Abalone of East Asia and Minoan Seashells: unexpected resonances

By Dimitra Mylona.

Abalone is a name for the many members of a large family of marine molluscs, the Haliotidae. Haliotidae translates into “the ears of the sea,” a term alluding to their shape.  They are gastropods, in other words they have one muscular foot and a spiral shell, although in this case the spires are flattened and not well formed. They are herbivorous creatures which live attached on rocks, much like limpets. In tidal regions, they can be gathered by hand when the water recedes.  From deeper waters they can be collected by divers or from a boat with abalone poles.

Abalone are much appreciated for their taste all over the world, from Europe to South Africa and Asia and from New Zealand to the Americas. Their flattish shell is covered on the inside with bright iridescent mother-of-pearl, a feature that makes the shells highly desirable. They have been historically used in tool making (e.g. fish hooks), jewellery and inlays.

Abalone in Japan

Abalone was a prominent element of the culinary, economic and spiritual life of the people in coastal southern Japan. Lots of web sites provide information on this, including this one of the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research.

During the Edo period (1603-1868) abalone found themselves at the heart of state economics and social unrest. Dried abalone, along with roast dried sea cucumber and shark fins, were at the time prized marine exports from Japan. China was a major importer. So great was the Chinese demand for abalone, that it resulted in a domestic shortage and serious political problems in Japan. 

In 1774 the shogunate (the feudal military government of Japan) set up special offices in abalone-rich regions in order to encourage increased production and export of dried abalone (also sea cucumbers and shark fins). The aim was to reduce the export of copper that was used to balance trade with China at the time. Inevitably, production quotas were set that had to be met at all costs. The cost of this measure was of a rather intangible nature. 

Abalone disappeared from the market and as a result the tables of the local elites were deprived from this status symbol food, a fact that caused dissatisfaction and unrest.  No abalone were available any more for the fishing villages to offer to their feudal lords, the shoguns, at celebratory occasions. Thus the food item that symbolically expressed the social ordering of society was lost. Νο abalone were left to be offered to the Gods as was customary, and the relations between the fishing communities and the divine were also disrupted; on top of all that fishermen were also dissatisfied but for a more practical reason. The state bought the dried abalone in prices significantly lower than those of the market.

Noshi, the dried abalone

Noshi was a dried abalone product. There were two ways to make noshi.  In both the flesh was first removed from the shell and was soaked for some time in salt. It was then washed and steamed. After that the flesh was finely cut. Cut lengthwise it became  kiri-noshi.  Cut in long strips, the same way an apple is peeled in one long ribbon, it turned into naga-noshi.  Naga-noshi came in three lengths, depending on the size of the abalone and the skill of the cutter. The longest could reach almost one meter and this required high skill and long training. 

The cut flesh of the abalone was stretched and dried in an oven or under the sun. The process of noshi making involved several secrets that were kept within noshi making families.   Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings show seaside locations strewn with drying stretched noshi, fishermen bringing boatloads of fresh abalone for processing and women and old men bent over low tables expertly cutting the abalone flesh!

In his book Fishing Villages in Tokugawa Japan, Arne Kalland, a Norwegian social anthropologist with a deep knowledge of Japanese maritime culture gives us a fascinating insight into the cultural intricacies of abalone fishing. Noshi, the cut, stretched and dried flesh of abalone was attached to gifts and offerings as symbolic decorations.  This tradition of noshi gift offering is today still kept alive at the important Ishe shrine, and traditional noshi is still made in Mie Prefecture. 

For most of modern Japan, noshi has lost much of its initial meaning and it is no longer used in its original, abalone-derived form. Instead, the term noshi now refers to stylized objects and patterns. Today it is customary to wrap formal gifts with paper called noshi gami and to place monetary gifts in envelopes called noshi bukuro. A special form of stylized noshi knot that decorates everything from gift cards to kimonos has its roots in the bundles of dried noshi strips of the past.

Ama, the female divers who fished the abalone

Abalone fishing in Japan (but also in nearby Korea) cannot be viewed separately from the legendary ama, the female divers, who harvest abalone (but also other resources) in the cold waters of the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean.  Women of all ages, from inexperienced young girls to skilled old mothers and gradmothers formed diving crews. They dislodged large abalone from waters deeper than 10 meters and stayed underwater for minutes at a time.  Until a few decades ago they were doing that with the aid of a simple knife and a net sack, by holding their breath and wearing a simple loincloth around their waists.   They were tied to a rope to be pulled up to the surface and the waiting boat when their strength abandoned them and hypothermia set in.

Ama formed, and still do, a tightly knit professional and social group. When married, their husbands moved with them into their family and community, instead of the other way round, which was the custom in the rest of Japan (what anthropologists call matrilocal residence of the male spouse).

The diving ama form one of the most nostalgic and evocative images of the Japanese maritime lore and this goes back for centuries (watch this short film on ama).

In the palatial poetry of the Heina Period (8^th-12 c.) the ultra civilized elite of the palatial courts viewed the world of the ama as a metaphor for the life away from the constrains of the dominant civilized society. These poems are steeping with nostalgia for the beauty and simplicity of life by the sea. Only the keen eye of a woman poet, Sei Shōnagon in the 10^th century, saw the hardships ama life involved. For modern, twentieth-century ethnography the romantic hues of the ama world persisted and were entangled in the feminist movement.  The ama divers were viewed as independent strong women, an exception to the normal patriarchal Japanese society.  The romantic approach to the lives of ama divers persists even today (read for example this blog post). The abalone was at the heart of the ama lives.

The secrets of the Minoan shells

A few millennia earlier and far away from Japan, geographically and culturally, in the Aegean Sea, some other fishers brought up treasures of the sea by diving in the warm waters of the Mediterranean.  The Minoans of the second millennium BC were certainly mariners! Their mighty navy was roaming the seas and they became rich and powerful. Some of them were fishers. 

Fish bones and shells of all sorts are found in coastal archaeological excavations of Minoan towns and villages and further inland. These humble finds tell the story of fishing. Minoan fishers were not very adventurous. They mostly harvested the shallow waters near the shore. Most people were eating small, humble fish caught in the shallows and mollusks detached from the rocks on the wave-line. The largest, impressive denizens of the depths were caught and eaten of course, but not as often and not by everyone. 

Most aspects of fishing were not important enough for the Minoan states to control and regulat in the way they did with sheep and goats or with wine and grain. The marine mollusks that produce the famous, rare, and precious purple dye are an exception, but more on this will appear in a future post.

Minoan art, rich and naturalistic, gives us a different image and changes our perspective.  The waves of the sea, the rocks on the seabed and the undulating seaweed, the fish, the octopuses and the seashells are celebrated motifs, decorating pottery vases, wall paintings in palaces, personal adornments and administrative objects such as seals.

Fishers dived and harvested shells of special importance. They were used in cult, in craft and in everyday life in ways we do not fully understand. The clues we have for their use and their significance come from their find spots and the objects we find with them but also from art. The Minoan world did not leave us any written records to explain such things.

The polymorphic Minoan tritons

The triton shells that belong to the genus Charonia, offer a good example of a shell with an impact. Tritons are among the largest Mediterranean shellfish. They seem to have had high cultural significance for the Minoans.  Divers brought up tritons, small and large. Some fishing communities targeted them specifically.  

Specialized workshops turned them into tools (e.g. decanters for liquids such as olive oil or wine, or ladles to use in workshops). Minoan craftsmen used triton shells to make tumpets , perhaps to use in ceremonies. In some cases they painted real tritons with bands of dark color, the artists’ attempt to improve on nature. Triton shells were buried under the floors of newly built houses for protection and they were used as ceremonial pouring vessels in cult. Tritons were significant. So much so that they were painted on luxurious pottery vessels of the so called “marine style” and triton replicas were made out of other materials such as faience, clay and stone.

A large stone triton from the Minoan site of Malia not only was found in a Palace, but was also engraved with a cultic scene. Apparently, some deep religious meaning was ascribed to the triton shells.

A triton shell made of green serpentine found in the Palace of Malia and dating to the 16^th century BC. It is engraved with sacrificial scene with two demons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rhyton,_triton-shape,_drawing_of_engraving,_Malia,_1550-1500_BC,_AM_Ag._Nikolaos,_0501254P.jpg

Unexpected resonances

The picture of Minoan shells that emerges from normal archaeological reasoning and combination of data shows that shells and other marine creatures were important to the Minoan society.  But how important they were we cannot begin to fathom.  The story of the abalone in Japan with their myriad connections to all aspects of life is instructive. Abalone impacted the local and international economy, political developments, poetry and art. They influenced the social structure and the way the fishers defined themselves and found their place in the world. From this rich, textured world of practices, relations and ideas, only a small part would survive if they were not recorded in writing and art in the last few centuries. We may imagine that the Minoan shells were similarly entangled in the fabric of tangible and intangible Minoan life.  Future research may very well show us how!!

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