Hawaiian Shells and Pacific Jewelry Significance
Some jewelry gained significance by virtue of its connection with trade and commerce. The possession of certain valuables demonstrated that the wearer was a man of enterprise and influence. Long distance canoe voyaging provided only skilled navigators with the opportunity for trade of items not readily available in their area. Complex systems of trade and ceremonial exchanges developed with personal items such as ear rings and necklaces. Trade also moved materials between coastal and inland groups. For instance, shells were travelling to inland areas and bird feathers were going out to coastal societies.
For Oceanic peoples whose whole history is so closely bound to the sea, a fish hook worn around the neck symbolized deep cultural significance. Wedding ceremonies often featured the presentation to the bride of a pearl shell pendant. Later this pendant would be finished into a fish hook to be used by the groom and their future male children. By transferring this masculine valuable across the marriage bond, the importance of the marriage and the promised creation of a new family were presented for the whole community to see. There was also a connection between jewelry as currency and currency as jewelry as was evident with shells like the cowrie. It has been said that Pacific ornaments of shell money may be regarded as either the most valuable of ornaments or the most decorative form of money.
Hawaiian Shells and Pacific Adornment
It was the aesthetic impact that provided and enhanced the power of Pacific jewelry. Common among materials were coral, bone, human hair, teeth, fish vertebrae, shells, coconut shells, feathers, and seeds. There was only one major absence and that was metal, which they did not know of until later European contact. The beauty and power of local materials was revealed by the skill of the craftsperson. Other materials not present in their immediate environment had to be obtained by trade or travel. Gathering of these materials often involved considerable physical effort or danger, making them even more valuable. Cone shells used for necklaces were traded hundreds of miles away. Drilled red shell discs from Spondylus were rare and difficult to obtain. Pearl shell, and cowries were also widely sought for their aesthetic appeal. Women dancers wore the cowrie paired or singly with a tight cord around the neck.
People were attracted to different materials due to color, shape, texture, strength, or even flexibility for swaying movements. Feathered headdresses silently waving in unison, flowered leis wafting their fragrance, and shell anklets all added to the sights, smells and rhythmic sounds of ceremonial dances. Hardness and strength of materials were desired for heirloom pieces which became more cherished the more worn they became. Reverence for ancestors was shown through the use of human hair in heirloom necklaces. Another motive for wearing jewelry in the Pacific was for protection. Breast plates made of shell were popular for this reason and added status in battle. Boar tusks carried with them associations of fierceness and aggression seen in wild male pigs, making them appropriate body ornament for male warriors. Besides physical protection, jewelry provided symbolic protection against forces of the supernatural world.
Hawaiian Shells and Pacific Jewelry
From the high mountain valleys of New Guinea to the low coral atolls of Hawaii and the remotest specks of Micronesia and Polynesia, the diversity of local cultures was expressed in language, song, dance, mythology, religion, family, costume, architecture, canoe design, and village life. Many of these cultures were in contact with each other, sharing their ideas through exchange, trade, warfare, and marriage. Others were more isolated, especially when long distance ocean voyaging declined. Living on the coasts, they had developed shell working techniques by forming fish hooks, and adze blades. With these techniques they produced shell arm rings, Cone shell discs, and shell beads to become the earliest known examples of Pacific Jewelry. Their shell, stone, wood, and fibre techniques became more and more sophisticated, forming a foundation for future cultures. Jewelry and personal ornaments of whale tooth pendants, bone necklaces, and drilled shell pendants underwent gradual changes for each Polynesian group.
Most Pacific peoples believe in a vital spiritual energy. The materials as well as the designs they wore focused this energy and helped give them control over its power. Within each Pacific culture there was diversity in design. By nature of the materials available, most of their patterns were geometric. Key values of balance, symmetry, reciprocity, growth and replication symbolized their beliefs for future generations. Both consciously and unconsciously, these designs reinforced the values in their daily lives. Traditional jewelry in the Pacific served many more purposes than simple decoration. Pacific peoples decorated and enhanced their bodies to convey a wide range of messages to their fellows and to the outside world. Jewelry served to enhance self esteem and social position, provide physical and symbolic protection, and display wealth, status, rank, and leadership.
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.
