Scaphopod Connections
Over the past few days, I have finished scanning my images of Native American scaphopod jewelry and decorated clothing, all of which were photographed in 1987 in the Burke Museum on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. Some of the Native American dentalium jewelry/clothing images that I have are REALLY impressive, not only for the wealth they contained, but also for the tremendous skill of the remarkable women who made them. Somehow, I wish I could find something like the shawl in the image below in an old trunk in my garage, and take it to the appraisers on The Antiques Roadshow. It would get the attention it really deserved. Ah… well. All I am likely to find in old trunks in my garage is old trash covered in old dust.
A shawl, made by a seamstress and master craftswomen from one of the Plains Tribes, in the mid-to-late 19th century.
This is a shoulder wrap or some sort of vestment, I neglected to photograph both sides in 1987, when I took the image. I would estimate that there may be close to a 1000 Antalis pretiosum shells in this item.
Not surprisingly considering their shapes and durability, scaphopod shells were widely used in ornamentation elsewhere and elsewhen throughout history. The following image was taken by Don Hitchcock in from the Dolní Věstonice Museum in the Czech Republic, which has some wonderful artifacts recoverd from an ice age mammoth hunter’s site.
A reconstructed necklace made from fossilized Dentalium badense shell fragment artifacts recovered at the Dolní Věstonice site in the Czech Republic. The artifacts at this site have been dated with Carbon-14 to about 29,000 years ago. Photo: Don Hitchcock donsmaps.com“
In one of the more bizarre coincidences I have had recently, I found the above image and information with the assistance of Mr. Google and associates. I hadn’t seen it prior to findinig on the web, but I knew that there should be ancient European, Asian or African dentalium work illustrated somewhere on the web, and charged ahead to find something I might use. I found this image, and it fit the bill of what I wanted, and I went to track down some information about it, including where the Dolní Věstonice site (which, from reading the information at the site, I realized I must have read about it sometime ago, I recollected nothing at all about it ) is located.
This Google Earth image shows where the Dolní Věstonice site is located. The other site indicated, the Frydek-Mistek region, is where my ancestors, at least back to before the mid-1700’s, lived. !!! My great-great-grandfather was one of four brothers that migrated together from this area to the US (Texas) just after the Civil War.
Nobody knows, of course, what happened to the descendents of the people who made and used the scaphopod shell necklace, or even if they left descendents at all. But I think it could be possible -stretching possibilities very thinly- if those descendents remained in that area, that maybe some of the genes of the person who made the scaphopod necklace may have decended to be in the genome – some 28,000 years later – that directed the growth of my scaphopod-studying body.
In closing this entry, I must thank Don Hitchcock for his gracious permission to use his fine image of the scaphopod necklace. Don has an immense array of web information about the paleolithic period throughout the world, and I have linked to his site in my blogroll. It is well worth a visit.
Until later,
Cheers,
