NAMER-010 - museum specimen
Inyo County denticulated toy bullroarer
United States - California - Inyo County - North America
Play / practical
Source term: Denticulated bull roarer used as a toy
A bullroarer collected in Inyo County, in the high desert of eastern California, and held by Harvard's Peabody Museum as object 35-78-10/4991. Its blade is denticulated, cut with a toothed or serrated edge, and the museum classes it as a toy rather than a ritual instrument. The Peabody entry fixes the object to the county and no further, naming no people, no village, and no collector's account of who spun it or when. Julian Steward's 1933 ethnography of the Owens Valley Paiute, the people of the county's valley floor, records the same toy exactly: an eighteen-inch stick handle, a two-foot string through a notch, a foot-long quarter-inch board — 'a small boy's toy' that two of his informants, T.S. and G.C., remembered playing with.
A small, round stick, 18 inches long, serves as handle; a 2-foot string fastened to a notch in one end of it passes through a hole in a board 12 by 1 by 1/4 inch, which is swung. A small boy's toy. T.S. and G.C. remember playing with them.
Julian H. Steward, Ethnography of the Owens Valley Paiute, UCPAAE 33(3) (1933), p. 278.
- Object
- Peabody Museum object 35-78-10/4991, identified in the holding review as a denticulated bull roarer used as a toy from Inyo County. Construction matches Steward's Owens Valley Paiute account: an 18-inch round stick handle, a 2-foot string through a notch, and a 12 x 1 x 1/4-inch board.
- Function
- Recorded as a toy; Steward's 1933 Owens Valley Paiute ethnography records a matching small boy's bullroarer of the same construction, with informants T.S. and G.C. recalling playing with them.
- Map confidence
- medium - Representative Inyo County anchor; not an exact collection point.
- Source location
Page references
Peabody object details/29026 / 35-78-10/4991
- Toy / secular survival