NAMER-006 - archaeological find
Castaic Cave Chumash funerary lot, collected by Stephen Bowers (1885)
United States - California - Los Angeles County - Castaic Cave - North America
Sacred / spirit
Source term: bull roarers
Bowers Cave held a cache of thin wooden roarers, their edges cut with teeth and their ends drilled for cord. Twelve complete examples and two fragments were reported; one still carried a five-strand braided cord 135 centimetres long. Collected by Stephen Bowers in 1885 among feather headdresses, clubs, baskets and worked shell, they survived as part of a funerary assemblage now affiliated under NAGPRA with the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Mission Indians.
The one lot of funerary objects is one lot of baskets and basket fragments, bull roarers, clubs, feather headdresses and headbands, organic material, quartz, stone implements, worked and unworked faunal remains, wooden tools, and worked shell.
Federal Register, Notice of Inventory Completion: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, doc. 2026-08763 (May 5, 2026)
- Object
- Bowers Cave cache of thin, notched wooden bullroarers with end-holes; twelve complete and two fragmentary examples are reported, one retaining a 135 cm five-strand braided cord.
- Function
- Function not recorded. The bull roarers occur within a single lot of grave goods; the notice does not describe their form or use.
- Map confidence
- high - Representative Castaic Cave / Castaic area anchor; not a disclosed exact cave coordinate.
- Source location
Page references
Heizer 1960:5-9; Elsasser and Heizer 1963:22-24, pl. 4c-d; Federal Register 2026-08763
- Death and rebirth