The Bullroarer Atlas

NAAIN-004 - museum specimen

Rappahannock

United States - Virginia - North America - Eastern Woodlands

Function not recorded

A Rappahannock bullroarer collected by Frank Speck: a notch-edged wooden slat, left plain to show the grain, a cord looped through the hole at...
A Rappahannock bullroarer collected by Frank Speck: a notch-edged wooden slat, left plain to show the grain, a cord looped through the hole at one end with its thick surplus wound around the slat's middle - the same culture and collector as the Rappahannock piece described here, though not that specific object. Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution (USNM E391849-0) Image source

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
NMAI object record; catalog 20/5079 / barcode 205079

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