Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (12 page)

The meaning instilled in all these objects made from Aegean
Spondylus
remains part of what archaeologist Michel Louis Séfériadès described as a ‘halo of mysteries’. There is no doubting their value and deep significance, given how many people across such a large area buried their dead with them. Accumulating objects made not just from shells but from gold, copper and other exotic materials seems to have been a sign of high rank or prestige, the preserve of chiefs and revered elders. Many
Spondylus
objects are rubbed and worn in ways that suggest they were used for a long time and passed between people, picking up stories and becoming heirlooms. Remains of a few workshops have been uncovered, further from the Aegean coast, where people reworked and recycled shell artefacts, which must have been a valuable and limited resource. Especially intriguing are the items that were deliberately damaged after they were made.

Archaeologists have uncovered many broken
Spondylus
objects, and at first it was assumed that they were mistakes, evidence of artisans whose hands had slipped. But it soon became obvious that these were no accidents.

One theory is that breaking and burning shell objects was a ritual of conspicuous consumption, a flamboyant way of asserting your status and showing who’s boss. It could also have had a more spiritual basis. In 2006,
John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska
, from Durham University, led a team who brought together most of the known
Spondylus
bracelets from the Varna necropolis, more than 200 in total. Like a giant jigsaw puzzle, they tried to work out which pieces fitted together. They found that many, but usually not all, of the parts of a fragmented ring were placed together in a single grave; there were often pieces missing.

It’s possible that rings were ceremonially broken at the graveside; some fragments were buried with the deceased,
with the rest given to mourning friends and relatives, creating indelible links between the living and the dead. It’s also possible that broken rings were used to create and maintain links between living people, who smashed and shared out a ring, carrying the parts of it around, before reuniting them in the grave. Across Old Europe, there are other objects that seem to have been carefully manufactured and then deliberately destroyed, including little clay figurines that were thrown into fires and ritually exploded.

Something else archaeologists have done with the ancient
Spondylus
rings is try them on.
Chapman and Gaydarska
found that many of the complete bracelets were too small for either of them to slip over their adult hands. But a younger volunteer, a five-and-a-half-year-old boy, could wear most of them (presumably under close supervision) and even fit some bracelets over his feet and onto his ankles. People from Old Europe may have ritually worn
Spondylus
rings from childhood, keeping them in place and soon being unable to take them off again.

As for the bracelet from Varna that was broken and then fixed back together with gold plates, this seems to have been imbued with even greater meaning. Michel Louis Séfériadès thinks it could be evidence of shamanism in Old Europe. He suggests that many things made from
Spondylus
were the ritualistic paraphernalia of shamans, part of a magical tool kit for communing with the spirit world. Maybe the only way for the buried chief to take his jewellery with him into the afterlife was to break it first – to make it imperfect.

Many thousands of years later, on the other side of the globe, parallel trades in
Spondylus
shells emerged, and there too ideas of shamanism flourished. In pre-Columbian times, Mesoamerican and Andean societies placed immense value on these shells, using them in some similar ways to Old Europeans. Archaeologists have traced
Spondylus
all over the
region, from Aztec tombs to Mayan iconography and Incan carvings. Starting in around 2600 bc, divers ventured beneath the waves and collected the two species of Pacific
Spondylus
that inhabit the coasts of modern-day Peru and Ecuador. The shells were carved into beads and used as inlays for fine jewellery, often keeping the orange, purple and red colours. Masses of tiny shell beads, known as
chaquira
, were made by the Moche people in northern Peru; a hoard of close to 700,000
chaquira
was found in a deep tomb in the suburbs of Quito. Beads were often strung together into clothes, including a form of body armour worn by warriors.

As in Europe, shells found in graves reveal how stratified cultures were in this part of the world, with the rich elites accompanied into the afterlife by bounties of oceanic treasures. Unlike in Europe, though, whole shells were often left as grave offerings; nearly 200 enormous
Spondylus
shells, each weighing up to a kilogram, were placed inside a tomb built by the Lambayeque culture in Peru around 1000 ad.

The symbolism of
Spondylus
ran deep, with not only real shells but also ceramic replicas and shell images in murals and sculptures. In the ancient city of Teotihuacan, 30 miles outside Mexico City, plumed serpents carved from basalt swim along the sides of the temple of Quetzalcóatl, weaving between depictions of
Spondylus
shells. There were links to agriculture, with shells offered up to the gods to bring rain and prevent drought.

People also ate
Spondylus
meat, although perhaps not simply as food. Images depicting these shells being held and eaten by deities have prompted some ethnographers to suggest that the shellfish were a source of mind-altering drugs. At certain times of year, warm seas can become stained blood red with blooms of toxic algae. For a time after a ‘red tide’ has hit, many shellfish become poisonous to humans; the molluscs absorb neurotoxins from the microscopic algae and pass them on to anyone who eats them. Symptoms of
paralytic shellfish poisoning vary; it can make you feel numb and giddy, and sometimes as if you’re flying, but a large dose can be lethal. There is evidence that shamans in early Andean societies used various plants and animals, including toads, for their psychotropic effects. Mary Glowacki from the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research thinks they could have also used poisonous shellfish to help them communicate with the supernatural. Her theory is that shamans may have learned to read the tides and predict when a moderate dose of poisoned shellfish could trigger an out-of-body experience. Given the way that the human kidneys excrete the toxin, it’s even possible that drinking the urine of someone who ate infected
Spondylus
would get you high.

Spondylus
has been linked with other gruesome practices in Aztec society. Beneath Teotihuacan’s temple of Quetzalcóatl, 60 human sacrifices were buried with their hands tied behind their backs. They were dressed in garlands of
Spondylus
shells, carved to look like human teeth, and arranged as gaping jaws around their necks.

The complex and occasionally blood-curdling history of these shells travels into the high peaks of the Andes. In the Inca Empire, children were led by a procession of priests into the highest, most sacred mountains, where they were ritually sacrificed, allowing them entry into the realm of the gods – supposedly a great honour. At such high altitude, the victims’ bodies have occasionally been preserved by the freezing, dry conditions; they look as though they have simply fallen asleep.

One of these mummified discoveries was a 12-year-old girl, who was found in 1996, some 500 years after she died. She was curled up on a platform facing the rising sun, at the peak of Sara Sara, a volcano in southern Peru. The team of high-altitude archaeologists who found her, led by Johan Reinhard, called her Sarita, ‘little Sara’.

Several other sacrificial children were found nearby, along with a collection of luxury artefacts: miniature human effigies made from gold and silver, bundles of coca leaves
that were chewed to stave off altitude sickness, and statues of llamas carved from
Spondylus
shells, unmistakable with their long ears standing to attention. Most intricate of all these objects was a male figurine, roughly the size of an Academy Award Oscar statuette, made from silver and adorned with fragments of cloth. You can see his finely shaped toes, and ears pulled into long lobes; his hands are folded across his chest, and he wears an ornate headdress fashioned from red
Spondylus
shell. All of these shell objects had been on a long journey, 5,000 metres (more than 16,000 feet) up into the clouds, a very long way from the ocean they came from.

Wind the clock forward a couple of hundred years and we find people still using shells to gather wealth and status, but on a scale never seen before, and in a way that combined ideas both ancient and new. The story of these shells reveals an even darker side to human nature.

Turning cowries into currency

Shallow coral lagoons in the northern reaches of the Indian Ocean are home to a small but immensely prolific seashell, the Money Cowrie. The shells, often three centimetres (one inch) long, are creamy white and lumpy, sometimes with a dainty gold line encircling a central hump. In life they are far more stunning than in death; the shell is covered by a frilly black and white mantle, intricately patterned like a miniature zebra.

Throughout most of their lives, cowries inhabit nooks of coral reefs or the branching fronds of seaweeds, and they don’t travel far. Female cowries lay clutches of eggs and sit on them, before they hatch into minute larvae. Then, for a short window of time, her offspring become travellers; the larvae drift around for a while in the water, riding the currents and tides, before settling down to live out their time as ponderous adults. However, after they died, the shells of many millions of cowries were once taken on long journeys, journeys with a sorrowful end.

Centuries ago, people in the Maldives began gathering cowries from the warm waters around their islands. They didn’t use tiny fishing lines and baited hooks, as one early traveller dubiously reported, but took advantage of the cowries’ secretive nature. The easiest way to harvest these shells was to throw coconut palm leaves into the shallows, then leave them there for several months. In that time, cowries would come out of hiding and investigate this new source of food and shelter, taking up lodging among the leaves. All the cowrie-fisher needed to do was pull a palm frond out of the water, give it a good shake and the cowries would drop off. It was then a matter of removing the snails from their homes by burying them in hot sand for a few more months. The end result was a stash of gleaming empty cowries, ready to be sorted and packed into triangular bundles wrapped in coconut fibre cloth. At last, when the monsoon winds began blowing from the south, wooden sailboats were cast off and the cowries began a new journey.

The first port of call was India, where the cowries were exchanged for rice and cloth under the strict control of the Maldivian king. No one else was allowed to take part in the trade. Some of these cowries stayed in India and were used as decorations, amulets and symbols of purity. Indians also used the shells as hard currency, to pay taxes and ferrymen at river crossings. And from possibly as early as the eleventh century, the cowrie trail spread to more distant lands.

Arab merchants took cowries from India on a shadowy overland route across the Sahara. Little is known about these early traders beyond snippets of evidence here and there; some archaeologists believe cowries were traded in Cairo in the Middle Ages, and in the far west of the Arab world, in Mauritania, remains have been found of an abandoned caravan, complete with its cargo of cowries.

Maldivian shells were first traded in West Africa in small quantities as amulets and charms, something that native shell species were already used for. By the fourteenth century,
cowries had been adopted as currency. The Money Cowrie doesn’t inhabit West Africa, so all the cowries in the region were imported from afar. In the mid-fourteenth century the great Moroccan explorer, Ibn Battuta, wrote the first account of cowries changing hands in the Mali Empire. Back then, shells were used in small transactions in the marketplace, to buy food and other domestic goods, as they have been in many other parts of the world.

Shells are one of the oldest and most widespread forms of hard currency. In New Guinea, people have pierced flakes of pearl shells and threaded them onto strings, measured across the chest in nipple-to-nipple lengths; Native Americans of southern New England made tubular beads, known as wampum, from whelk and quahog shells, which became legal tender when European settlers arrived; and in the Pacific Northwest, from Canada to California, strings of tusk shells (scaphopods) were used as money. In China, the use of cowries as currency goes back thousands of years. The classical Chinese character for money stems from a pictograph of a cowrie, and when demand outstripped supplies of real shells, people made imitations from bone, ceramics and metal. And it could be that the ancient trades in
Spondylus
shells, on opposite sides of the world, also included a form of currency which, some say, is the origin of the word ‘spondoolies’.