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Geographical range of four common West African cowrie species: Zonaria sanguinolenta, Luria lurida, Trona stercoraria and Z. zonaria.
Source publication
Despite the perceived importance of cowrie shells as indicators of long-distance connections in the West African past, their distribution and consumption patterns in archaeological contexts remain surprisingly underexplored, a gap that is only partly explicable by the sparse distribution of archaeological sites within the sub-continent. General wri...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... of these reportedly occur commonly in environments theoretically readily accessible to human collectors, that is to say inter-tidal or shallow water, but one of these -Zonaria picta -is restricted to the Cape Verde Islands. This leaves four key contenders, the distributions of which are shown in Figure 3 and all of which we have identified in West African archaeological assemblages. ...
Context 2
... allowed us to identify significant patterns ( Figure 6). The Maldivian ecological and archaeological assemblages of both M. annulus and M. moneta tend to include a higher proportion of small and medium shells ( Figure 6, bars 1-2 and 5-6), whereas the East African archaeological and ecological assemblages of both species feature a higher proportion of medium and large shells ( Figure 6, bars 3-4 and 7-8). Importantly, the differences in the sizes of cowries of Maldivian and East African origin remain apparent even when M. annulus and M. moneta are combined ( Figure 6, bars 9-12). ...
Context 3
... Castle presented a contrasting case: here the assemblage was dominated by Trona stercoraria (N = 23 of 28 locally occurring species). Reflecting the limited geographical range of the species (see Figure 3), Zonaria sanguinolenta was only found in assemblages from Gorée Island, Senegal. ...
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Citations
... Distilled Dutch liquor became the most preferred liquor for indigenous religious rituals (Akyeampong, 2002;Van den Bersselaar, 2007). Also, the cowrie shell species recovered from the shrine, Monetaria moneta (Fig. 8a), is known to have been imported by European traders from the Maldives Islands, the Indian Ocean world, and the East African coast and circulated widely as currency and jewelry in West Africa during the Atlantic slave trade (Edmunds, 1978;Haour & Christie, 2019;Hogendorn & Johnson, 2003;Johnson, 1970). The recovery of two Ghanaian coins dating to the 2000s suggests that some individuals continued to offer money to the shrine long after it was abandoned in the mid-twentieth century. ...
Peki is an Ewe-speaking community in present-day southeastern Ghana. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this community became a hub for the trade in enslaved people. To take charge of the Atlantic economy, the Peki invited the North
German Missionary Society to their community in 1847, intending to use them to gain direct access to European merchants on the coast. They also established a franchise of the influential Dente deity of Krachi at Dzake, one of eight Peki settlements. This paper explores the archaeology of the Dente shrine and its role in the historical memory of the Peki community’s entanglements in the Atlantic trade. We employ archaeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence to show how the Peki elites leveraged African indigenous spiritualism to control the post-abolition trade in people. We highlight how contemporary memories of the Atlantic trade in Peki have been constructed through selective processes of remembering and silencing in the face of burgeoning roots and heritage tourism in Ghana. The paper underscores the contradictory roles of an African indigenous religious institution in the complex and syncretic responses to the Atlantic trade in people. It helps us to understand the distinctive power-building strategies that a local community of the West African hinterland adapted to survive in the shadows of expansionist states during
the Atlantic trade.
... Sixteen cowrie (Cypraeidae) fragments were recovered, representing 15 shells (Supplementary material, Table S3). These were assessed by visual and microscopic analysis to identify species, size, condition, and any evidence of anthropogenic modifications as part of a wider analysis of cowries from West African sites (see Haour and Christie (2019), where the Ohlinhou e assemblage is discussed as "Avloh" after the nearest village). ...
The archaeology of the immediate coastline of West Africa remains surprisingly little understood, and what research has been undertaken has often focused on questions relating to sea-based interactions and the precolonial polities lying slightly inland. This paper reports the results of excavations on Ohlinhoué, a small lagoonal island in the western Republic of Bénin. A locally manufactured ceramic assemblage was recovered, together with a small suite of artifacts, including glass, metal, shell, and smoking pipes. These archaeological data provide insights into a small-scale, likely fishing and salt-producing community in this area between sea and river. As such, they provide an alternative to historical readings relating to well-known precolonial polities and trade entrepôts that feed popular historical narratives.
... As people have counted and exchanged goods since prehistoric times, it is reasonable to accept that food fraud is about as old as humanity. With the rise of monetization, as early as 400-200 B.C. in the Roman Empire [2,3] or in the 5th century with cowries spread from India across the African continent [4], the motivation for profit likely became more persistent and fraudulent practices underwent increasing sophistication. The German chemist Fredrick Accum seems to be one of the very first to address the diversity of fraudulent practices in food [5]. ...
With the rising trend of consumers being offered by start-up companies portable devices and applications for checking quality of purchased products, it appears of paramount importance to assess the reliability of miniaturized sensors embedded in such devices. Here, eight sensors were assessed for food fraud applications in skimmed milk powder. The performance was evaluated with dry- and wet-blended powders mimicking adulterated materials by addition of either ammonium sulfate, semicarbazide, or cornstarch in the range 0.5–10% of profit. The quality of the spectra was assessed for an adequate identification of the outliers prior to a deep assessment of performance for both non-targeted (soft independent modelling of class analogy, SIMCA) and targeted analyses (partial least square regression with orthogonal signal correction, OPLS). Here, we show that the sensors have generally difficulties in detecting adulterants at ca. 5% supplementation, and often fail in achieving adequate specificity and detection capability. This is a concern as they may mislead future users, particularly consumers, if they are intended to be developed for handheld devices available publicly in smartphone-based applications.
... Evidence of the intense harvesting and trade of M. moneta cowries from the Maldives for circulation in Indian Ocean trade networks was documented by Al-Mas'udi in the tenth century CE and Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century CE (Hiskett, 1966;Johnson, 1970). Recent research by Haour and Christie (2019) has significantly opened up our understanding of the distribution of cowries in West Africa. Their analyses of archaeological cowries from the region confirmed that the M. moneta from the Maldives Islands reached West Africa via trans-Saharan trade routes by the terminal first millennium CE. ...
Archaeological explorations of the meaning of ‘trade objects’, such as glass beads and cowrie shells, remain hampered by theoretical and methodological limitations in both their analyses and interpretations. In this paper, we develop a methodology for critically engaging in multi-scalar questions of the circulation, exchange, and value of cowrie shells in African archaeological contexts. Species, size, dorsal modifications, and depositional contexts were compared across five sites from South Africa dating between 750 and 1350 CE. These results were positioned within a review of cowries from archaeological sites in the region and compared to the documented distribution of cowries from wider African archaeological contexts. Monetaria annulus were the prevalent cowrie species in southern African archaeological contexts over the last 2000 years, with a notable absence of Monetaria moneta, prevalent at contemporaneous sites in West Africa, as well as a variety of endemic southern African species. Breakage patterns on the dorsal surface correspond to different modification techniques, such as chipping and grinding. Combined analyses of modification, use-wear, and depositional patterns show variation, revealing a diversity in the biographies of individual cowries. While a comparison of the distribution of cowries across the continent confirms the circulation of cowries through known trade routes, such as the trans-Saharan trade network and the European mercantile network, they also reveal new pathways for exchange that highlight the need for further exploration of intra African networks. Finally, the breadth of the results of this study demonstrates the value of a focus on a specific artefact to address a wide range of themes, from exchange to the archaeology of everyday life.
... Societies along the Niger were already used to buying and selling things regularly by the mid-first millennium AD, probably with a socioeconomic system that was sufficiently monetarized to cope with the large scale and high frequency of transactions. The earliest known cowrie shells from the region also date from the midfirst millennium and were clearly used as currency by the beginning of the second millennium (Haour & Christie, 2019). The regular trade in basic items and the concurrent development of specialist traders and long-distance routes will have opened up the possibility for any item to be traded in any volume along the same routes. ...
Kola nut (Cola cf. nitida) and Safou fruit (Dacryodes edulis) remains have been discovered in eleventh- to fourteenth-century archaeological contexts at Togu Missiri near Ségou in Mali. These remains are evidence of early trade in perishable foodstuffs from the West African forest zone into the Middle Niger region. On the basis of these finds, this paper argues that long-distance trade links were well established by the end of the first millennium AD. It thereby supports the hypothesis that dates the inception of trade between the West African forest zone and the savanna regions to the first millennium AD. The circumstances of the find are discussed, as are the implications for our understanding of the wider exchange network based on the Niger River system in the late first and early second millennium CE.
... In addition to the two species directly mentioned by York (1972) (L. lurida and Z. zonaria), we also include Trona stercoraria (Linnaeus, 1758) and Zonaria sanguinolenta (Gmelin, 1791) as these species have also been recovered archaeologically (Haour and Christie 2019). It should be noted that the nomenclature of L. lurida, Z. zonaria, and Z. sanguinolenta has recently changed. ...
... Details of the distribution, habitat, and abundance of these species are presented in Table 1. Of the four species native to Africa, Z. sanguinolenta has the most restricted geographical range-limited to the waters around Senegambia-a factor that appears to have influenced its archaeological distribution (Haour and Christie 2019). Although three other species-Schilderia achatidea (Gray in GB Sowerby I, 1837), Zonaria pyrum (Gmelin, 1791), and Zonara picta (Gray, 1824)-also occur along the West African coast (MolluscaBase 2019), they are either restricted geographically (Zonaria picta) or prefer deeper water habitats that are not easily accessible to human collectors (Schilderia achatidea, Zonaria pyrum). ...
... Identification of beach-washed shells has significant implications for our understanding of cowrie use and value in West Africa. Evidence for beach-washing is common on the West African species which we have studied, suggesting that these were not collected live (Haour and Christie 2019). While it is true that L. lurida and Z. zonaria bear a resemblance to M. annulus, they are unlikely to have been confused by users. ...
Two species of the cowrie shell, Monetaria moneta (Linnaeus, 1758) and Monetaria annulus (Linnaeus, 1758), repeatedly occur in archaeological contexts across West Africa. Despite their archaeological and ethnographic importance, these shells remain poorly and inconsistently reported in the archaeological literature. The absence of standardized data on species composition, size, and condition of cowrie assemblages, and whether and how the shells were modified, make it difficult to examine their significance in a regional and chronological framework. To address this problem, we propose a set of standardized criteria and coding system for recording cowrie assemblages—in particular, species, size, condition, and state of modification. We aim to enable nonshell specialists within the wider archaeological community to securely identify intact or modified specimens of M. annulus and M. moneta, showing how these can be distinguished from four cowrie species native to West Africa—Luria lurida (Linnaeus, 1758), Zonaria zonaria (Gmelin, 1791), Zonaria sanguinolenta (Gmelin, 1791), and Trona stercoraria (Linnaeus, 1758). We demonstrate how accurate species identification and the assessment of proportions of different sizes of shells within suitably large assemblages can provide insight into their provenance. This information can enhance our appreciation of the exchange networks within which these shells moved. We also identify five different strategies documented in the archaeological record that were used to modify cowries, detailing how these can be differentiated and classified. The aim here is to suggest a recording strategy that will enable comparisons of the use and value of cowries in West Africa and elsewhere.
Cat Island, South Carolina, was once the location of slave trade activities, including capture of Native Americans for export and the rise of plantations in the Lowcountry for indigo and rice production, from the sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. This Element examines the Hume Plantation Slave Street Project led by the author, and archaeological evidence for hoodoo magic and ritual practices involving “white magic” spells used for protection and treatments for illness and injury, and, alternately, for 'black magic,' in spells used to exact harm or to kill. This Element is intended as a contribution to the collective knowledge about hoodoo magic practices in the Lowcountry, centered on the Hume Plantation grounds during this period of American history. It is an attempt to examine how attitudes and practices may have changed over time and concludes with a look at select contemporary hoodoo activities conducted in local cemeteries.
Monetaria annulus (Gastropoda: Cypraeidae) or also known as the gold-ringed cowry is distributed throughout Indo-Pacific waters and utilized by local people for centuries as money, jewelry, and food. The research on Monetaria annulus aims to obtain the genetic characteristics of the species, namely the similarity value on the BOLDsystems data, nucleotide base composition, genetic distance, and phylogenetic analysis based on the COI gene sequence. The samples from Nunuhu Beach underwent extraction, amplification, electrophoresis, and sequencing. Genetic analysis was carried out using bioinformatics software, namely MEGA 7.0, BOLDsystems, Jupyter Notebook, Microsoft Excel, with data comparison extracted from Genbank. The results of genetic characterization from three fresh samples, five ingroups and two outgroups resulted sequence with a length of 606 bp and similarity value of 99.5-99.83%. The nucleotide base composition shows that the GC combination is lower than AT with 42.02% and 57.98% respectively. The average genetic distance of Monetaria annulus from Nunuhu Beach with the ingroup is 2.69%. It shows that the samples from Nunuhu Beach were identified as one species with the Monetaria annulus ingroup. From the phylogenetic tree, a large cluster were identified, dividing Monetaria annulus from Nunuhu Beach with its ingroups originating from China and Papua. The result of this research is beneficial as the basis for biogeography research on Monetaria annulus, especially in the Wallacea region.
Marine resources provide a baseline for understanding the sociohistorical trajectories of Andean societies using Pacific coastal environments. This study examines seashell distributions in northern Chile’s semiarid region, revealing inland circulation patterns established over twelve thousand years. This included an extensive review of published information and new data assessed through GIS and least-cost paths. Sorting 950 specimens from 32 sites into 32 taxa, we identified consistent mobility patterns across time periods. In addition to the primary west-east trajectory from the sea to the interior, a secondary north-south inland vector was in use since the early Holocene. This study also revealed intensified shell transport during the middle Holocene, and a shift toward down-the-line exchange with reduced shell frequency at interior sites by the late Holocene, particularly in the Limarí Valley. Additionally, shell artifacts - ornaments and tools - were found more consistently in interior contexts. Together, these findings shed light on long-term human adaptation strategies in semiarid mountainous environments.
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