Rings

Hello!

This one's a picture-heavy post!  Remember, you can click on any pictures to see them full-size.

Hello to all our visitors around the world - we've had a lot of international visits lately.  Only fitting, I suppose, considering how globally diverse the La Salle expedition was.  I plan to do another post on that at some point, but meanwhile you can check out one of my earlier posts with a map of the global connections on the La Salle expedition.

Today I'm going to talk about the last set of artifacts we did: the iconographic finger rings.  There are more than 1500 brass rings in the Belle collection, with 16 different designs.

Here's one of the rings now.  I feel like a 17th century gentleman with this kind of fancy accessorizing.

Most of the rings have religious designs, which led to the name "Jesuit ring" for quite a while.  They've been found in small numbers across several archaeological sites around North America, always associated with the French.  It wasn't until the Belle excavation that a large number was found, allowing further scholarship.  One of the immediate results is that we're no longer calling them Jesuit rings, since the La Salle expedition had no Jesuit involvement.  Instead, they're iconographic rings - rings with icons.

That first ring is a "Type 1A" design.  Even though the design looks like it says IXXI, it's actually an interlocked A and M, standing for Auspice Maria - under the protection of Mary.  This is the emblem of the Society of Saint Sulpice, a society with which La Salle was associated, and which sent priests to Texas on the expedition.

This is a Type 3 ring - "Christ as a Young Man".  You can barely see the halo lines around the head.

This third ring is a Type 6 design.  It's an "IHS" ring, which stands for the first three letters of Jesus's name in Greek (ΙΗΣΟΥΣ) - that Σ is an S in English.  The three arrows under the IHS represent the nails of the crucifixion.  While this is the symbol of the Jesuit order (properly called the Society of Jesus), it's not only associated with them.  This is the most prevalent design in the collection - we've got hundreds of these, mostly found in the one large intact box of rings and other trade goods.

See, there are a lot of IHS rings!  This is only one bag out of many.  We're putting all these rings into their own bags and trays.

I don't have the time or space to show examples of all 13 designs, but that should be enough to give a nice taste of the ring collection.  You can always write us if you have more particular questions.

Finally, there were a couple non-iconographic rings that have settings for gems or glass.  Here's one now:

That's all for this week - as always, thanks for reading, and feel free to speak up with questions!