NAAIN-005 - museum specimen
Mattaponi Reservation NMAI 9-7738
United States - Virginia - King William County - North America - Eastern Woodlands
Function not recorded
Source term: Bullroarer
One of the few bullroarers ever recorded for the Eastern Woodlands, collected on the Mattaponi Reservation in King William County, Virginia. Frank G. Speck, who gathered it about 1920, published it in his 1928 ethnography of the Powhatan tribes, figuring two specimens side by side as the "old" and "new" types of Mattaponi bullroarer. He recorded no ceremony, no spirit, and no game for it; among these much-transformed tidewater communities the carved slat survives as a thing without a documented use. Its weight is geographic. In a 1952 survey of New World instruments, Theodore Seder mapped the bullroarer across Australia, Melanesia, South America, Africa, and most of North America, and named the rare blanks, among them the eastern seaboard, to which he attached a single exception: the Mattaponi, the people from whom this stick came.
This simple instrument was used almost everywhere in the world, although there are occasional places where it is not found, such as Finland, northeastern Asia (except the Chukchee), and the eastern part of North America (excluding the Mattaponi).
Seder 1952, "Old World Overtones in the New World," University Museum Bulletin 16(3-4), Univ. of Pennsylvania
- Object
- Carved wood bullroarer collected in 1920 by Frank G. Speck
- Function
- Material object from Mattaponi Reservation; key eastern North America exception row
- Map confidence
- high - Mattaponi Reservation coordinate from public gazetteer; source place is reservation not museum
- Source location
Page references
Speck 1928, p. 448, Fig. 134 (catalog 9/7738); NMAI object record NMAI_105655 / barcode 097738