The Bullroarer Atlas

NAAIN-017 - ethnographic attestation

Eastern Band Cherokee / Birdtown

United States - North Carolina - Qualla Boundary - Birdtown - North America - Eastern Woodlands

Play / practical

A bone bullroarer with sawtooth edges and a hide cord, shown here for its general Inuit/Arctic form — not the poplar board fastened to a long...
Representative image. A bone bullroarer with sawtooth edges and a hide cord, shown here for its general Inuit/Arctic form — not the poplar board fastened to a long string that the Birdtown Cherokee are said to swing overhead for its deep roaring note. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1907.72.1) Image source

Source term: roarer; typical bull-roarer

Among the Eastern Cherokee of Birdtown, on the Qualla Boundary in the North Carolina mountains, the "roarer" was a child's plaything rather than a secret of the men's house: a narrow length of poplar bored with a single hole, fastened to a long string, and swung in fast circles around the head until its beveled edges threw off "a deep, roaring note." John Parris, chronicling the old toys that Cherokee boys once made alongside willow whistles and elderberry popguns, carefully sets the roarer apart from the "buzzer" — a notched disc of soft wood or gourd strung through two central holes and spun between the hands. The one-hole board on its cord is, in his words, "a typical bull-roarer," and unlike the sacred roarers of Australia or the Papuan Gulf, this one carries no spirit voice and no taboo: it is simply a toy that has now, like most of the old Cherokee playthings, all but disappeared.

The "roarer" was a typical bull-roarer, fashioned from a narrow length of poplar and fastened to a long string by a hole at one end.

John Parris, "Whistle-Making Time Near," Mountain Bred column (Asheville Citizen-Times)
Object
Narrow poplar board fastened to a long string by a hole at one end; swung around the head to make a deep roaring note.
Function
Cherokee children's toy bullroarer, explicitly distinguished from a separate two-hole buzzer.
Map confidence
high - Birdtown populated-place/community anchor from TopoZone/GNIS; Parris gives Birdtown as the column heading but no sub-community use site or collection location.
Source location
PDF p. 1

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