Cowrie shell found at Monticello

Monticello's archaeological collection contains hundreds of thousands of artifacts that systematically document the changing lifeways of Monticello's residents. Among the most intriguing objects in the collection is a money cowrie shell found in excavations along Mulberry Row, the "Main Street" of houses and craft shops where many enslaved people lived and labored on the mountaintop. The shell attests to the persistence of African cultural traditions at Monticello in the late 18th century.

Money cowries (Cypraea moneta) are small snail-like creatures that live in the tropical waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Their beautiful shells have been featured in ritual practices and incorporated into clothing and jewelry for thousands of years in African and South Asian cultures. Symbolically they were often associated with notions of womanhood, fertility, birth, and wealth. For centuries before European expansion in the 1500s, cowries were also used as a form of currency in some areas — hence the name "money cowrie." With the advent of the slave trade to the New World, cowries were among the items that Europeans exchanged with coastal West African groups for slaves. By the early 18th century, hundreds of thousands of pounds of cowrie shells were being exported from South Asia to Europe, often as "packing peanuts" in the China trade, and then re-exported from Europe to Africa. Evidence for their use in the slave trade comes from Yorktown, an important 18th-century Virginia port, where archaeologists have found hundreds of cowries in a trash dump dating to about 1760. The dump was on the property of Phillip Lightfoot II, a merchant who was heavily involved in slave importation.

Unlike the many unmodified cowries in the Yorktown dump, the single Monticello cowrie appears to have been valued for reasons other than its potential monetary worth. The shell was found during the excavation of a subfloor pit or storage cellar beneath a building that Jefferson called "the Negro Quarter." The Negro Quarter was a dwelling for the enslaved occupied from the early 1770s to the mid-1790s. A hole made in the back of the shell and two grooves, caused by the abrasions of a thread that passed through it, indicate that the shell was worn as jewelry or attached to clothing. It was probably transported to Virginia as adornment on clothing of a newly-enslaved African.

While we cannot be sure of the precise significance the cowrie shell had for the person who wore it at Monticello during the late 18th century, today it provides tangible evidence that enslaved people carried some part of their African lives and identity with them across the Atlantic and onto the plantations of southeastern America.

- Monticello Archaeology Department, Monticello Research Report, August 2003

Further Sources

• Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. Monticello Explorer. "Negro Quarter." 
• Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. Plantation Database.