PERI1982-001 - ethnographic attestation
A roarer cut from manzanita
United States - Dry Creek - Cloverdale, Sonoma County, California - North America
Function not recorded
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.
- 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 (Peri, Patterson and Goodrich 1982, p. 122).
- Source
- Peri, Patterson & Goodrich, Ethnobotanical Mitigation, Warm Springs Dam-Lake Sonoma (1982), p. 122.
- Source location
- printed p. 122
- Source confidence
- medium Dry Creek/Lake Sonoma community-area anchor for a table covering two communities.