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CHAPTER 4 OVEREXPLOITATION OF MOLLUSKS As rich as the riverine life appeared to have been at the shell-bearing sites, shellfishing declined and then stopped at most of the locations annotated in Chapter 2. One explanation given for the apparent abandonment of this activity and foodstuff is human overexploitation of this resource. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the hypothesized extirpation of the molluscan resource at the hand of humans after 5000 bp, and the hypothesis that shellfish were a restricted resource that attracted Archaic peoples to these (few) locations 8,000 to 5,000 years ago. I will establish the parameters of truly intensive shellfishing and develop the picture of how big and how productive the beds were, how long the beds could sustain harvesting pressures,how quickly they regenerate,and how many shells one person can harvest with different extraction methods.To do so, I will draw on information from historic pearl rushes,the U.S.freshwater shell button industry, and modern musseling for the Japanese cultured pearl industry. It is my goal to convince the reader that this resource was neither limited in occurrence nor in fecundity during either the terminal Archaic or the subsequent centuries and that the human populations of the pre-Columbian Ohio Valley were never so large or so intent on shellfishing that they would have denuded rivers of shellfish. The Mississippi and St. Lawrence River systems have the richest freshwater molluscan fauna in the world. Eastern North American is home to roughly one-half of all the world’s species of freshwater bivalves (Stansbery 1970:9).Their abundance was so great and shellfish so prolific across the Mississippi watershed that thousands of tons of shellfish were wrested from rivers such as the Wabash, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Black, White, and Pearl from 1857 until 1913 by individuals and families both casually and intently searching for pearls. Natural pearls, in numerous colors, were and are common in bivalves of eastern North America. In fact, an assessment of the harvest of these pearls during Archaic times is 52 Overexploitation of Mollusks a major missing element in this study—what became of the thousands of pearls that were found in the open shells piled around the Ohio Valley? In the period from 1850 to 1940, those pearls earned their finders and buyers hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is fair to say that those rivers that by 1912 would become the focus of intensive mussel harvesting for the pearl button industry had already sustained years of hand and rake harvesting by pearl hunters.(See Claassen 1994 for a survey of U.S.pearl rushes.) The United States freshwater shell button industry began in 1891. From 1891 until World War II, the domestic freshwater button industry employed hundreds of thousands of workers,either at the river,in cutting shops, in factories, or as sales representatives. About 20 million gross of U.S.-made shell buttons were sold in the United States in 1909, 26 million gross in 1912, and 40 million gross in 1916. That year the industry claimed 9,500 workers in factories, 9,746 musselers, 585 shoremen and boatmen, and shells bought worth $1.2 million. The value of exported freshwater shell buttons reached $2.1 million in 1918 (Claassen 1994). After World War I the industry steadily declined in revenue for various reasons, including zippers, labor costs, buttons of cheaper materials like casein and composition,and the washing machine,which discolored and broke shell buttons. In spite of intensive harvesting for more than 50 years, the shell supply was not a factor in the button industry’s decline. While the U.S. freshwater shell button industry became a mere shadow of its former self by 1945, musselers quickly found a market for the same shells gathered in the same way in the cultured pearl industry of Japan. The various saltwater pearl oysters and freshwater bivalves (naiads) will deposit nacre around any irritant, but research and experience proved that a calcareous nucleus (a piece of nacreous shell) was optimum for pearl formation.The layers of nacre adhere best to other nacre (which most marine shells lack but naiads have) and are therefore less likely to fracture when they are drilled for stringing (Claassen 1994). To form the nucleus or bead, a naiad shell is cut into strips, the strips cubed, the cubes tumbled into an oval shape, and then pressure ground into round beads. Japan lacks naiad populations in quantity sufficient to supply beads...

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