PAPUA NEW GUINEA: kina shell money (250g), Opitz p.176-79, 20 x 18cm, crescent-shaped pearl oyster shell, colored with red ochre, VF, R, ex Charles Opitz Collection. The gold-lipped pearl oyster (Pinctada maxima, "kina" in local languages) was once a currency of considerable value. Harvested from distant islands, it was most prized by the highland tribes and used for the purchase of pigs and brides, as well as a display of male wealth. When the first Europeans advanced into the highlands in the early 1930's, few kina shells had yet found their way there from the coast; only some very rich men owned them. One ordinary shell was worth a whole pig weighing 200 lbs, and the price for a bride was two or three fragments of a shell, plus a pig and some other valuable items. Within 10 years, the value of the shells would plummet, as white prospectors began to give them out for services and food. A superior kina would only buy a small pig, and a good price for a bride had risen to 10 shells and 10 pigs. By the 1960's, marriage payments consisted of 60 to 100 shells plus 10 pigs, and by 1985 the shells were no longer used as currency. But such was the kina's cultural significance that it was adopted as the name of the national currency in 1975 (= 100 toea).
Estimate: $100-150