The Bullroarer Atlas: Mapping a Thousand Attestations of the World’s Strangest Instrument

TL;DR

• I built the Bullroarer Atlas, an interactive world map of more than 1,000 published records of the bullroarer (about 1,400 catalogued in all), to see the patterns no single regional literature can show.
• The instrument runs a near-monotonic gradient from sacred to trivial: about three-quarters of Australian records are tied to secret initiation; in Europe roughly half are children’s toys and almost none are sacred. Tylor’s Victorian “doctrine of survivals” turns out to be a measurable geography.
• Deep time is anchored by confirmed Ice Age finds — European bone and antler pieces of ~17,000–11,000 BP — after which Europe’s excavated record goes nearly silent for ~9,000 years, until the instrument resurfaces in medieval ground as a children’s toy.
• Against the textbook, Sub-Saharan Africa and lowland South America, not New Guinea, are where the crop-fertility link runs strongest, and North America is the world center for the bullroarer as a healing instrument.
• Reduplicated onomatopoeic names — tundun, paka paka, threm-threm, jwim-jwim — recur across unrelated languages in nine of the map’s thirteen regions, and where a meaning survives the roar is almost always the voice of a being, not the weather.

“It is probably the most ancient, widespread, and sacred religious symbol in the world.”

— Alfred C. Haddon, The Study of Man (1898), on the bullroarer

What the Bullroarer Atlas is, and why I built it#

A bullroarer is almost nothing: a flat blade of wood, bone, or stone, drilled at one end, tied to a cord, and swung. The air stalls and reattaches over the spinning edge and the thing moans — a low, pulsing, unplaceable roar that seems to come from everywhere and from something alive. That sound has been heard, on every inhabited continent, as the voice of a god, an ancestor, or a swallowing monster. It has also been heard, in a Latvian village or an English schoolyard, as a nice noise a child can make with a bit of slat and string.

I have written about the bullroarer for years, mostly about what it means — the initiation complex, the swallowing myth, the serpent behind the roar. The Atlas is the empirical companion to that writing. Its ambition is flat-footed and total: to find every published attestation of the instrument — ethnographic account, museum specimen, excavated find, textual reference — and put them all in one place, arranged in space and time. The map now holds more than a thousand records — some three hundred and fifty across Australia and the Pacific, more than a hundred and fifty in Africa, similar numbers again in North America and Europe, nearly a hundred in South America — with roughly 1,400 catalogued in total, each with its own record page, the sources it rests on, and in most cases an image of the object itself.

The point of assembling them is that no scholar ever reads the whole literature. The Australianist knows churingas; the Melanesianist knows the men’s-cult flutes and roarers; the Africanist knows the Dodo cult; the archaeologist knows a handful of Magdalenian pendants. Each works from Haddon’s 1898 survey, or Frazer, or Loeb, or Zerries, or Gourlay, plus their own region. Put the regions side by side, count them, and things become visible that were invisible one library at a time.

How old is the bullroarer? The deep-time record and its 9,000-year gap#

The catalog holds nearly a hundred archaeological candidates; about a third are secure enough to plot as confirmed. The oldest confirmed cluster is Ice Age Europe — Magdalenian, Solutrean, and Ahrensburgian bone and antler pieces dating from roughly 17,000 to 11,000 years ago. The La Roche de Birol blade, Lespugue, Saint-Marcel, the Raymonden fragment, the Stellmoor reindeer-bone piece — these are the genuine deep past of the instrument, insofar as we can hold it in our hands.

Then comes the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of Anatolia: the decorated bone plaques of Göbekli Tepe and Körtik Tepe, and an antler piece from Çatalhöyük — bullroarer candidates published by the excavators themselves, from the world of the first temples.

After the Anatolian Neolithic, the European ground goes quiet. Between the Magdalenian and the Middle Ages there is essentially a nine-thousand-year hole in the excavated record. The one thing that fills it is not dug up at all: the Classical rhombos, the whirled instrument of the Greek mysteries, known from Clement of Alexandria and the Gurob papyrus — a text, not an object.¹ And when the bullroarer finally resurfaces in European soil, from about AD 1300 to 1900 — the Netherlands, Latvia, Sweden, the British Isles — it does so, in the excavators’ own words, in every single case, as a children’s toy.

These dates are a floor, not a ceiling. Bone and antler survive where wood cannot, and the regions with the densest living traditions — Australia and Oceania alone hold more than a third of all records — worked in wood, which leaves nothing behind in tropical soil. Their deep past shows up as rock art rather than as surviving boards. The oldest excavated bullroarer is not the oldest bullroarer.

That the same object bookends the sequence as Ice Age ritual gear and as a medieval plaything is the deep-time version of the gradient this whole map turns out to describe.

From sacred instrument to children’s toy: a global gradient#

Group the records by region and score each by what the source says it was for — secret men’s initiation at one pole, an unsupervised child’s toy at the other — and the world sorts itself into a gradient so clean it is almost a ramp. This is the quantified form of what Edward Tylor called, in 1871, the doctrine of survivals: the idea that a solemn ritual object in one society persists as a meaningless plaything in another, a fossil of lost seriousness. Tylor argued it from anecdote. The map measures it.

At one end, Yuin men heard the roar as the voice of Daramulun and death was the penalty for a woman who saw the source. At the other, in the Naga Hills and across South Asia, the same object is a boys’ seasonal toy — a bird-scarer, a threm-threm whirled in the fields. East Asia is the extreme case: in the literate mainstream — Han China, Yamato Japan, Korea — the bullroarer is absent from the confirmed record entirely. It survives only at the margins of those civilizations, among the Yi, the Uyghur of Turfan, the Ainu. Where the state and the written word arrive, the roaring board seems to fall silent. I have argued elsewhere that this same instrument is the near-universal marker of male initiation; the gradient is what happens to a marker once the rite it marked decays.

The bullroarer and agriculture: Africa, not New Guinea#

The literature has a type-site for the agricultural bullroarer, and it is New Guinea — the yam cults, the men’s houses where the roarer’s voice guarantees the harvest. More than one record in ten across the catalog ties the instrument to crop fertility, sowing, or harvest. But when you normalize by how many records each region has, the New Guinea reputation does not hold up as the peak.

The crop link runs strongest in Sub-Saharan Africa and lowland South America: the Uukwaluudhi omathila, the “Big Birds” whose whirred voice is carried in a secret night procession to bring rain and bless the sowing; the Gwana Jukun Dodo cult of rain and harvest; the Fali roarer swung for the ripening millet — and, across the Atlantic, the pequi-fruit and fish-increase complexes of the Amazon. New Guinea, the supposed type-site, trails them both at roughly half their rate.

There is a second, subtler correction inside the first. The agriculture-linked records skew toward secret initiation, not away from it. Crop fertility is rarely a free-standing weather-magic act; far more often it is one more thing the men’s cult claims to control, embedded inside the same closed complex that owns the roar, the swallowing myth, and the exclusion of women. Fertility and secrecy are not two uses of the instrument. They are the same use.

Healing and weather: the North American cluster#

If agriculture belongs to Africa, curing belongs to North America. It is the global center of gravity for the bullroarer as a healing instrument — about one in six North American records, more than double any other continent. The Apache cut curing bullroarers from wood struck by lightning; Navajo chant-way practice turned the roar to healing; Zuni rain-priests and Southwest medicine societies made it a doctor’s tool. North America also leads in weather-magic use, at about one record in seven.

The comparative literature treats Southwestern curing roarers as a regional curiosity, a footnote to the Pueblo ethnographies. Assembled and counted against the rest of the world, that “curiosity” is the global maximum. This is the recurring payoff of the exercise: a thing that looks minor inside one region’s monograph turns out to be the planet’s high-water mark once every region is on the same table.

Women, secrecy, and the charter myth#

The bullroarer is, over much of the world, a machine for excluding women. Around 180 records attest the exclusion of women or the uninitiated from the sound or the sight of the instrument; the hard core — where the penalty for a woman is death — clusters in Australia, Melanesia, lowland South America, and Africa. This is the terrain of the swallowing complex: the roar is the monster, initiation is being eaten and reborn, and the secret is enforced by the worst sanction the society has.

Riding on top of that exclusion is one of anthropology’s most famous stories — the charter myth that women owned the bullroarer first, and that men stole it and now guard the theft with terror. I have hand-checked it down to a dozen-plus rock-solid cases, most in Sahul — and what makes them remarkable is that the same story recurs far outside Australia: among the Wauja and Kamaiurá of the Upper Xingu, and in the Dogon Sigui. A near-identical origin myth on three continents is a deep signal, and I have laid out the case at length in the Women and the Bullroarer essay.

What the bullroarer is called: reduplicated names, and the voice of a being#

Two things about the names on the map delight me because they are provable and no one had counted them.

First, reduplicated onomatopoeic names — a syllable doubled to mimic the roar — are a global constant. They make up about 6.5% of all recorded native name-tokens, and they turn up across nine of the map’s thirteen macroregions, in languages with no relationship to each other: tundun among the Kurnai of southeast Australia, paka paka among the Wik-Mungkan of Cape York, jwim-jwim in the Gran Chaco, threm-threm in the Naga Hills, !goin!goin among the Kalahari San, burriburri in Sardinia, huhu in Polynesia. The instrument keeps naming itself, in the same way, everywhere — which is exactly what you would expect of an object whose meaning is its sound.

Second, and stronger: where a gloss for the name survives, the roar is overwhelmingly identified as the voice of a person-like being — an ancestor, a spirit, a monster — and almost never as mere weather. Of roughly 156 records that name the sound as “the voice of X,” about 99% name a being: Daramulun, Oro, the swallowing kaiaimunu. Almost none name a force like thunder or wind as such. The bullroarer is not, at root, a weather-noise. It is somebody talking. I have pulled the full pattern apart in the global lexicon of bullroarer names.

The bullroarer and the snake#

For readers of this site the sharpest thread in the whole catalog is the serpent. About fifteen records tie the bullroarer directly to snakes — by name, by decoration, or by myth — and they span continents that never shared a tradition. The Guugu Yimidhirr word dunggul for the instrument literally means “snake.” A Yolngu roarer painted with a python is not a picture of the great serpent Yurlunggur — swung on its cord, it is his hungry voice, and the men who whirl it become the snake that swallows the boys. A Gudanji churinga from the McArthur River carries a snake running the length of the blade under red ochre, sung with its own totemic history. In the Upper Xingu the boards carry snake zigzags; the Dogon rhombe shares its name with the serpent of the Great Mask.

And the thread reaches into deep time. One of the Körtik Tepe plaques, from the same Anatolian Neolithic world as Göbekli Tepe, carries a band of three snakes worked in hatched rhomboids. Further out on the frontier of the evidence is a ~20,000-year-old mammoth-ivory plaque from Mal’ta in Siberia, engraved with three snakes on one face and nested spirals on the other, which Soviet scholars themselves likened to Australian churingas.² No comparative source has ever put these on one table — though the honest caveat belongs here too: the Hopi Snake Dance uses a bullroarer, but there its work is calling rain and thunder, not being a snake, and I do not count it in the serpent set. The connection I have spent years chasing between the serpent, the roar, and the origin of ritual language is not everywhere. But it is real, and it is intercontinental.

Mapping absence#

Classic surveys recorded presence. When Haddon or Frazer built a distribution, a blank on the map meant only that no one had written anything down. The Atlas also records where trained observers looked and found nothing — and that turns a blank from ignorance into data.

The cleanest example sits inside the world’s densest bullroarer region. New Guinea is saturated with the instrument, yet the Massim world of Milne Bay and the coast of Central Province — Malinowski’s own ground, and Seligmann’s — are a documented void. Ritual life there runs on Kula exchange and the great Hevehe masks instead; the roaring board simply is not the local idiom. Recording that absence is what makes a diffusion argument testable: if the instrument spread, its gaps have to be explained, and you cannot explain a gap you never wrote down. (These absences are recorded in the catalog rather than drawn on the public map.)

How to read the Atlas#

Everything above is a claim; the records are the evidence, and they are meant to be walked. You can open the map and move by region — Africa, South America, Europe — or drop straight into the archaeology and follow the deep-time dots. Every point opens a record page with its sources and, usually, the object. Alongside the map are the long essays where a single thread gets the room it needs: the swallowing complex, Women and the Bullroarer, the Iberian slate plaques, the difference between a buzzer and a true bullroarer, and the x-ray-style art that keeps company with it; on this site, Roaring Boys tells the human side. A thousand small facts, assembled, stop being a curiosity cabinet and start being an argument — about how deep this instrument goes, and about what a roaring piece of wood on a string has meant to almost everyone who ever swung one.

Footnotes#

Sources#

The Atlas is built on the classic comparative literature plus several hundred museum catalogs and regional ethnographies. The foundational works:

1. Haddon, Alfred C. The Study of Man. London: Bliss, Sands & Co., 1898. The first serious global survey of the bullroarer, and the source of the “most ancient, widespread, and sacred” claim.
2. Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture, vol. 1. London: John Murray, 1871. Origin of the “doctrine of survivals” that the sacred-to-toy gradient makes quantitative.
3. Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Project Gutenberg edition. The comparative frame within which the bullroarer’s ritual role was first popularized.
4. Loeb, Edwin M. Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 25, no. 3 (1929): 249–288. On the initiatory core of the instrument.
5. Zerries, Otto. Das Schwirrholz: Untersuchung über die Verbreitung und Bedeutung der Schwirren im Kult. Stuttgart: Strecker und Schröder, 1942. The most thorough diffusion study before this one, extended in his 1953 South American work.
6. Gourlay, K. A. Sound-Producing Instruments in Traditional Society: A Study of Esoteric Instruments and Their Role in Male–Female Relations. Canberra: Australian National University, 1975. The definitive treatment of the New Guinea men’s-cult roarer.
7. Van Baal, Jan. Dema: Description and Analysis of Marind-anim Culture (South New Guinea). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. On the roarer inside the fertility-and-secrecy complex.
8. Tuzin, Donald. The Voice of the Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Arapesh Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. The classic study of the sound-secret and its enforcement.
9. Dietrich, Oliver, and Jens Notroff. “A Decorated Bone ‘Spatula’ from Göbekli Tepe. On the Pitfalls of Iconographic Interpretations of Early Neolithic Art.” Neo-Lithics 1/16 (2016): 22–31. The excavators’ own hedge on whether the Anatolian plaques were bullroarers.
10. Dauvois, Michel. Studies of Upper Palaeolithic sound-producing objects, including the rhombes of the French Magdalenian. On the acoustics of the Ice Age specimens.