One day early in 1773, as the Quaker explorer rambled alone among some prehistoric Indian shell heaps on one of the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia, he spotted a circular rim jutting from the ground.
He turned to a database of 5000 cooking pits, human burials, shell heaps, and charcoal deposits.
A shell dump heap along its southern wall yielded Indian and European artifacts, including white clay smoking pipes made in Amsterdam.
Quick with intimations of sounds and smells, they feature fields of shell craters, heaped corpses, a mustached skull swarming with worms, and an insanely grinning woman with a maimed, dead baby.
Shell mounds (refuse heaps also known as kitchen middens) reveal the gradual development of a nomadic hunter-gatherer society, whose tools and weapons continued to progress in sophistication and complexity.
Indeed, ancient human settlements are frequently recognized by their pollutants—shell mounds and rubble heaps, for instance.
But for Daria E. Merwin, the goal has a bit less glitter: discovering a 10,000-year-old heap of shells and some ancient arrowheads, spear points and cutting tools in the waters off New Jersey.
You may have confronted one too many panna cottas, heaps of shell beans, or tombstone-size pork chops.
The Hameeds' house was a charred shell, its central room a heap of twisted fans, bicycles, children's toys and a collapsed cage that had kept pet parrots.
