shell-heaps

Updated: May 23, 2025

The women gathered raspberries or whortleberries in the open places of the woods, or clams and oysters in the sands and shallows, adding their shells as a contribution to the shell-heaps that have accumulated for ages along these shores. The men fished, speared porpoises, or shot seals. A priest was often in the camp watching over his flock, and saying mass every day in a chapel of bark.

Francis Parkman - Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV

It is found from end to end of the main island and even in Yezo, and in pits, shell-heaps, and independent sites as well as in tombs, burial caves, and cairns of the Yamato. Thus, there does not seem to be sufficient warrant for associating it with a special race.

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era

As the stars recede into distance, so time recedes with them; and there may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen stepping into the ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or that older race, eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them, when the Baltic was an open sea.

- Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists : Volume 3 of 3

Anterior to both of these movements another race, the neolithic Yemishi of the shell-heaps, had pushed down from the northeastern regions of Korea or from the Amur valley, and peopled the northern half of Japan.

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era

There is great diversity of size among the shell-heaps, some being of insignificant dimensions and others extending to five hundred square yards. They are most numerous in the eight provinces forming the Kwanto.

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era