Title: Scallop shells
General information about item:
- Material lore
- Country: Spain
- Informant: Tommy Botch
- Date Collected: 11/05/19
Informant Data:
- Tommy Botch is a 24-year-old lab manager in the Robertson Lab in the Psychology and Brain Sciences Department at Dartmouth College, where he studies vision in virtual reality. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California and completed his undergraduate education in psychobiology at UCLA. Tommy enjoys describing fine cheeses and baking sourdough bread in his spare time. He undertook his thru hiking journey when he was 20 years old.
Contextual Data:
- Historical Context: The Camino de Santiago is a 1,000 year-old pilgrimage route that begins at numerous points around Europe and ends at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain. According to Christianity, the apostle Santiago (known in English as Saint James) spread the religion around the Iberian Peninsula (which includes Spain and Portugal). Theory says that his body was put on a boat and landed on the coast of Spain, right near present-day Santiago de Compostela. King Alfonso II wanted his body to be buried in a special chapel, and ordered the building of the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral. Christians across Europe began taking this pilgrimage to worship at the Cathedral.
- Social Context: Recently, the route became a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was featured in the 2010 movie The Way, which helped it grow in popularity (Source). Our informant took the most popular route, the Camino Frances, which begins in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, and over the Pyrenees. This trail spans 800 km (500 miles).
Item:
- The scallop shell is the symbol of the Camino de Santiago. It adorns every trail marker and hikers tie one to their backpacks as they make this arduous journey. Tommy reported two stories as to where the symbol comes from. The first is that when the apostle Santiago was pulled out of the sea by the coast of Santiago de Compostela, his body was covered in scallop shells, so the shells took on that religious connotation. The second is that since the pilgrimage has trails beginning all over Europe that converge at Santiago de Compostela, if you map all of it out, the radiating lines converging upon the one point resembles the bumps on a scallop shell.
- The scallop shell also serves another purpose: there are points along the pilgrimage where hikers stop to replenish water. At these points, some towns and businesses leave out pumps of red wine, which hikers can drink from their scallop shells.
Informant comment:
- “I think the story of Saint James is the official, historical significance of the scallop shell. The story about the multiple trails converging is more of the modern, more secular, pop-culture view of the scallop shell.”
Collector: Erica Busch