No. SKINNER2016-001
Lizard Cave cache roarer
United States · New Mexico · Colfax County · north Ponil Canyon · North America · Southwest
Function not recorded
Source term: bullroarer
This bullroarer survived because the shelter stayed dry. It was cached with other perishable things, a notched rasp, a yucca fireboard, a mat of willow shoots and a cluster of wheat seeds, in a low rockshelter in north Ponil Canyon, long after Puebloan people had lived there. Its owners were probably Ute, perhaps Jicarilla Apache. Both peoples knew this country, and both knew the instrument. The Moache Ute had moved down into northeastern New Mexico before settlers reached Colorado. Saparits, a Moache elder who lived at Cimarron until about the age of forty, said the bullroarer was a plaything, but also made the wind blow and cleared the clouds away; in other Ute bands it answered only to someone born in summer. Among the Llanero Jicarilla it was fifteen inches of wood on three feet of cord, swung by men and boys while women were free to watch.
Particulars
- Object
- Bullroarer recovered from a historic rockshelter cache.
- Function
- Not recorded.
Sources
- S. Alan Skinner, Crevice Burials and Tipi Rings on the Southern Great Plains, Papers of the Archaeological Society of New Mexico 42 (2016), pp.217–237; Table3 p.227. View · archived
- A.H.Schroeder, The prehistory of northeastern New Mexico, New Mexico Geological Society Guidebook27 (1976), pp.77–82, especially p.80. View
- Omer C. Stewart, Culture Element Distributions: XVIII, Ute–Southern Paiute, Anthropological Records 6(4) (1942), pp. 236–239, 291 View · archived
- E. W. Gifford, Culture Element Distributions: XII, Apache-Pueblo, Anthropological Records 4(1) (1940), pp. 58–59, 151–152 View · archived