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Five Thousand Years of Shell Symbolism in the Southeast (13 pages)
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Page: of 13
170 Aaron Deter-Wolf and Tanya M. Peres
and culture, marine shell remained an important symbolic, albeit lessintensively employed, material throughout the Woodland period.
The use of marine shell as a high-value social currency clearly peaked
during the Mississippian period with the Braden art style, which originated at Cahokia in the American Bottom (Brown 2011). As Cahokian
culture and associated artistic motifs spread through the Southeast, there
began an ongoing negotiation of collective memories between the existing inhabitants of the region and those Pauketat (2007: 118) calls “foreign
would-be rulers.” This invention/reinvention of communal traditions resulted in the blending of creation stories (Brown 2005; Pauketat 2007)
and visual markers linked to the ancestral homeland in the “great water
to the east” (that is, shell middens and marine shell artifacts) to legitimize
the Cahokians right to rule and occupy territories in the Mid-South. This
claim was strengthened through trade and fictive kin alliances (Hall 1991;
Pauketat 2007) with groups along the Florida panhandle and possibly as
far south as the Calusa-dominated region of southwestern Florida.
As the Mississippian cultures of the interior Southeast again focused
their attention toward the Gulf Coast as an important source for symbolic
and prestige goods, they apparently relaunched and expanded Archaic
trade networks. Trace-element analysis of three marine shells recovered
archaeologically from Monks Mound, the principal mound construction
at Cahokia, in Illinois, revealed chemical signatures representative of different marine waters (Claassen and Sigmann 1993). One of these artifacts
likely originated from the Atlantic Ocean, one from the central or western
portion of the Gulf of Mexico, and one from warm tropical waters such as
those found off of the northern Mexican Gulf Coast.
Mississippian artifacts crafted from marine shell include a variety
of objects that were worn, displayed, exchanged, and consulted. These
gorgets, beads, cups, and pendants are most often recovered from Mississippian burials, although they are sometimes found in elite or eliteassociated household contexts (e.g., Trubitt 2005). It is widely understood
that during the Mississippian period, marine shell items were created for
elites within elite-associated production areas (Trubitt 2003, 2005). Trubitt (2005) found that after AD 1200, shell-working areas were brought
into Cahokia proper from the periphery, so that the elites could effectively
control the access to both the exotic raw material (marine shell) and the
finished objects (though see Meyers, chapter 4, this volume).
Five Thousand Years of Shell Symbolism in the Southeast 171
The use of marine shell during late prehistoric times became part of
an evolving political history that Pauketat (2007: 118) refers to as the
“elaborate retelling of the Middle Mississippian narrative through art and
mortuary theater,’ in which Mississippian elites were grafting their own
mythology onto the traditional symbolic medium of marine shell (e.g.,
Cobb and Giles 2009). This was done both through the inscription of
these beliefs onto the shell itself (as epitomized by shell artifacts from
Spiro) and in the reimagining of the mythical role these materials played.
Embedded Meanings
Recent research (e.g., Brown 2005, 2011) has established linguistic and
cultural continuity between the late prehistoric Mississippian culture and
early historic Siouan speakers, in particular the Dhegiha and Chiwere
linguistic branches. Consequently, it is now widely accepted that careful
analysis of Siouan beliefs can inform our understanding of late prehistoric
art and culture. Various Siouan groups incorporated both marine and
freshwater shells as principal components of their sacred bundles. During his 1819 expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Edwin James (1823: 325)
described an Omaha sacred bundle that contained a large shell that had
been “transmitted from the ancestry” of the tribe. He describes the ritual
deployment of that artifact as follows:
Previously to undertaking a national expedition against an enemy,
the sacred shell is consulted as an oracle. For this purpose, the magi
of the band seat themselves around the great medicine lodge, the
lower part of which is then thrown up like curtains, and the exterior envelop is carefully removed from the mysterious parcel, that
the shell may receive air. A portion of the tobacco, consecrated by
being long suspended to the skin mats, or coverings of the shell, is
now taken and distributed to the magi, who fill their pipes with it,
to smoke to the great medicine. During this ceremony, an individual occasionally inclines his head forward, and listens attentively to
catch some sound which he expects to issue from the shell. At length
some one imagines that he hears a sound like that of a forced expiration of air from the lungs, or like the noise made by the report of a
gun at a great distance. This is considered as a favourable omen, and