I wanted to do something. I wanted to do something big. —Sabato Rodia Sabato Rodia was a beachcomber. Barely five feet tall, with a face as creased as a used map and eyes perpetually squinted against the sun, he spent untold days prowling the beaches and estuaries of Southern California with an old cement sack slung over his shoulder. As he walked, he filled the sack with the shells that marine mollusks had once built from seawater to protect their vulnerable bodies. In a way, the seashells also shielded Rodia from the blows of a difficult life. When he was 14, Rodia’s family had sent him from Italy to the United States to earn a living as a coal miner and construction worker. Labor conditions in turn-of-the-century America were crushing though, and after Rodia’s brother died in a mining accident, he buckled under their weight. He drank too much and beat his wife Lucia, then left her and their children. By the 1920s, Rodia was living alone on land he’d bought for US $900 in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood, barely literate and working as a tile setter. That’s when he turned to the sea for salvation. Over the next three decades, Rodia hauled some 10,000 seashells from the coast to his property, where he built a whimsical fantasy of concrete walls, arches, and towers that soared to over 30 meters. He studded the structure with the shells, as well as with broken tools, plastic toys, glass bottles, pieces of tile, and thousands of other found objects. The obsession helped him stay sober. “I was one of the bad men,” he once said. “I was drunken, all the time a drinkin’. … That’s why I built the tower for, I quit the drinkin’.” Nuestro Pueblo—Our Town, as Rodia called his creation—drew in the neighborhood’s working class immigrants. Some held weddings and baptized their children within its lacy walls. Then, in 1954, Rodia abruptly handed his keys to a friend, left Watts, and never returned, even when Los Angeles threatened to demolish his “pile of junk” three years later. In Rodia’s absence, Watts rose to defend its orphaned landmark. Residents convinced officials that if a crane could pull on the towers with 4,500 kilograms of force without toppling them, they should stay. The towers stood. Today, visitors from around the world flock to the Watts Towers, and the city that sought their demolition has sunk millions of dollars into their upkeep. Scholars look to them for insights on class politics, the Italian-American diaspora, and art history. But until recently, few people paid attention to the towers’ seashells. So Bruno Pernet, a marine biologist at California State University, Long Beach, decided to look at Rodia’s history through the mollusks he collected. After several years of identifying clams, abalone, and other shells, Pernet and his colleagues realized that they not only corroborated scattered accounts of Rodia’s beachcombing habits, they captured a richer moment in the region’s environmental history. Some of the towers’ most common species are now locally extinct or rare, and invasive newcomers have become common. “If he tried to do this today, in the kinds of habitats I think he collected most of his shells from, it would not look like this,” Pernet said when he led me through the towers last spring, pointing to a row of white clam shells pressed into an archway. “It’s like a time capsule at a very coarse level.” Like Rodia, people around the world and throughout history have carried shells far from the coast, where they’re sometimes preserved for hundreds or thousands of years. Just as the towers’ shells tell a story about Rodia and his home, these shells give archaeologists a record of what people ate, their trade and travel routes, and the environments they called home. Seashells are what scientists call mnemoactive objects: physical triggers of rich sensory memories. But shells can also reveal deeper truths about long-ago humans. Seashells are what scientists call mnemoactive objects: physical triggers of rich sensory memories. Rodia might have run his calloused palm over a piece of abalone, for instance, and relived the moment he picked it up—the gulls reeling overhead, the salty air, the freedom he felt walking the coast. Other people have incorporated shells into ceremonies and rituals commemorating the most profound moments of their lives; these shells may have called to mind a spiritual experience, or perhaps the elemental force of birth or mysterious, yawning chasm of death. Read in context, the shells people leave behind hold within their wave-polished chambers the full arc of the human experience. Spirit need these things same as man. Then the spirit rest and don’t wander. —Resident of the Georgia Sea Islands, describing shells and other objects on African American graves Humans’ affection for shells is older than our species. Half a million years ago, Homo erectus, a precursor to modern Homo sapiens, sharpened the edge of a freshwater mussel shell on what’s now the Indonesian island of Java. Archaeologists found this simple tool among a pile of shells surrounding Homo erectus bones, invoking a vision of an archaic human squatting in the jungle, prying open mussels and slurping down the calories he needed to survive. Homo erectus weren’t just using mussels for tools and food, though. Among the shells, archaeologists also found one bearing a remarkable zigzag pattern. Analysis revealed it to be the world’s oldest known engraving, predating similar carvings by 300,000 years. That means before Neanderthals painted abstract designs onto cave walls in Spain, before people even mastered the art of making fire, someone created beauty by drawing on a shell, projecting some part of themselves onto the natural world. People also made the earliest known jewelry from shells. Around 100,000 years ago, researchers believe that people in present-day Israel, Morocco, and Algeria drilled holes into marine snail shells to create beads, which they traded or carried inland, perhaps strung on lengths of fiber. Marian Vanhaeren, an archaeologist from the University of Bordeaux in France who helped identify the beads, says that people must have been particularly smitten with shells to transport them such long distances, rather than using stones or other raw material closer at hand. She sees similar tendencies across the globe, from the deserts of Arizona—where Hohokam people wore hoop bracelets made from Pacific clamshells some 2,000 years ago—to the inland mountains of Western New Guinea, where Eipo people continue to value shell jewelry with little understanding of where the raw materials originated. “The Eipo had no idea they were an animal from the sea. They did not even know the sea,” says Vanhaeren, who also does fieldwork in New Guinea. “This was very astonishing to me, that these shells, they travel, and people always see them as special.” Archaeological evidence suggests that around the same time people started decorating themselves with shells, they also began tucking them into graves. Some 74,000 years ago, mourners in South Africa buried a four- to six-month-old infant in a cave 82 kilometers from the coast. Before covering the tiny body with dirt, they placed in the grave a Conus shell, a marine mollusk slightly bigger than a lima bean with a repeating brown-and-white pattern. The shell had a hole drilled through it, suggesting that it had been worn as jewelry, and was covered in ochre, a red pigment that signifies importance in historical and modern cultures. It’s the earliest known evidence of humans intentionally burying personal adornments in a grave. Why a shell? Did they hope it would protect the child in the afterlife? Was it a status symbol? Or simply a beloved object left behind with a beloved person, an expression of grief? Whatever the reason, the practice stuck, reverberating across cultures. In the Kongo-speaking region of central Africa, people believed that shells formed the boundaries of the dead’s underwater realm; lining a grave with shells ensured a spirit’s safe passage to this aqueous underworld. In Senegal’s Saloum Delta, people created huge burial mounds out of shells. Archaeologists have identified 8,000-year-old shell burial mounds in the southeastern United States, mother-of-pearl shells in a 5,000-year-old Palestinian grave, 2,000-year-old Conus shell rings in graves in the Marshall Islands, and dozens of similar examples from around the world.