The Spiritual Economy of Shell in Native North America: Still Circulating

Summary

Shell material, particularly marine shell, has long been recognized in the archaeology of pre-colonial America as a “prestige” good of complex meaning. Particularly in the Mississippian world, shell traveled great distances and appeared in richly meaningful contexts of use. Even in areas abundant in shellfish, however, it played a complex role: food, adornment, pottery temper, landscape alteration. After colonization shell use did not disappear, and oral traditions indicate some of the ways in which its spiritual significance demanded continued circulation. Yet the spiritual economy and value of shell in the more recent past has not been widely explored as a continued (even if altered) circulation. In this paper I explore some of the material properties of shell, its contexts of use in deep and recent history, and its movement among and between people. I propose a sense of “spiritual economy” which implies the mutual and ongoing influence of materiality, spirituality, and sociality. The movement of shell parallels a circulation of interpretation and memory between past and present, when we consider the conditions of possibility for interpreting the past and present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Mediating Spirit Worlds in Native North America

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