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Five Thousand Years of Shell Symbolism in the Southeast (13 pages)
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Five Thousand Years of Shell Symbolism in the Southeast
AARON DETER-WOLF AND TANYA M. PERES
In 1882/83, the Rev. J. Owen Dorsey recorded a description of mourning rituals and war customs among the Kansa, in which he described
the contents of a sacred war bundle. This bundle contained five layers of
wrappings, in the center of which was a “clam shell... brought from ‘the
great water at the east’ by the ancestors of the Kansas” (Dorsey 1885: 673).
Dorsey did not see the “clam shell” in person but records that the item
was “made like the face of a man, with eyes, face, teeth, etc.” This description and a sketch provided to Dorsey by the bundle keeper, Paha"le-gaqli
(figure 7.1) shell, reveal that the item included in the Kansa war bundle
was a Chickamauga-style shell mask gorget. This distinctive late prehistoric artifact type, typically manufactured from the outer whorl of a whelk
(Busycon sp.) shell, appears throughout the American Mid-South cining
the Mississippian period (circa 800-1500 BC).
The ideology and artifact complex of the Mississippian Ideological
Interaction Sphere (MIIS; previously known as the Southern Cult and
the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex) was centered in the southeastern
United States and peaked 500-600 years before Dorsey visited the Kansa
(Lankford 2011; Reilly and Garber 2007). This suggests that the Kansa
were either reusing a Mississippian shell mask some 500 years after its creation (Howard 1956) or were manufacturing new objects reminiscent of
the MIIS. Regardless, the principal significance of the shell artifact from