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Five Thousand Years of Shell Symbolism in the Southeast (13 pages)
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Page: of 13
174 Aaron Deter-Wolf and Tanya M. Peres
Figure 7.6. Female effigy
seated in a helmet shell, recovered from the Sequatchie
Valley, Tennessee (after Troost
1845: 361).
stored within the Tent of War, directly associated with the sacred Cedar
Pole. Unfortunately, the specific origin and symbolic value of these items
had been lost before they were documented in the 1870s. Legends of the
Omaha Shell Society suggest that the Sacred Shell was connected with
death, the recycling and continuation of life, and water, “the medium for
transmitting power from the Above to the mother earth” (Fletcher and La
Flesche 1911: 187). According to Fletcher and La Flesche, the Cedar Pole _
was associated with the first appearance of humans and with the Thunderers. The juxtaposition of the pole and shell within the Omaha Tent of
War created balance between the Above and Beneath Worlds, as well as
between male (pole) and female (shell) concepts (Myers 1992). Duncan
(2011: 31) identifies such earth/sky, male/female juxtapositions as “unified dualism” and notes that they are “an ever present theme in Dhegihan
cosmology.’
There is strong ethnographic evidence that ancient Native Americans
associated shells with female principles (Claassen 2008, 2011). Representational evidence of this association comes in the form of several figurines
Five Thousand Years of Shell Symbolism in the Southeast 175
from the Mississippian period. In his early discussion of prehistoric art
from Tennessee, Troost (1845: 361) illustrates a find from the Sequatchie
Valley consisting of a female ceramic effigy seated within the outer whorl
of a marine gastropod that he identifies as a flame helmet (Cassis flammea) (figure 7.6). The interior whorls and columella of the shell had been
removed to create a “sanctuary” for the figurine (Troost 1845: 360-61).
In 2009, excavations in East St. Louis uncovered the so-called Exchange Avenue Figurine, a flint clay figurine depicting a kneeling woman
with a gastropod positioned cup-up at her knees (Caba 2011) (figure 7.7).
The shape and positioning of the outer whorl suggest to us that the Exchange Avenue Figurine is holding a modified helmet shell (Cassis sp.)
with the central columella and interior whorls removed, just as seen in the
Sequatchie Valley example. The Exchange Avenue Figurine differs significantly from the three other examples of Mississippian female flint clay figurines (the Westbrook, Keller, and Birger figurines) in that it holds a shell
Figure 7.7. The Exchange Avenue
Figurine, East St. Louis (after
Caba 2011: 12).