A roarer cut from manzanita

Source term: bull-roarer

Manzanita is a low, red-limbed chaparral shrub with wood hard enough to blunt a blade, and the Southern Pomo of Cloverdale, in the Russian River hills of Sonoma County, put every part of it to use — berries and leaves for food and medicine, the wood for things that had to last. The plant-use record for Cloverdale lists what the wood was worked into: a straight wooden war club, a double-pointed fish hook, and a bullroarer. The compilers had a ceremonial category and used it on the same plant, for the moth cocoons gathered off it for doctors' rattles; the roarer they filed under technology. Who swung it, and on what occasion, is not said.

TECH: Wood fashioned into a simple club (straight wooden war club), bull-roarer, double-pointed fish hook

Peri, Patterson & Goodrich, Ethnobotanical Mitigation, Warm Springs Dam-Lake Sonoma (1982), p. 122.

Particulars

Object

Bullroarer worked from manzanita wood; dimensions, cord and decoration not recorded.

Function

Not recorded; the survey files the manzanita roarer under technological rather than ceremonial uses, beside the war club, fish hook and harpoon toggle.