Forty years ago, in the city of Varna on the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea, workmen were digging a trench to lay a power cable when they stumbled on something unexpected: human remains – very old human remains – and a great hoard of gold treasure. Archaeologists quickly stepped in and uncovered the rest of a vast necropolis, a prehistoric city of the dead, comprising at least 300 graves that had been dug more than six and a half thousand years ago.
The glittering gold that first caught the workmen’s eyes turned out to be part of the oldest haul of buried gold known in Europe. But the gold jewellery and ornaments were not the only treasures left in these graves. In the finest of them all, the resting place of the most powerful man of this ancient community, was a circular bracelet carved from a single seashell that came from far away. It was carried hundreds of miles overland and given to a skilled artisan, who spent many hours carefully polishing and carving it. When it was finished, the shell bracelet was snapped in two, then fixed back together with strips of gold plate hammered with rows of fine dimples.
No one knows exactly why this shell bracelet was broken and then mended. There is no written record from this time, only a series of objects to tell us about these people of the past. Yet there’s little doubt that for the person who made it, and the person who was buried with it, the bracelet held great meaning. The shell had perhaps been just as precious as the gold that was used to fix it – maybe even more so.
Just like the molluscs that use their shells to hunt and dig and move, so people have also fashioned shells into all sorts of objects. Some are practical tools. Archaeologists have found shells made into anvils, choppers, knives, fish-hooks and weights for fishing nets. There are shells that lent themselves to particular uses, based on their size and shape, like the bailer shells (of the genus Melo) that seafaring cultures have used for centuries to scoop out water from canoes and sailboats. Ground down into powder, shells are added to animal feeds as a source of calcium. The powder can also be combined with ceramics; pottery made a thousand years ago in the Mississippian culture of North America was commonly made stronger by mixing burnt, crushed shells in with the clay.
Besides the usefulness of shells, people have also admired their elegant shapes, dazzling patterns and gleaming iridescence. It’s no great surprise that cultures worldwide have used shells to decorate people and places. What is astonishing, though, is how universally shells have come to hold great meaning. Far from being just pretty things to look at, shells have been embraced as powerful emblems of sex and power, of birth and of death.
For millennia, people in distant corners of the globe have placed whole shells in graves alongside the bodies of their loved ones. Even a long way inland, thousands of miles from the sea, piles of shells lie in ancient burial sites. The dead are interred, sometimes clutching shells in their hands or with cowries placed over their eyes (perhaps because the shells themselves look like eyes). The Scythians, a group of ancient Iranian nomads, roamed the central Asian steppes on horseback, yet made burial mounds decorated with cowrie shells. The Seneca people of New York State believed shells placed in the grave could purify decaying flesh and allow the soul entry to the spirit world. They also made masks with shells for eyes, believing that to look through a shell is to gaze back to the beginning of time. The Winnebago tribe of Nebraska considered shells to be the stars of the sea and the apparitions of dead children, women who died in childbirth and men who died in battle; shells were placed inside sacred caves to honour these dead.
One reason, it’s thought, that shells have turned up in so many graves is their colour; in many cultures white represents purity and peace, and, accordingly, it is the colour of birth or death. There is also the notion that shells come from an unseen, watery underworld. Empty shells that wash up on beaches are messengers from the deep. Beachcombers pick them up from the strand line, while pondering the hidden realm they came from, or divers bravely visit this dangerous place themselves and return bearing exotic objects.
Around the world, shells are ancient symbols of sexuality, fertility and renewal, perhaps in part because of their shape. So many people have picked up a cowrie shell, turned it over and seen a lengthwise, dark opening like a corrugated smile that reminded them of female genitalia. Even the cowrie’s rounded bump is reminiscent of a pregnant belly. Shells are associated with the life-giving properties of water, and they’ve come to represent the protective womb, a place of conception and the generation of life.
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.
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’.
Shells work well as a form of money for various reasons: they are difficult to fake convincingly; many of them (cowries in particular) are of a consistent size and weight; they are tough and durable; and they feel nice in your hand and are easy to handle. The deep symbolism of shells, and their association with power and status, may also have encouraged their use for important transactions such as marriage dowries.
The trade in shells between the Indian Ocean and West Africa continued on a small scale for several centuries. It wasn’t until European traders came on the scene that a radical shift took place and a whole new commodity emerged that could be purchased with shells, one that would change the course of human history.
Portuguese merchants were the first to figure out the connection between seashells from the Maldives and the markets of West Africa. For a while, they had the trade by sea to themselves but the British and the Dutch soon joined them, and eventually took over. Between 1600 and 1850, the East India Companies of these two great trading powers dominated global shell commerce.
Fleets of ships, known as East Indiamen, sailed first to India, Indonesia and China, where they loaded up with fine goods that were in great demand back in Europe: silks, spices and tea. Before departing again for home, the crews would stop at Indian and Sri Lankan ports to fill their holds with millions of Maldivian cowries. At this point of the trade, the shells were cheap and their main purpose was to act as ballast to keep the ships stable in rough seas throughout their voyages across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the west coast of Africa and back to Europe.
The shells were unloaded into auction houses in Amsterdam and London, where another circle of traders were waiting. They snapped up the shells, repacked them into a second fleet of ships and sailed them back down south.
Some two years after they had been plucked from the Indian Ocean, millions of cowries ended their longest ever journey. In the final stage of a 15,000-mile trip, the shells were lowered over the side of European ships and into small canoes that paddled up the shallow, mangrove-fringed creeks of West Africa. The shells were to be exchanged, not for goods to ship back to Europe, but for human slaves.
European slave traders had discovered that shells were the ideal currency to take to Africa and trade with kings and merchants (ammunition, weapons and other factory-made goods were also exchanged for human lives). Traders turned a handsome profit, importing dirt-cheap shells and exchanging them for slaves.
Prices per human head rose over the years. In the 1680s, a slave cost around 10,000 shells; by the 1770s the price tag hanging around the neck of an adult male slave was more than 150,000 cowries. Once the shells had changed hands, the slaves were shipped across the Atlantic, many of them to work in Caribbean plantations. And so it was that cups of English tea, made from tea leaves packed among Maldivian cowries, were sweetened with sugar grown by the men and women whose lives had been bought with the very same shells.
At the peak of the slave trade, British fleets were importing an average of 40 million cowries into West Africa every year. Throughout the eighteenth century, as Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson discuss in detail in their book The Shell Money of the Slave Trade, 10 billion shells were shipped across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.
From the point of view of the molluscs that made all those shells, this is a hugely impressive feat. Enduring such intense exploitation without dwindling is testament to their reproductive prowess and it comes as rather a surprise given that female cowries must spend much of their time brooding eggs, instead of casting their young straight into the big blue, as many of their relatives do. In general, the longer an animal spends tending its offspring, and the fewer young it produces in one go, the more vulnerable the population is to overexploitation by humans.
When the trade in Maldivian cowries collapsed, it was not because supplies of shells had run out. In 1807, the British government passed an Act of Parliament making the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire, and although trafficking persisted for a time among some colonies, the trade in shell money to West Africa drew quickly to a halt. Humans would never again be swapped for shells on the international market, although for a time slaves were still sold within Africa for shells. But this wasn’t the end of the story for the European trade in shell money. A decade later, another new commodity emerged in West Africa, which once again was shipped to Europe in return for shells. Europeans turned their attention from exploiting fellow human beings to exploiting the natural world, and they did so on an even more staggering scale.
It’s perhaps strange to think that the global trade in palm oil that is currently responsible for the bulldozing of natural habitats across the tropics has its origins in the nineteenth century. Palm oil lubricated the gears and greased the wheels of the industrial revolution that set the modern world in motion. Factories and homes were lit with palm oil lamps, and workers used palm oil soap to wash off the factory grime.
Back then, most of the world’s palm oil was grown in West African plantations, and British traders continued to use Maldivian cowries to buy it. Rather than fading away, the shell trade ramped up a gear, more than doubling previous levels. By 1850, more than 100 million shells were being traded each year. But there was one more crisis ahead for the European shell trade, one from which it would never recover.
In 1845 a German trader, Adolph Jacob Hertz, sailed west across the Indian Ocean after unsuccessfully trying to buy cowries directly from the King of the Maldives. The Maldivian monarchs had always been hostile towards any European merchants who showed up at their islands and Hertz was no exception. On his way back home, he called in to Zanzibar, an island off Africa’s east coast, where he discovered an all-too-obvious truth: cowries live all over the place.
On Zanzibar’s fine white beaches, Hertz found the Gold Ringer Cowrie. This species is similar to the Money Cowrie, although slightly larger and with a more prominent golden circle on its back. Many traders had known of gold ringers and considered using them, but so far this alternative hadn’t made a dent in the Maldivian cowrie trade, largely because African merchants refused to accept them. However, the time was right for Hertz, and his discovery went on to revolutionise the cowrie trade. He set sail from Zanzibar, taking with him a few gold ringers and a good idea of where to find plenty more.
Before long, a trickle of gold ringers began to enter markets in West Africa. Exactly why merchants finally agreed to take these alternatives remains unclear. It could have been the impact of the booming palm oil industry that was pushing up prices of Money Cowries so that traders welcomed a cheaper option. These new shells went into circulation alongside the traditional Money Cowries, and the trade from East Africa soared.
This time around it was private dealers who dominated the shell trade, rather than national companies. German and French fleets transported gold ringers directly from East to West Africa and in less than 20 years imported 16 billion cowries, almost as many as the British and Dutch had throughout the previous century.
Gold ringers flooded into West Africa with a swift and inevitable consequence. Hyperinflation gripped the trade, and the value of shell money plummeted. Soon a handful of cowries was all but worthless. The Maldivian harvest of Money Cowries had already slumped and, 600 years after the shell trade began, it finally came to an end.
By the opening decade of the twentieth century, imported cowries had changed hands as currency for the final time. In total, more than 30 billion Maldivian cowrie shells ended up half a world away from where they were hatched and lived. The nature of shell money means they could not be withdrawn from circulation or replaced. Some shells were crushed for limestone and many were built into walls and floors, as reminders of former wealth. And some people buried hoards of cowries, hoping their riches would once again be worth something. A day that would never come.
As well as all the cowries imported into West Africa as tainted symbols of oppression, the region has plenty of shells of its own. Most of them aren’t used for money, though, but for food.