STEWART1941-010 - ethnographic attestation
Achomawi mountain-sheep-horn bullroarer
United States - Upper Pit River drainage and the western slopes of the Warner Range, northeastern California - North America
Weather / fertility magic
Source term: bull-roarer (wimo'to is Stewart's element heading, not an Achomawi word)
The Achomawi of the upper Pit River — Californian neighbours of the Surprise Valley Paiute — held more bullroarer than any of the Paiute bands around them: a wooden whirrer, a toy use, a wind use, and one thing nobody else nearby had, a bullroarer made of mountain sheep horn. The horn roarer stops with them: across Idaho and Utah the horn whirrer was denied by every Shoshoni band — which is how a boundary gets drawn, from both sides.
- Object
- Recorded in two forms, wood and mountain-sheep horn.
- Function
- Swung as a children's toy and to make the wind blow; recorded in both wood and mountain-sheep horn.
- Source
- Omer C. Stewart, Culture Element Distributions: XIV, Northern Paiute, Anthropological Records 4:3 (1941). AE column, table p. 401: 1870 bull-roarer +, 1871 whirrer of wood +, 1872 OF SHEEP HORN +, 1873 used as toy +, 1874 to make wind blow +. Element 1872 is marked minus in all thirteen other columns of the survey; Group and informants, p. 365: '14, AE…
- Source location
Page references
Stewart 1941, pp. 365, 401, 403; Steward 1941, p. 250; Steward 1943, p. 357
- Source confidence
- medium to high Upper Pit River drainage between Likely and Alturas, California. Territory anchor for the named people; not a use site.
- Weather magic
- Toy / secular survival