Pearl: Aboriginal Use of Pearls & Pearl Discovery in Mound Graves Page 596



	ABORIGINAL USE OF PEARLS	493

	several of the mounds at Moundville, Alabama. He also found a sheet-copper pendant, elongated oval in outline, with an excised repoussé decoration, embracing a swastika within a circle, and a triangle. This pendant, which lay near the skull of burial No. 132, bears a perforated pearl nearly seven millimeters in diameter and weighing about nine grains ; it is fastened to the pendant by a piece of vegetable fiber that passes through the pearl. With another burial (No. 162), the skeleton of an adult, was an elliptical gorget of sheet-copper decorated with a pearl.¹ In a personal communication Mr. Moore states that all the pearls found by him in the mounds were very much disintegrated by the lapse of time ; he also writes that he has never found any shells immediately with the pearls, although masses of Unio shells were often met with in the mounds. He believes the shell-fish had been used for food. Unio shell-heaps exist likewise on the shores of the inland lakes of Florida, and in middle Georgia and Alabama ; and several of them on the banks of the Savannah River, above Augusta, are fully described by Colonel Charles C. Jones.² He says : "In these relic-beds no two parts of the same shell are, as a general rule, found in juxtaposition. The hinge is broken, and the valves of the shell, after having been artificially torn asunder, seem to have been carelessly cast aside and allowed to accumulate." Thus, in addition to the historical evidence, physical proof is abundant of the pearl fisheries of the aboriginal tribes of the South. In order to ascertain the precise varieties of shells from which the southern Indians obtained their pearls, Colonel Jones invited an expression of opinion from a number of scientists whose studies rendered them familiar with the conchology of the United States. Their responses throw considerable light upon this inquiry, though with some curious variation. Prof. William S. Jones, of the University of Georgia, says that he has seen small pearls in many of the Unios found in that State. Prof. Jeffries Wyman, on the other hand, after a careful and extensive series of excavations in the shell-heaps of Florida, failed to find a single pearl. "It is hardly probable," he remarks, "that the Spaniards could have been mistaken as to the fact of the ornaments of the Indians being pearls, but in view of their frequent exaggerations, I am almost compelled to the belief that there was some mistake; and possibly they may not have distinguished between the pearls and the shell ¹ "Moundville Revisited," Reprint from ^z "Antiquities of the Southern Indians," the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sei- New York, 1873, p. 483; also, "Monumental ences of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, 1907, Remains of Georgia," Savannah, 1861, p. 14. Vol. XIII, pp. 398-403.