The Bullroarer Atlas

NAMER-020 - ethnographic attestation

Tübatulabal

United States - Upper Kern River and South Fork Kern River drainages, Kern River Valley, southern Sierra Nevada, Kern County, California - North America

Play / practical

A pair of carved Apache rhombi, chevron- and wave-patterned and strung on plaited cords, stands in for the Tübatulabal bull-roarer of the...
Representative image. A pair of carved Apache rhombi, chevron- and wave-patterned and strung on plaited cords, stands in for the Tübatulabal bull-roarer of the southern Sierra Nevada, which is recorded only as a flat wooden slat whirled on a cord. J. W. Powell / J. G. Bourke (1892) Public domain Image source

The Tübatulabal of the upper Kern River, in the southern Sierra Nevada of California, whirled a bullroarer not as a sacred voice but as a working tool of the hunt: swung on its cord, the roaring slat was used to draw birds within reach. The same instrument served children as a plaything. Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin recorded it for the Kern River Valley people in her 1938 ethnography, one of the plainly utilitarian and recreational uses of the bullroarer in Native California, with none of the men's-secret ceremonialism that surrounds the instrument elsewhere in the world.

Object
A flat wooden slat whirled on a single cord to produce a roaring, humming sound.
Function
Whirled to attract birds while hunting, and used as a children's toy.
Map confidence
medium - approximate territory centroid (Kern River Valley / Lake Isabella basin, around the junction of the North Fork and South Fork Kern River near Weldon, Onyx and Kernville, the demographic core of Tübatulabal territory)
Source location
Voegelin 1938, UC Anthropological Records 2(1):15, 36

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