Tracing them along the northern route through the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, these shells have been found in the ancient graves of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana, and northward to the regions of the Great Lakes. Dr. Gerard Troost, in a communication to the American Ethnological Society,[[54]] describes an interesting series of sepulchral remains discovered in Tennessee. The crania were characterised by remarkable artificial compression, as in an example figured by Dr. Morton (plate 55, Crania Americana), and the graves abounded with relics, “lares, trinkets, and utensils, all of a very rude construction, and all formed of some natural product, none of metal.” From an examination of those, Dr. Troost was led to the conclusion that the race to whom they pertained came from some tropical country. Among their stone implements obsidian abounded. Numerous beads were formed of tropical marine shells of the genus marginella, ground so as to make a perforation on the back, by means of which they could be strung together for purposes of personal ornament. Plain beads were made from the columellæ of the Strombus gigas; and such columellæ were found worked to a uniform thickness, perforated through the centre, and in all stages of manufacture, to that of perfected beads and links of the much-prized wampum. Similar accumulations of shell beads in the great mounds of the Ohio valley are referred to in a subsequent chapter; but another relic has an additional value from the light it throws not only on early native arts, but on ancient manners and modes of thought. Dr. Troost describes and figures various rudely sculptured idols, from some of which he was led to assume the existence of Phallic rites among the ancient idolaters of Tennessee. The greater number of the idols were of stone, but the one figured here (Fig. 49) has been modelled of clay and pounded shells, and hardened in the fire. It represents a nude human figure, kneeling, with the hands clasped in front; and when found, it still occupied, as its primitive niche or sanctuary, a large tropical shell (Cassis flammea), from which the interior whorls and columella had been removed, with the exception of a small portion at the base, cut off flat, so as to form its pedestal. The special application of this example of the tropical cassides adds a peculiar interest to it, as manifestly associated with the religious rites of the ancient race by whom the spoils of southern seas were transported inland, and converted to purposes of ornament and use.
The discovery of similar relics to the north of the Great Lakes is still more calculated to excite interest; and, indeed, when first brought under notice they gave rise to extravagant ethnological theories, based on the assumption of their East Indian origin.[[55]] But though they furnished no evidence of such far wanderings from the old East, they throw considerable light on ancient migrations of native American races, and illustrate the extent of traffic carried on between the north and south, in ages prior to the displacement of the Red-man by the European. Two large tropical shells, both specimens of the Pyrula perversa, have been presented to the Canadian Institute at Toronto: not as examples of the native conchology of the tropics, but as Indian relics pertaining to the great northern chain of fresh-water lakes. The first was discovered on opening a grave-mound at Nottawasaga, on the Georgian Bay, along with a gorget made from the same kind of shell; the second was brought from the Fishing Islands, near Cape Hurd, on Lake Huron. Thirteen other examples from the Georgian Bay are in the Museum of Laval University; and many more have come under my notice procured from grave-mounds and sepulchral depositories in different parts of Western Canada. Recently, in the summer of 1874, a large ossuary of the Tiontonones, or Petuns, was accidentally opened at Lake Medad, in the county of Wentworth, within which were found evidences of extensive sepulture, numerous clay and stone pipes of curious workmanship, shell and stone implements, and a number of the same tropical shells, both whole and in pieces, most of which are now in the possession of Mr. B. E. Charlton of Hamilton, Ontario. Similar ossuaries have been repeatedly opened in the Huron Country, between Lake Simcoe and the Georgian Bay. In one pit, about seven miles from Penetanguishene, three large conch-shells were found, along with twenty-six copper kettles, a pipe, a copper bracelet, a quantity of shell beads, and numerous other relics. The largest of the shells, a specimen of the Pyrula spirata, weighed three pounds and a quarter, and measured fourteen inches in length; but a piece had been cut off this, as well as another of the large shells, probably for the manufacture of some smaller ornament. In another cemetery in the same district, among copper arrow-heads, bracelets, and ear-ornaments, pipes of stone and clay, beads of porcelain, red pipe-stone, etc., sixteen of the same prized tropical univalves lay round the bottom of the pit arranged in groups of three or four together. From such shells the sacred wampum, official gorgets, and other special decorations were made; and the appearance of some of those found in northern graves suggests that they may have been handed down through successive generations as great medicines, before their final deposition, with other rare and costly offerings, in honour of the dead.
The attractions offered by such products of tropical seas are by no means limited to the untutored tastes of the American Indian. In India, China, and Siam, the Pyrum, and other large and beautiful shells of the Indian Ocean, are no less highly prized by the natives, not only as an easily wrought material for implements and personal ornaments; but in some cases, as vessels employed in their most sacred rites. A sinistrorsal variety found on the coasts of Tranquebar and Ceylon, is devoted by the Cingalese exclusively to such purposes. Reversed shells of the species Turbinella, are held in like veneration in China, where great prices are given for them; and are often curiously ornamented with elaborate carvings, as shown on several fine specimens in the British Museum. They are kept in the pagodas, and are not only employed by the priests on special occasions in administering medicine to the sick; but the vessel for holding the consecrated oil, with which the Emperor is anointed at his coronation, is made from one of them.
Such analogies in the choice of materials, and in objects set apart for the sacred rites of different nations, are full of interest in reference to characteristics common to man in all ages, and in regions the most remote. But when they are met with in the arts and customs of the same continent, they point with greater probability to borrowed usages, and often help the ethnologist to track the footprints of migrating nations to their earlier homes. But the use of shells for personal ornaments has been traced back, along with other evidence of the antiquity of man, almost to what seems the primeval dawn. In the caves of southern France and Italy, along with mammoth and reindeer bones and ivory, and in the sepulchral deposits at Aurignac, lay shell necklaces or bracelets made of the Littorina littorea, still abundant on the shores of the Atlantic, along with perforated shells of the miocene period, evidently gathered in a fossil state to be converted to purposes of personal decoration. So also in a later, but still prehistoric age, the megalithic tomb, brought to light, in 1838, under the Knock-Maraidhe Cromlech in the Phœnix Park, Dublin, disclosed two male skeletons, underneath the skulls of which lay a number of the common Nerita littoralis, perforated, evidently for the purpose of being strung together as neck ornaments. An ornamental bone-pin, with a knob carved at each end, and a rude flint-knife, constituted the only other contents of this primitive tomb which had been constructed with such costly toil.
Other British cists and cairns have disclosed similar relics of the shell necklace and bracelet, made of the oyster, limpet, and cockle shells, the contents of which supplied an important source of food. For not only in the ancient kitchen-middens of northern Europe, but mingling with more ancient cave deposits, as in Kent’s Cavern, lay heaps of the shells of such edible molluscs, the refuse of the table of the old cave-men, which shows one resource on which they depended for subsistence. America, too, had its ancient shell and refuse heaps, as at Cannon’s Point, St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, where a vast mound of oyster and mussel shells, intermingled here and there with a mediola or helix, and with flint arrow-heads, stone axes, and fragments of pottery, covers an area of not less than ten acres. But they abound upon all the sea islands of the Southern States, and in many cases constitute regular sepulchral mounds or shell cairns. One of these singular cairns on Stalling’s Island, in the Savannah river, more than two hundred miles from its mouth, is an elliptical mound measuring nearly three hundred feet in length, and enclosing, along with human skeletons, bones of large fish, deer, and other wild animals, accompanied with broken pottery, arrow-heads, axes, flint-knives, and charred wood. On the islands, and along the coast of Georgia and Florida, the inexhaustible supplies of oysters, conches, and clams, furnished an abundant supply of food. Around the Indian villages the shells accumulated in waste heaps; and even now, at times, show the circular hollow where the native hut had stood. With a mild climate, abundant game and indigenous fruits, in addition to the inexhaustible spoils of the sea, the Southern Indians had little temptation to roam; and the numerous shell-mounds and cairns afford proof of their settled occupation of many localities. A large drinking-cup, made of the conch-shell, was one of the special attributes of the Indian cacique; and such cups are frequently found deposited beside the buried skeleton.
Fresh-water shell heaps also abound; and Professor Jeffries Wyman made those of East Florida the subject of an interesting paper in The American Naturalist. Such memorials of the encampments of the aborigines are historical records of the habits and customs of ancient native tribes. The fresh-water mussels, which constituted an important article of food, and also supplied the pearls which they prized for decoration, enter largely into the contents of the heaps. Intermingled with them are “numerous fragments of pottery, stone axes, chisels, crushing-stones, awls, mortars, net-sinkers, arrow and spear points, flint-knives, shell beads, soapstone ornaments, pipes, and the bones of deer, buffalo, alligators, turtles, racoons, and other animals.”[[56]] Many of the bones have been split, like those found in the ancient mounds and caves of Europe, for the purpose of extracting the marrow; and along with such evidences of culinary arts are piles of chipped flint and stone, with broken or unfinished axes, spear and arrow-heads, and other traces of the Indian tool-maker’s workshop. In all ways we thus recognise, amid diversities of race, climate, and other external circumstances, many minute analogies between the men of palæolithic and neolithic ages of Europe, and those of the new world’s more recent centuries, in regions apart from its singular centres of a native civilisation.
But also the convenient form and beauty of various marine shells have led to their use, not only as a substitute for the flint and stone of other localities, or the unknown bronze and iron of later ages, but even for the precious metals as the medium of a recognised currency, and this from times of unknown antiquity, alike in the old world and in the new. Of such substitutes for a metallic currency the Cypræa moneta is the most familiar. The cowrie shells used as currency are procured on the coast of Congo, and in the Philippine and Maldive Islands. Of the latter, indeed, they still constitute the chief article of export. At what remote date, or at what early stage of rudimentary civilisation, this singular representative shell-currency was introduced, it is perhaps vain to inquire; but the extensive area over which it has long been recognised proves its great antiquity. The Philippine Islands form, in part, the eastern boundary of the Southern Pacific, and the Maldives lie off the Malabar coast in the Indian Ocean; but their shells circulate as currency not only through Southern Asia, but far into the African continent.
Corresponding to this cowrie currency of Asia and Africa is the American Ioqua, or Dentalium, a shell found chiefly at the entrance of the Strait of De Fuca, and employed both for ornament and money. The Chinooks and other Indians of the Northern Pacific coast wear long strings of ioqua shells as necklaces and fringes to their robes. These have a value assigned to them, increasing in proportion to their size, which varies from about an inch and a half to upwards of two inches in length. Mr. Paul Kane thus wrote to me: “A great trade is carried on among all the tribes in the neighbourhood of Vancouver’s Island, through the medium of these shells. Forty shells of the standard size, extending a fathom’s length, are equal in value to a beaver’s skin; but if shells can be found so far in excess of the ordinary standard that thirty-nine are long enough to make the fathom, it is worth two beavers’ skins, and so on, increasing in value one beaver skin for every shell less than the first number.”
But as the New World has thus its disclosures and illustrations of native arts and usages full of interest to the student of primeval man, so also the first glimpse of a western hemisphere revealed its aborigines already familiar with that distinctive evidence of reason, the art of fire-making, earliest of all the practical sciences, and the indispensable precursor of every higher art of civilisation.