Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells Read online

  These ideas help explain why so many creation myths tell stories of shells giving birth to gods, humans and sometimes entire worlds. On the island of Nauru in Micronesia, people tell stories of the god Areop-Enap, who found himself trapped inside a clamshell. He groped around in the dark and found two snails, and made them into the sun and the moon; a worm divided the shell into the sky and the earth, and its sweat dripped down and formed the sea. In the Pacific Northwest of North America, the Haida people believe their creator, the trickster Raven, dug up a cockleshell after a flood and opened it to release the men inside. Raven then persuaded the men to have sex with another mollusc, the chiton, and the resulting offspring were women. And if you think Europeans haven’t gone in for creation stories involving shells, just take a look at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, with the naked goddess perched on a scallop shell. It’s stories like these, and plenty of others, that have tempted people to wear shells as jewellery or sewn into their clothes as symbols of good luck and fertility.

  The powerful symbolism of shells can also be heard in the call of shell trumpets. The conch in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is a symbol of power – in meetings, only the boy holding the conch is allowed to speak – and it is just one in a long line of emblematic shell instruments that resonate through myths, legends and religions into the distant past. Ancient Indian epics tell of heroes who carried conch shells inscribed with their names, which they used to banish demons and avert natural disasters. Samurai warriors used shell trumpets to relay messages to their troops. The lament of a triton shell trumpet accompanies Fijian chiefs to their graves, and conch trumpets are blown in Haiti to call up Agwe, the voodoo water spirit and protector of ships. Shell trumpets have even left their mark in Hollywood. In Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien the sound of a conch trumpet is used in the soundtrack to evoke the desolate atmosphere of the abandoned spacecraft.

  Aztec legends tell of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcóatl, who ventured into the underworld to bring back humans after they were wiped out by a great flood. He struck a deal with the lord of the dead, Mictlanteuctli, who agreed to hand over the human bones on condition that Quetzalcóatl played a conch trumpet. The lord of the dead duped him, producing a solid shell that wouldn’t play a note. But Quetzalcóatl outsmarted his opponent and summoned worms to chew holes in the shell and bees to fly around inside; the clamouring insects sent out a hollow roar that showed Quetzalcóatl had stuck to his side of the bargain. The lord of the dead had to let the bones go, and humanity was reborn.

  As Quetzalcóatl knew, the key to the conch’s use as a musical instrument is its hollow chamber. Just like trumpets, trombones, flugelhorns and other brass instruments, shells have a flared opening, also known as the bell. Cut the tip off a large conch or triton shell, press it to your lips and blow. The buzzing from your lips vibrates the column of air inside and resonates along the bell, emitting sound waves that are sculpted in different ways depending on the shape and size of the shell.

  The same physics explains why the sound of the sea gets ‘trapped’ inside large shells. Hold one to your ear and the hollow space acts as a resonating chamber, picking up ambient noises, the wind or the rush of blood through your ears, modifying and amplifying them until they sound (some say) like the swooshing of waves on a beach.

  There are countless stories and uses of shells, from fortune telling and board games to magic amulets that ward off the evil eye. You would be hard pressed to find a society anywhere in the world that doesn’t have its own interpretation of these natural objects found in rivers and seas and on land. From them all, I have chosen three shells with three stories that, taken together, show how the shell-makers’ homes have captured human imagination from the very beginning, and in their gleaming surfaces we will see many facets of human nature reflected back at us.

  The oldest gems

  Archaeologists and palaeontologists have various ways of looking into the past and piecing together a picture of how things used to be. When it comes to understanding how humans evolved, the bones of our ancestors reveal a lot about what they looked like, what they ate and the diseases they suffered from. And it is in the objects our ancestors left behind, including some remarkable shells, that we find clues about something else: what they were thinking.

  Set into a scrubby hillside near the village of Taforalt in north-eastern Morocco is a huge limestone cave called the Grotte des Pigeons. An international team of archaeologists, led by Abdeljalil Bouzouggar from Rabat University in Morocco and Nick Barton from Oxford University, have been excavating the site for more than five years. They have uncovered stone tools and the bones of African hares and wild horses that show ancient people once lived and ate there. From deep down in the cave floor, in the remains of a fireplace, the team dug up a handful of shells that turned out to have been there for a very long time.

  The shells are dog whelks (known in North America as nassa mud snails) from the genus Nassarius. Each is the size of a thumbnail, cream-coloured with a flattened base and twisted tightly into a neat point. Francesco d’Errico and Marian Vanhaeren of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris scrutinised the shells and deciphered their time-worn story. The dog whelks had traces of red ochre rubbed into them; they were pierced with holes and some have microscopic patterns of wear that indicate they had once been strung on a cord. They didn’t come from fossil deposits but must have been brought into the hills from the Mediterranean shore, more than 40 kilometres (25 miles) away at the time. The beachcomber who found them had either selected shells that were already punctured or taken intact shells and later on, perhaps back inside the cave by the fireside, carefully pierced a new hole into each one.

  Ashy sediments from the cave revealed how long ago the shells had been left there. One technique, optical dating, involves accessing a chemical clock locked inside grains of quartz and feldspar; the clock slowly ticks away and gets reset every time those minerals are exposed to sunlight. Researchers have learned how to read the clock to calculate how long things have been buried in the dark. Bouzouggar, Barton and the team initially concluded that the cave remains were at least 82,000 years old; repeated tests have pushed the date even further back, to between 100,000 and 125,000 years ago. These pierced and painted shells are the world’s oldest jewellery.

  Stringing shells onto a cord and wearing them as pendants or beads may seem like a simple enough thing to do, but it reflects a fundamental part of being human. Unlike the stone tools that early hominins were making more than three million years ago to kill and butcher animals, shell jewellery has no obvious practical purpose; it is just for decoration.

  However, the care and attention that went into collecting these particular shells, carrying them a long way from the sea, smearing them in red pigment and wearing them shows that they must have meant something important to those early people. We don’t know what those shells symbolised, but they hint that people had begun to gain a sense of self-awareness and to think in an abstract manner; they were able to express their ideas about the world around them, and their relationships with each other. What’s more, these were not the only dog whelk shells being used as beads in prehistoric Africa. Shell beads made from the same species, Nassarius gibbosulus, have been found in similar ancient sites in Israel and Algeria, and others from the same genus have been found in a South African cave. Piecing together these findings, it seems that some time more than 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens living at opposite ends of Africa were using dog whelk shells as decorations.

  Until these discoveries were made in Morocco, the oldest known symbolic ornaments were perforated animal teeth and shell beads from Europe, dating back no more than 40,000 years. In contrast to the African bead-makers, who used only a couple of shell types, European beads were made from more than 150 species. This suggests that shell beads played different roles in Europe and Africa, and raises the controversial idea that ancient African beads were a close match to more recent use of shells by hunter-gatherers.
Rather than being simply personal ornaments, the African beads may have been passed along interlinking exchange systems, or long-distance networks, that crossed the continent and spanned cultural boundaries. When people lived in the Grotte des Pigeons, the climate was going through rapid change, with fluctuating rainfall patterns that would have made life difficult; perhaps the shell beads helped groups of people to reinforce their cultural identity and get through tough times together.

  Even if we can’t now be sure what those oldest shell beads meant and how they were used, they are a sign that our distant ancestors were thinking in a thoroughly modern way. Tens of thousands of years later, shells and other artefacts were being made that revealed a new meaning and desire among people: the desire to amass wealth and show off their high status. By the time the Bulgarian shell bracelet was made, then broken, human societies were becoming split in a similar way, and not everybody got to wear shell jewels.

  Signs of inequality

  The discovery of the Varna necropolis, and the hoards of treasures, transformed the view of so-called Old Europe. This was an obscure and often overlooked period in prehistory, dating from long before ancient civilisations emerged in Greece and Rome, and before Egyptians started building pyramids. Around 6200 bc, farmers were migrating north out of Greece and Macedonia into the Balkan foothills, bringing with them domesticated wheat, barley, sheep and cattle. Until the discovery at Varna, it was generally assumed that society back then, in the Copper or Eneolithic Age, was egalitarian, with people living in small, scattered settlements and no sign of a rich elite. Suddenly, archaeologists found themselves contemplating opulent graves and Europe’s oldest stash of gold treasure.

  Not all the graves were equally adorned, and some were quite sparse, but the most sumptuous – grave 43 – contained the skeleton of a man who died in his forties, who archaeologists think could have been the leader of the Varna community. He was buried in clothes trimmed in gold and carnelian beads, held a gold sceptre, wore gold earrings and gold bracelets, and each knee was capped with a gold disc; he even wore what appears to be a gold penis-sheath. On his upper left arm, above the elbow, he wore the broken shell bracelet fixed with a gold plate. The shell it was made from, a variety known as Spondylus, hadn’t come from the Black Sea but was brought to Varna from much further away. It was part of a complex, long-distance trade in valuable luxury goods that stretched for thousands of miles across Europe, and was the first of its kind in the world.

  There are still many species of Spondylus shells living in seas worldwide, stuck fast to rocks down in the depths, many metres beneath the waves. Their common name is thorny oyster, a perfect description for these bivalves with their shaggy coats of spines that encourage seaweeds and other organisms to settle, lending them a cloak of camouflage. The shells themselves are commonly a deep orange, purple or blood red, but in life they are often smothered in encrusting sponges like a colourful, gloopy sneeze.

  Most of the ancient Spondylus artefacts found across Europe were made from shells collected while the molluscs were still alive. There are few signs of wear and tear that would suggest they spent time rolling in the surf before a beachcomber came along and picked them up. It also seems unlikely that these shells came from fossil deposits. To collect them, people must have found the places where they grew and pulled them from the rocks they clung to. But where did they go to find these shells?

  In 1970, when Nick Shackleton and Colin Renfrew analysed the oxygen isotopes in ancient Spondylus objects, they found a chemical signature that was etched into the shells while they grew. This revealed their Mediterranean origins, and in particular the warm, clear waters of the Aegean Sea. It was here, in the early part of the Neolithic (around the seventh or sixth millennium BC), that fishermen began gathering Spondylus shells. They probably used rakes, dredges and perhaps even tongs from the surface to pluck shells out of the depths; skin divers would swim down and chip the oysters away with knives while holding their breath. Divers and fishermen then passed their shells on to local artisans, who transformed the raw material into all sorts of bright, white ornaments. Spondylus beads, buttons, bangles, pendants and belt buckles have been found – mainly in graves – throughout the Balkan Peninsula, in Ukraine, Hungary and Poland, in Germany and westwards into France, where a cylindrical Spondylus bead has even been found on the outskirts of Paris.

  For these Mediterranean shells to have become so widely dispersed, there must have been a major network of people travelling around Old Europe, meeting each other, exchanging goods and at the same time swapping knowledge and ideas. The popularity of Spondylus grew throughout the Copper Age, especially in areas far from the coasts. Then, all of a sudden at the beginning of the Bronze Age, around 3,000 years after they first appeared, Spondylus objects vanished from the archaeological record. Either the shells were no longer available, perhaps because the social networks supplying them broke down (there’s no indication that the shells had been overfished at that time), or maybe people simply didn’t want them any more.

  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.