The Bullroarer Atlas

NAAIN-005 - museum specimen

Mattaponi / Mattaponi Reservation

United States - Virginia - King William County - North America - Eastern Woodlands

Function not recorded

The Mattaponi serrated wooden bull-roarer Speck figured (fig. 134) — museum photograph of the same object, NMAI 9/7738; the long central slot...
The Mattaponi serrated wooden bull-roarer Speck figured (fig. 134) — museum photograph of the same object, NMAI 9/7738; the long central slot is a decorative cut, suspension is by the single end hole. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (9/7738) Image source

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
Speck 1928, p. 448, Fig. 134 (catalog 9/7738); NMAI object record NMAI_105655 / barcode 097738

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