Helen Scales

speaker

228 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Helen Scales’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Seashells · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

They'll say, yes, this is going to be my shell.

They will take that shell, cast off their old one, and that gets passed on down the line.

So it's like a vacancy chain, which you get with things in the human world too.

But...

Everybody gets a new shell, one size bigger.

Everyone goes off happy.

Money.

Again, I'm going to bring out my collection.

This one actually you can sort of hear.

What have we got?

I've brought some cowries.

So cowries are these lovely little shells that you get around the world.

The ones here in Britain are tinier, smaller than this.

This is a tropical species.

So one of the reasons I think that shells have been used as currency is that they have that kind of nice feeling in your hand.

You can count them out and hold on to them, stick them in your pocket.

They're durable, most of the time difficult to fake.

So again, it's one of these extraordinary things that human cultures around the world have repeatedly used shells in various forms as a form of currency, whether it's whole shells like cowries.

whether it's pieces of shell ground down into beads and woven together into bigger structures or looped into great big long strings.

But the cowrie in particular, these ones have a really extraordinary story connected to them, which is a really dark part in human history, which is the link to the trade in enslaved African people.

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