I wasn’t expecting us to have an artifact of the day so early in the excavation, especially since most of the planned excavation work today was digging through already excavated material. While the fill used to level and cap the site after our 2018 excavations has a lot of modern artifacts mixed in like plastic bags, cutlery, straws and the like which I suppose will be future artifacts to someone, they are not yet of archaeological concern!
The crew re-locating the northeast corner of Structure 1 had part of their unit fall in previously unexcavated soil, and as they were cleaning it back, out popped a shell. And not the typical land snail shells we see, or maybe perhaps a freshwater mussel shell or even an oyster shell, but part of a marine shell!
I chose this as artifact of the day because it reminded me of the other shell we found in 2017 on this site. Finding two marine shells is pretty suggestive of someone living here being into Conchology, which was an extremely popular Victorian pastime.
While the collecting and study of shells has been popular for hundreds of years, the term Conchology was coined by the British naturalist Emanuel Mendes da Costa, who published Elements of Conchology in 1776.
Unlike our previous shell find, this one is a bivalve. My initial brief foray into the literature suggests it is a member of the Veneridae family, but maybe after cleaning it up and looking for diagnostic features we will be able to narrow it down to a particular species. We will never know if this was brought back as a momento by a family member or friend who travelled the oceans, or was special ordered from a shell merchant to add to a cabinet of curiosities, but it gives us another little peek into the life of one of the past inhabitants of this house.
One thought on “Artifact of the Day – May 2nd 2024 – Marine Bivalve Shell”
I am amazed that there is a study on Concho’s and their link to Victorian culture. Even more so is their inability to succumb to disease or decay like other archaeological materials at aboriginal or early settlement units. I believe Conchology like early archaeology was a pastime for the equestrian class such as the grand tour where European youths traveled to Greece or Rome collecting antiquities to display at their homes, similar to Victorian women collecting and making shifting marine shells showing their status.
-Reading The Cabinet of Curiosity made me wonder if was this the identity of women modesty Peterborough wanted among their women to show their loyalty to the crown or were more British than Canadian.
Bradley Navaranjan