48 



MoLLUSCA IN THE MaYA LoWLANDS 



Use of Shells as Votive Offerings 



It is plain from Table 2 that the vast preponder- 

 ance of shell from Dzibilchaltun is completely un- 

 worked. Only 333 shells or identifiable fragments 

 out of a total of 2,376 showed any sign of working, 

 about 14 per cent. The larger part of these were tiny 

 Marginellas worked as beads and small nacreous 

 fragments possibly used in mosaic. 



Some of the shells were doubtless brought for the 

 table, but this would still not account for the bulk 

 of material found. Other shell was probably brought 

 in for slight alteration and use as ornaments, or for 

 simple raw material in jewelry; but the number of 

 unworked specimens cannot be accounted for as 

 simply an artisan's backlog. 



The Maya seem to have endowed the marine 

 mollusc with magic or symbolic properties which 

 led to a number of ritual (or possibly only super- 

 stitious) usages. Unfortunately, I know of no sur- 

 vival of such beliefs or practices into historic times. 

 "Ethnomalacology" in this area is an empty word. 

 This is in startling contrast to the Maya's continu- 

 ing knowledge of their botanical environment. My 

 Merida housekeeper's Maya vocabulary for plant 

 species is awesome in size and in specific definition, 

 as is her knowledge of their life history and medici- 

 nal qualities. TiiTie after time, as we collect plants, 

 she gives most specific Maya names and lists of 

 therapeutic properties which look as if they were 

 borrowed verbatim from the early works of George 

 Gaumer or from Ralph Roys's Ethnobotany of the 

 Maya (1931). But despite the 73 species at inland 

 Dzibilchaltun, our informant knows only one word 

 describing shells — the Spanish word concha. Efforts 

 to obtain Maya names for marine shells, even among 

 the coastal population, were fruitless. The generic 

 term hub occurs in early dictionaries with the mean- 

 ing of 'shell' or 'shell trumpet' (e.g., Perez, 1866—77, 

 p. 143) and is still occasionally used in the more 

 general sense today. Roys (1931, p. 328) cites 

 the name hoc for oyster in the San Francisco Dic- 

 tionary.^ Any cult of interest has certainly long since 

 vanished. 



We shall see in many ways that cults of interest 

 did exist, and some of these can be traced to the very 

 distant past. Shells were deeply involved in Maya 

 ideas of cosmogeny. The Old God of the ancients 

 (Schellhas' and Anders' God N, referred to by 

 Thompson as "The Mam") is frequently depicted 

 as carrying a large conch on his back, and occasion- 

 ally as emerging from one. The godhead and the 

 molluscan symbol are associated with the under- 

 world, with death, and (according to Forstemann) 

 the five unlucky days at Uayeb at the end of the year. 

 By extension, the shell became associated with water, 

 with the moon goddess Ixchel (who was the goddess 

 of fertility and childbirth and also a water deity), 

 and with childbirth. In hieroglyphic writing, the 

 shell was symbolic of completion, being used as the 

 basic glyph for zero and a component of various 

 glyphs describing completion, such as period-ending 

 signs. Thompson (1950, pp. 133—34), examines this 

 symbolism in some detail and illustrates (fig. 21) 

 a number of graphic representations. More com- 

 parative material is assembled by Schellhas (1904), 

 Spinden (1913, pp. 83-84, figs. 108-11), Tozzer 

 (i957> P- i°7. figs. 166-83) and Anders (1963, 

 numerous references and illustrations). 



Most of the portrayals of the Old God with the 

 conch are in the codices, some of which probably 

 date to not long before the conquest. But the con- ■ 

 cept is a much earlier one. Several columns in Modi- 

 fied Florescent structures at Chichen Itza portray 

 an old man emerging from a large conch shell 

 (Spinden, 1913, fig. no; Tozzer, 1957, fig. 175). 

 Two of the gold disks recovered from the Sacred 

 Well at Chichen Itza portray this motif (cf. Lothrop, 

 1952, pp. 61—62, fig. 43). In one the emerging 

 figure is an old man who might well have been 

 God N. In the other, however, the figure is clearly 

 that of the deity with the long, decorated nose whom 

 Schellhas called God K, of whom we shall see more 

 later. Lothrop believed these gold disks belong to 

 the very beginnings of the "Toltec" period (Modi- 

 fied Florescent) at Chichen Itza, as the central panels 

 contain design forms which are largely of Mexican 

 plateau inspiration, and the peripheries still con- 



^ Prof. Alfredo Barrera Vasquez, whose knowledge of Maya 

 faunal and floral terminology is unparalleled, knows of only 

 one specific name; Pleuroploca gigantea, the largest of our 

 marine molluscs, is called chacpel. "Chac" means red in Maya; 

 "pel" is the vernacular {"termino indecenle," Perez, 1866—77, 

 p. 275) for the female genitalia. The brilliant red Pleuroploca 



is thus somewhat graphically separated from the white animal 

 of Stromhus and Biisycon, or the black Twbinella, the other 

 large conchs. Both Pleuroploca and Tttrbinella, however, are 

 known to most modern coastal fishermen by the Spanish name 

 ahulon. Some popular names for freshwater and land molluscs 

 will be mentioned below. 



