The Bullroarer Atlas

NAGPRA2007-001 - museum specimen

Black-and-red zigzags beside the Gaan

United States - White Mountain Apache Reservation (White River and its North and East Forks), east-central Arizona - North America - Southwest

Sacred / spirit

Representative—not this record’s object: Hopi wooden blade painted with a red zigzag, British Museum
Representative — not this record’s object. · Hopi wooden blade painted with a red zigzag, British Museum · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: bullroarer

Before the masked dancers came in, the clown whirled the bullroarer to announce them, then kept it roaring through the dance: so White Mountain Apache men described it in the 1930s. The Gaan they impersonated were spirits of the wild mountain country, not the dead. This blade, painted with black and red zigzags and its cord still wrapped around it, was bought on the reservation in 1901 or 1903 with nineteen Gaan masks, black cloth hoods under painted crowns of wooden slats, and eighteen wands. One of those wands carries the same black zigzag, filled in with red.

gan impersonator did not represent dead, but sylvan spirit.

Gifford, Culture Element Distributions: XII, Apache-Pueblo (1940), p. 184, note 2935
Object
Wooden blade painted with zigzag lines in black and red, its string attached at the narrow end and wrapped loosely around it (Field Museum 84679). It belongs to a 56-piece Gaan assemblage of nineteen masks, eighteen wands, sixteen hoops and a medicine string on a buckskin bag.
Source
National Park Service, Notice of Intent to Repatriate Cultural Items: Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, Federal Register 72(164), 24 Aug 2007, pp. 48672-48674 (FR Doc. E7-16774): 56 cultural items, 19 Gaan masks, 18 wands, 16 hoops, 1 bullroarer (catalog 84679, "painted with zigzag lines in black and red ... A string is attached at the narrow…
Source location
Page references

FR 72:48672-48674; Field Museum catalog 84679; Gifford 1940:152, 184

Source confidence
medium to high
Location note
Fort Apache, at the fork of the North and East Forks of the White River: reservation anchor for Owen's collection, whose items are recorded from the reservation, the White River Agency and the two forks. Not a findspot; about 5 km from the Gifford Whiteriver anchor (GIFFORD1940-001).

Regions: The Americas · American Southwest · North America

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