PNG48 - ethnographic attestation
Hube
Papua New Guinea - Morobe - Oceania - Sahul
Function not recorded
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
The Hube are an Eastern Huon people of the Morobe interior, scattered through the Mongi and Kua river valleys behind the Huon Peninsula coast. Their bullroarer was recorded by Richard Neuhauss, whose 1911 Deutsch Neu-Guinea illustrates the object among the Huon material it catalogues (Bd. 1, p. 259, fig. 173h). Neuhauss notes the instrument's presence but sets down no account of its use — how it was swung, named, or what it sounded. On the coast nearby, the Yabim and Bukaua tied an identical instrument to the swallowing-monster of male initiation and called it balum, the voice of an ancestral ghost; but that complex is documented for those Austronesian neighbours, not for the Hube, whose own bullroarer survives in the record as object alone.
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence
- Function
- Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer occurrence; function not stated.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Bd. 1, p. 259, fig. 173h