The Bullroarer Atlas

SARVASY2014-001 - ethnographic attestation

Nungon (Towet, Worin, Kotet)

Papua New Guinea - Uruwa River valley - Kabwum District, Morobe Province - Oceania

Sacred / spirit

A New Guinea wooden bullroarer with bundled cord; the Uruwa instrument itself was never described or photographed.
Representative image. A New Guinea wooden bullroarer with bundled cord; the Uruwa instrument itself was never described or photographed. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Oc1925-0213-4) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: bullroarer

No Nungon-language term for the instrument is recorded.

In the upper Uruwa valley, on the southern wall of the Saruwaged Range, Nungon men's houses stood in Towet, Worin, and Kotet into the 1950s. Yam and taro plots were planted in strict silence; young men came out of the men's house to bless the first plantings by treading on the earth; initiation meant diving deep into a pool of water. And when the first harvest was eaten — a meal for men and boys, taken in the men's house — a bullroarer sounded over it. The linguist Hannah Sarvasy preserved the memory in a single sentence of her Nungon grammar; no one recorded the instrument's name or its shape.

As elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, a bullroarer would be sounded on the occasion of the eating of the first harvest; this was eaten by men and boys in the men's house.

Hannah Sarvasy, A Grammar of Nungon (2014), p. 25.
Object
No form or local name recorded; the grammar states only that a bullroarer was sounded.
Function
Sounded at the eating of the first harvest — a meal taken by men and boys in the men's house. Yam and taro plots were planted in strict silence; no further ceremonial meaning is recorded.
Map confidence
medium_high - Centroid of the Towet, Worin, and Kotet village cluster named for the men's houses (OSM village nodes, verified 2026-07-12); not an asserted performance findspot.
Source location
p. 25

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