Hawaiian Shells and Cowrie Gloss
Cowries were used as decoration on clothing, drums, divining chains, headdresses, ritual masks, furniture, games, and in computation. Because of the demands of cowries, special systems of numeration were often used just for cowrie shell arithmetic. Along the coast of Africa they were pierced and threaded, generally in strings of forty. Another group multiplied twenty times three cowries and added ten which give (20X3) +10 =70 cowries. Other people had a unique system of cowry equivalents with a special nomenclature. First the shells were counted out by six and then ten groups of six were combined to form piles of sixty cowries. The fabulous gold wealth of one kingdom was balanced and recorded by treasurers every twenty days with the aid of cowrie shells.
Cowries were used as a sign of wealth, prestige, and power on royal thrones, adornment, crowns, and beadwork. Only a king was allowed to wear cowries in bulk. In the Pacific Islands, women dancers wore the cowrie paired or singly with a tight cord around the neck. Cowries became a favorite because of their beautiful colors, unique patterns, and high-gloss finish. This is possible because their mantle is on the outside, secreting the shell from the top down and keeping it protected, whereas most other shells are secreted from the inside out, hence the glossy interior of many shells. The live cowrie mantle is usually ornamented with spectacular papillae that provide camouflage by matching the color of the sponge it feeds upon. Cowries usually remain hidden during the day and emerge at night to feed with the mantle fully extended. Juveniles are paper-thin, coiling as they grow until maturity when the outer lip curves inward, forms teeth, and the shell thickens with a new adult color pattern. The height of an adult cowry does not change once this takes place but rather the shell thickens and the interior is dissolved to create more space inside. Curiously, young cowries stop coiling at random regardless of height, resulting in a broad size range in adults.
Hawaiian Shells and Cowrie Currency
Money cowries (Cypraea moneta) are small mollusks that live in the tropical waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Their beautiful shells have been featured in ritual practices and incorporated into clothing and jewelry for thousands of years in African and South Asian cultures. Symbolically they were often associated with notions of womanhood, fertility, birth, and wealth. The Egyptians considered them to be magical agents and also used them as currency in foreign exchange transactions. Archaeologists have excavated millions of them in the tombs of the Pharaohs. In the thirteenth century, cowrie shells were brought to Africa from the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. They showed up in Egypt, then across the Sahara in the western Sudan region. Later, they were brought in by Dutch and English traders through the Guinea Coast ports of West Africa. The Europeans were astonished that the Africans preferred cowrie shells to gold coin.
Cowries were used in many other ways like bride wealth, payments for fines, divination, initiation into secret societies, and funerals. They were an important part of burial rituals in ancient China. When an emperor of China was buried, his mouth was stuffed with nine cowries. Feudal lords had seven, high officers five, and ordinary officers three. Common people generally had their mouths stuffed with rice, but if a commoner had some wealth, the last molar of each side of the mouth was supported by a small money cowry. This was to ensure that the dead had plenty to eat and spend in the afterlife.
Hawaiian Shells and Cowrie History
The cowrie shell has been used as money in more parts of the world than any other currency. As far back as the Shang dynasty (sixteenth-eleventh centuries BC) inscriptions talk of cowries. Archaeologists have found that the distribution of cowrie coincides with the gradual acquisition of territories by the noble lords of the Zhou dynasty (eleventh century – 221 BC). Cowrie shells were the most popular currency within Africa and pictures of cowrie’s shells also appear on cave walls of Paleolithic Africa. With the advent of the slave trade to the New World, cowries were among the items that Europeans exchanged with coastal West African groups for slaves. In the United States a money cowrie shell was found in excavations along Mulberry Row, the street of slave houses and craft shops adjacent to Thomas Jefferson’s mansion. The shell attests to the persistence of African cultural traditions at Monticello in the late 18th century. Throughout history cowrie shells have also been used for decoration, jewelry, and prestige.
The single Monticello cowrie appears to have been valued for reasons other than it’s potential monetary worth. The shell was found during the excavation of a subfloor pit or storage cellar beneath a building that Jefferson called ‘the Negro Quarter.’ The Negro Quarter was a slave house occupied from the early 1770’s to the mid 1790’s. A hole made in the back of the shell and two grooves, caused by the abrasions of a thread that passed through it, indicate that the shell was worn as jewelry or attached to clothing. It was probably transported to Virginia as adornment on clothing of a newly enslaved African. Historians cannot be sure of the precise significance the Monticello cowrie shell had for the person who wore it, but it provides tangible evidence that enslaved people carried some part of their African lives and identity with them across the Atlantic and onto the plantations of southeastern America.
Hawaiian Shells and Adornment
Shells have played a central role in religion from prehistoric times onward. Dominating early religious practices, cowrie shells had powerful female symbolism and was renewed in the religions of the great civilizations that followed. Various American Indian tribes believed possessing certain shells gave them spiritual power. Archaeologists uncovered a chief buried on a blanket made of 200,000 shell beads. Long before our modern day communication systems, man found that trumpets made from shells produced a sound that carried for many miles. By using as series of trumpet blasts, messengers were able to communicate fairly detailed messages from village to village, tribe to tribe.
All cultures have used shells and pearls for personal adornment. Cowries were worn by Cro-Magnon man, as indicated by cowrie ornaments found in their caves. Some cultures wore shells to signal their distinct tribal identities and display their role and rank within the tribe. In some parts of India, a Hindu woman’s equivalent of a wedding ring is a bracelet made of the sections of the Indian chank. Other ways shells have been used as adornment are as jewelry, pendants, earrings, finger rings, nose rings, bracelets, and buttons. Abalone shells, especially the famous Paua shell from New Zealand, were extremely popular for buttons. The freshwater mussels along the Mississippi River were used extensively to make ‘pearl buttons’ for many years. In the year 1912 there were 196 pearl button factories in 20 states along the Mississippi River system. As decoration or as intrinsic parts of their function mother of pearl was commonly used on ceremonial or religious garbs. As clothing adornment, pearls are frequently sewn on as jewelry, fresh and saltwater pearls are used in many ways as inserts in ceremonial masks.
Hawaiian Shells and Tools
From prehistoric times, man has used shells for tools and utensils. Household dishes, cooking pots, cutlery, scoops, spatulas were often made from bivalves and larger gastropods. Food pounders were made from the giant clam in the South Pacific. Storage containers for such things as perfumes, ointments and medicines were made from some of the larger bivalves and univalves such as the nautilus. Oil lamps made from shells are a frequent find throughout the Middle East. Fishing lures, octopus lures, hooks and sinkers were made from abalone, pearl shell and cowries. Tweezers, tongs and claspers were made from bivalves. Building tools designed to split and smooth many building and thatching materials such as palm fronds and bamboo canes. Farming tools, shovels, plow blades, hoes for tilling the soil, adze, knife, and axe blades were made from shells with sharpened edges. Blades and scrapers for cutting and skinning hides were made from shells such as the ark shell. Drills, chisels, scrapers, sanders were made from various shells such as the Red Helmet shell. Bailing buckets made from ‘bailer’ shells are still in use by native fisherman in the South Pacific and Australia today to bail out their boats.
In the 16th Century, natives of Central America dumped Purpura Patula snails into cauldrons and crushed them. The mashed snails oozed purple dye that could color cloth. By 1648, the natives had started producing this dye for export to Spain. Because of the high demand for the dye, they were forced to find ways to maintain their supply while not endangering the population of snails. By imposing conservation measures, they learned to pluck a snail off the rocks, gently blow into its shell and collect the dye that trickled out. The snail was then returned to the rocks unharmed. Central America wasn’t the only part of the world where clothes were dyed with mollusk juice. Mollusks in the Mediterranean were also used in this way. Antony and Cleopatra had sails that were colored ‘tyrian purple’. Rome’s emperor Nero was the only person in the empire allowed to wear cloth of this color.
Hawaiian Shells and Influence
Mollusks first made their appearance 500 million years ago, and their shells have played an important role in many cultures throughout the world. They have influenced man in art, architecture, trade, music, medicine, communication, and religion. They have been weighed, measured, sliced and cataloged by scientists. And archeologists have shown us how shells were used for containers, tools, ornaments, currency, and jewelry.
Shells were the earliest forms of currency used in many countries. The Chinese were the first people to use the cowrie shell as currency. Examples of other country’s native money-strands are found in New Guinea, the Melanesian islands, and Africa. The acceptance of this shell as a type of currency was so strong that the first oval metal coin minted in the Greek colony of Lydia around 670 B.C. was modeled after the cowrie. Hard clamshells and whelks were the shells used to make North American Indian wampum. Eastern Indians also used the tusk shell as a trade shell. Beads and other ornaments were traded all over the Andean region. Chumash Indians of California also made shell beads that they used as money. The name “Chumash” literally translates ‘bead money makers’.
Man has long been inspired by the graceful symmetry and beauty of shells. Archaeological diggings at many ancient sites have produced shells and artifacts in the design of shells. Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans used the shell’s shape as part of their building design and decor. Architecture has been profoundly influenced by the symmetry of molluscs, with the Guggenheim Museum being a classic example. Many great artists were so inspired by the beauty, diversity and design of the shell, that they incorporated them into their masterpieces.
