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Five Thousand Years of Shell Symbolism in the Southeast (13 pages)
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Page: of 13
162 Aaron Deter-Wolf and Tanya M. Peres
A
Figure 7.1. Sketch of the “clam shell” from the Kansa war bundle (A, after Dorsey 1885:
673, fig. 3) and a comparative Chickamauga-style Mississippian period shell mask
gorget (B, after McCurdy 1915: 65, fig. 11).
the Kansa bundle as related to Dorsey was not the iconography depicted
on its surface but rather the raw material the artifact was constructed
from. That material, marine shell, was symbolic of the ancestral origins of
the Kansa along the coastal Southeast.
The myriad of imagery depicted on marine shell during the late prehistoric period in the American Southeast was meaningful and significant
and has provided the basis for important examinations of Mississippian
art and iconography (e.g., Brain and Phillips 1996; Lankford et al. 2011;
Phillips and Brown 1978, 1984; Reilly and Garber 2007). We argue, however, that the selection of marine gastropods by late prehistoric artisans
as an iconographic substrate was explicit and deliberate. By the late prehistoric period, shells were embedded with 5,000 years of physical and
symbolic geography. This chapter examines ancient Southeastern Native
Americans’ use of freshwater and marine shell,to recall their ancestral origins; sanctify and lay claim to the landscape through the construction of
deliberate landmarks; legitimize political power through the acquisition
and display of symbolic, exotic material; and signify and enable access to
supernatural power.
Ancestral Landscapes and the Consecration of Riparian Space
Recent research by Saunders and Russo (2011) shows that prehistoric occupants of the Florida panhandle were engaged in deliberate exploitation
Five Thousand Years of Shell Symbolism in the Southeast 163
of shell by at least 7200 BP. By two thousand years later, in the Late Archaic, shell was used as a raw material at sites throughout the interior
and coastal Southeast. It is widely assumed that ancient inhabitants of the
region consumed invertebrate animals and deposited the leftover calcium
carbonate shell in specific locations, resulting in the formation of distinctive features identified archaeologically as shell middens, mounds, and
rings. The specific social or ritual function of these constructions is not
readily clear (e.g., Claassen 2010; Marquardt 2010a; Saunders and Russo
2011). Regardless, both freshwater and marine mollusks constituted convenient, plentiful, and durable construction materials that were deliberately selected for use in monument construction.
The available evidence suggests that concerted shell-bearing deposits appeared in the interior (noncoastal) portion of the Mid-South by at
least 8000 year cal. BP. The earliest shell middens along the Duck River in
Tennessee and Green River in Kentucky formed around 8000 and 6200
cal. BP, respectively (see summary in Claassen 2010). Radiocarbon dates
recently obtained from shell-bearing sites along the Cumberland River
in the vicinity of Nashville, Tennessee, indicate initial shell midden and
mound formation during the period circa 6600-7000 cal. BP (Deter-Wolf
and Peres 2014; Miller et al. 2012; Peres and Deter-Wolf 2013; Peres, DeterWolf, and Myers 2012).
The cultural and environmental forces that gave rise to the appearance of shell mounds and middens along the waterways of the interior
Mid-South hundreds of years after the first coastal manifestations remain
the subject of ongoing speculation and debate (e.g., Anderson 2010; Marquardt 2010a, 2010b). One possibility is that the initial construction of
these features coincided with inland migrations of coastal populations
during the later portion of the Archaic. Geomorphological evidence from
the Florida Gulf Coast shows that rising sea levels resulted in a shoreline retreat of approximately 12 meters per year during the period circa
6000-7000 BP (Faught and Donoghue 1997; Saunders and Russo 2011).
This massive environmental shift may have spurred the beginnings of a
multigenerational movement northward (Anderson et al. 2007). The ancestors of these formerly coastal groups brought with them their traditional subsistence strategies and construction methods, manifested in the
archaeological record by the appearance of intensive shellfish exploitation
resulting in the formation of large shell midden deposits.
Specific evidence for the journey of the coastal-estuarine diaspora into