is cataloged simply as a bullroarer of wood under Music and Sound. The record gives the place only as Virginia and says nothing about how it was used or who swung it. Speck's monograph on the Rappahannock themselves never mentions a bullroarer, but in his broader 1928 study of the Powhatan tribes he illustrated the instrument among the neighboring Mattaponi, showing what he labeled the old and the new types side by side.
Old (a) and new (b) types of Mattaponi bullroarers.
Speck, Chapters on the Ethnology of the Powhatan Tribes of Virginia, 1928, fig. 134
- Object
- Carved wood bullroarer collected by Frank G. Speck
- Function
- Material object record; source place is only Virginia and should not be forced to a museum or arbitrary tribal-office coordinate
- Map confidence
- low_medium - Rappahannock/Virginia community anchor at Indian Neck, King and Queen County, used because NMAI gives culture Rappahannock and place Virginia but no collection locality.
- Source location
Page references
NMAI object record; catalog 20/5079 / barcode 205079