Bowers Cave cache of twelve roarers

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)

Particulars

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

Not recorded.