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136 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY
undertaken in Red Rock Reservoir by the National
Park Service and Iowa State University
between 1964 and 1968. A contract completion
report covering sites included in these agreements
was submitted to the National Park Service in
1973. In 1976, Nancy Osborn wrote her Master's
thesis on "The Clarkson Site (13WA2): An
Oneota Manfestation in the Central Des Moines
River Valley." The analysis of all of the Moingona
Phase materials, however, has not yet been
completed.
Introduction
Recently a friend of mine, Juanita Pudwill,
then a student at Iowa State University, was
engaged in a study of corn ceremonialism among
American Indians. Her study was based, in part,
on her own experiences and observations at the
Mesquakie Settlement near Tama, Iowa, where
she was formerly employed as a teacher of speech
and drama at the local high school. As a portion
of her project, she reported the following to me in
1979:
During the fall of 1976, I was invited to a friend's home
on the Mesquakie Indian Settlement near Tama, Iowa, to
take part in a corn harvest ceremony. I entered the house
and went into the kitchen. A young woman of the family,
who was a friend and former student of mine, was standing
at the kitchen table sharpening the edge of a clam shell with
a whetstone. There was a small box of the shells on the
kitchen table. I asked her what she was doing. What I really
meant was, "Why are you sharpening a shell?" She gave an
upward and back nod of the head .... Following her nod I
went into the front room, where representatives of four
generations of the family had gathered to perform an annual
ceremony .... I saw the use of the shell with the corn and
immediately sat down with the family and began shelling
corn.
Other than surprise, I had two immediate reactions.
The first was inappropriate but uncontrollable
laughter at the thought of the delightful
pun: shelling corn! The second was an archeological
flashback to Oneota storage pits that I had
excavated at sites in the central Des Moines River
Valley (Figure 15). Among other things, the fill
of the storage pits had contained scapula hoes,
antler picks and rakes, corn kernels and cobs, and
notable numbers of worked mussel shells (Figure
16).
As I excitedly thumbed into the Oxford English
Dictionary and Webster's New World Dictionary in
pursuit of the pun possibly perpetrated by Pilgrim
perceptions of Indian ingenuity, I thought to
myself, "It can't be true." I quickly found that,
indeed, it was not true. Our present use of the
English phrase "to shell"—as in corn, peas, or
walnuts—comes from the Middle English schelle
meaning "to peel"—as in "to remove [a seed]
from its shell, husk, or pod." Worse than that, as
far as the putatively post-Columbian pun was
concerned, the Middle English schelle has a linguistic
ancestry going all the way back to a
reconstructed Indo-European base, *sqel-.
The second and more serious question still
remained. Could the worked mussel shell valves
discovered in Oneota cache pits represent implements
used in removing kernels from cobs as part
of the green corn harvest ?
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the
contemporary ethnographic, historic, and archeological
evidence for interpreting certain freshwater
mussel valves as green corn shellers. This
paper does not pretend to have captured all of
the archeological examples or ethnographic analogs
for clam shell corn shellers. My intent is
rather to document the linkage of the archeological
evidence with historic, as well as contemporary,
behavior patterns and to focus attention on
the social and ideological ramifications of these
data.
The methodological perspective employed in
this paper is essentially that which is called the
controlled ethnographic parallel or analogy. Ethnologists
and social anthropologists typically use
the method of controlled comparison (Eggan,
1954) and have shown the utility of this approach
in studying the archeology of the eastern United
States (Eggan, 1952). Traditionally archeologists,
spanning the gamut from the supposedly "old"
to the presumably "new," have utilized this
method in interpreting the function of artifacts,
reconstructing culture history, and exploring theories
of culture change (cf, Strong, 1936; Mott,