East Meets West: Indigenous Use of Indo-Pacific Cowries on the Great Plains

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Indo-Pacific cowrie shells entered North America in the late 17th and early 18th centuries as part of colonial expansion reliant on a global network of trade that commoditized both people and animals. Over the course of the 19th century, Indigenous people of the mid-west and Great Plains incorporated these shells into diverse objects worn or carried on the body, including necklaces, earrings, clothing, dolls, weaponry, and medicine bundles. In this paper, I examine curated objects, archaeological sites, and images from archival collections relating primarily to the Cheyenne, Arikara, Sioux and Mandan to examine how these groups integrated cowries into longstanding practices while simultaneously responding to processes of contemporary change.   

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 915