The Bullroarer Atlas

NAAIN-016 - archaeological find

Tunumiit, Clavering Island (Northeast Greenland)

Northeast Greenland - Tunu - North America - Arctic edge

Function not recorded

A weathered bone blade with fine sawtooth edges and a long hide cord, photographed with its Pitt Rivers Museum catalog card; a broad...
Representative image. A weathered bone blade with fine sawtooth edges and a long hide cord, photographed with its Pitt Rivers Museum catalog card; a broad Arctic/Inuit type, not the wood bullroarer excavated at the Stone House site on Clavering Island that this page documents. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1907.72.1) Image source

Source term: Bullroarer

A carved and drilled wooden bullroarer, dug from a stone house at Site C on Clavering Island in Northeast Greenland and dated by the museum to probably AD 1600–1800. It was excavated in 1930 by the archaeologist Junius Bird, who dug abandoned Eskimo ruins on Clavering and Shannon Islands during the Ford-Bartlett East Greenland Expedition — Captain Robert Bartlett's voyage on the schooner Effie M. Morrissey, sponsored by the Museum of the American Indian and its trustee James B. Ford. The Smithsonian attributes it to the ancestral Tunumiit of the Tunu (East Greenland) coast. Among Greenlandic Inuit the bullroarer is recorded chiefly as a child's spinning noise-toy rather than a ritual instrument, a lozenge of wood or bone pierced at one end, spun on a cord to whir.

Bullroarer. Wood. Stone house; Site C, Clavering Island; Northeast Greenland National Park; Tunu (East Greenland); Greenland. Date made: probably AD 1600–1800.

National Museum of the American Indian, object record 17/9504 (NMAI_191756)
Object
Wood archaeological bullroarer from Stone house Site C
Function
Archaeological object probably AD 1600-1800 from Clavering Island Site C
Map confidence
high - Clavering Island archaeological source place; not museum location
Source location
NMAI object record 17/9504

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