The Bullroarer Atlas

SWA-PECOS-001 - ethnographic attestation

Pecos Pueblo

United States - Pecos Pueblo, New Mexico - North America - Southwest

Function not recorded

A painted wooden board with paired circular motifs, a bold painted chevron near the tail, and cord tied toward one pointed end, photographed...
Representative image. A painted wooden board with paired circular motifs, a bold painted chevron near the tail, and cord tied toward one pointed end, photographed with a museum scale card: a Bororo bullroarer shown for the general North American form, not the Pecos Pueblo object documented here. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1903.40.1) Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

Among the artifacts A. V. Kidder recorded from his long excavation of Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico was a single wooden bull-roarer, noted on page 293 of his 1932 inventory of the site. Wood rarely survives in Southwestern deposits and such pieces were never numerous, so the find stands nearly alone for the region: when Donald Brown surveyed prehistoric Southwestern sound instruments in 1967, he could account for only three excavated bull-roarers in all, the Pecos specimen, one from cliff dwellings in the Verde Valley, and a third from a cache at Chetro Ketl. All three were made of wood.

One bull roarer was found at Pecos (Kidder 1932:293), another in cliff dwellings in the Verde Valley (Bourke 1892:477), and a third in a cache at Chetro Ketl (R. Gwinn Vivian, personal communication). All were made of wood.

Donald N. Brown, "The Distribution of Sound Instruments in the Prehistoric Southwestern United States," Ethnomusicology 11, no. 1 (1967): 71-90
Object
Kidder 1932 p. 293 directly includes a Pecos `bull-roarer (Room 75)` reference in Google Books page-search snippet view; Brown 1967 later summarizes this as one wooden bullroarer at Pecos, citing Kidder 1932:293.
Function
Source-explicit archaeological bull-roarer; function not stated in the recovered snippet.
Map confidence
low_medium - Pecos Pueblo / Pecos National Historical Park regional site anchor, not an object provenience coordinate.
Source location
Kidder p. 293 Google Books snippet: `bull-roarer (Room 75)`; Brown quote in VOM local mirror

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