The Bullroarer Atlas

NAMER-012 - museum specimen

Northern Pomo (maker Sam Tony), Mendocino County, California

United States - Northern Pomo territory, upper Russian River drainage, Mendocino County, California - North America

Function not recorded

A long, dark wooden blade tapering to a point, with a coil of cordage lashed at the broad end — a Pomo bull-roarer collected at Coyote Valley...
Representative image. A long, dark wooden blade tapering to a point, with a coil of cordage lashed at the broad end — a Pomo bull-roarer collected at Coyote Valley Rancheria in Mendocino County, from the same Northern/Eastern Pomo tradition as maker Sam Tony's slat, though not his own instrument. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley (1-2679) Image source

ma-dim / pa-doch

Source term: bull roarer

The two Pomo names recorded on the museum object record for this instrument; the museum gives them without translation. The form pa-doch echoes the padok of the Eastern Pomo kalimatoto padok, the "doll of Thunderman" recorded by Loeb for the Pomo bullroarer.

A black-painted wooden slat almost three-quarters of a metre long, made by Sam Tony, a Northern Pomo man, and carried east on Stewart Culin's 1906 Brooklyn Museum expedition through California. The museum catalogues it as a Large Black Bull Roarer and records its two Pomo names, ma-dim and pa-doch, but no translation and no use; the entry preserves a maker and a date and little else. Among the inland Pomo such slats of cottonwood were whirled by men in the Thunder ceremony to raise the sound of a storm, the Eastern Pomo calling the instrument kalimatoto padok, the doll of Thunderman.

Large Black Bull Roarer (ma-dim or pa-doch)

Brooklyn Museum, accession 06.331.8127
Object
A long, flat, black-painted wooden slat, 72.5 cm long and 9.5 cm wide, of wood and pigment, catalogued by the Brooklyn Museum as a musical instrument. The narrow elongated blade proportions are those of a whirled bullroarer rather than a spun buzzer.
Function
Function not recorded on the museum record. Among the inland Pomo such cottonwood slats were whirled by men in the Thunder (xalimatoto) ceremony in imitation of a storm, but no use is documented for this specimen.
Map confidence
medium - Representative anchor in Northern Pomo territory on the upper Russian River near Ukiah / Sherwood Valley, Mendocino County; the museum record names only the maker's people (Northern Pomo) and the 1906 California expedition, not a finer collection locality.
Source location
Accession 06.331.8127

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