The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG53 - ethnographic attestation

Cape Cretin

Papua New Guinea - Morobe - Oceania - Sahul

Sacred / spirit

The first New Guinea Schwirrholz catalogued in Berlin (VI 10342, 1888) — palm-wood blade with a horsefly incised on each face, at rest and in...
Representative image. The first New Guinea Schwirrholz catalogued in Berlin (VI 10342, 1888) — palm-wood blade with a horsefly incised on each face, at rest and in buzzing flight; Hagen ties it to the Finschhafen barlum complex of Cape Cretin's region. Not the Cape Cretin object itself. E. Krause, in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 20 (1888), p. 267 (Berlin VI 10342) — via archive.org Public domain Image source

Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags

A bullroarer and a slit-gong were logged side by side at Cape Cretin, the headland guarding the mouth of Langemak Bay on the Huon Gulf, then carried off to nineteenth-century collectors as bare carved specimens: no name written down, no account of who swung the one or struck the other. This is bullroarer coast, thick with men's ceremony, yet the Cape Cretin entry keeps its silence. The objects survived; the rite that gave them a voice did not.

give no uses within the present context

Gourlay 1975, p. 15, Huon Gulf source-cluster discussion
Object
bullroarer occurrence; slit-gong occurrence
Function
Gourlay Table 1 row 53 records bullroarer and slit-gong occurrence for Cape Cretin; local Gourlay prose says this Huon Gulf source cluster gives no use within his present context.
Map confidence
high - geocoded
Source location
Table 1, row 53

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