shell beads

I've been waking up every morning at 3:48 A.M.  Too early to start the day but too late to try to fall back to sleep right away.  So I get out of bed, try not to wake Dave and the dogs (truth be told, the dogs are only too happy to occupy the warm spot I've just vacated), and I make my way downstairs.  Sometimes I take my ipad with me, sometimes I just sit on the couch petting our geriatric cat, and sometimes, if I'm really really lucky, there's something interesting on tv.  The other morning there was a show on the NatGeo channel about the excavation of a hominid child's skull in a cave in Morocco.  Along with the bones, a number of tiny shells were found.  They had holes in them and under the microscope, the holes showed wear patterns that indicated that the shells had been strung on sinew or on some kind of plant material.

Jewelry.

These people were making and wearing jewelry 125,000 years ago.  And what's more, the shells were not local; they had come from hundreds of miles away.   I just cannot imagine what meaning that strand of shells had for those people, but they pull me back through the millenia that separate me from that child and his mother.  I fell asleep on the couch and had a dream about making a necklace of shells, specifically a shard of clam shell that I found on the beach near my house that I had been practicing my hole drilling skills on.  No wire.  Only plant fiber.

My dream necklace involved quite a lot of macrame but  my attempts were rather pathetic.  Need to revive those old hippie skills.  I think I'll dig out my old macrame books and get some softer material and redo this.  The hemp has a mind of its own.

clam shell amulet necklace, close up