Wampum beads carried treaties, names and titles long before colonists spent them as cash
Shell beads drilled from whelk and quahog were how Northeastern Woodlands peoples recorded treaties, confirmed a chief's authority and handed a dead person's name to a successor. European settlers saw something simpler: money. Between 1637 and 1661, New England even treated the beads as legal tender.
The word comes from wampumpeag, a Massachusett or Narragansett term for white strings of shell beads. Strictly, it first meant only the white beads cut from the inner spiral of the channeled whelk; the dark purple ones, taken from the quahog clam, were called sewant or suckauhock. Beads found in New York predate 1510. A typical bead was a small tube about a quarter of an inch long, though one Seneca belt from the 17th century has beads nearly 2.5 inches in length.
Making them was slow. Women artisans rounded fragments of shell, bored holes with wooden pump drills tipped with quartz and weighted with steatite, then rolled the strung pieces on a grinding stone with sand and water. Finished beads were threaded on deer hide, sinew or plant fibre. Among the Haudenosaunee, each chief and clan mother held a particular string as proof of office, passed on to whoever succeeded them, and messengers showed wampum to prove they spoke with authority. Belts woven in patterns could be read by anyone who knew the system, whatever language they spoke, and the Onondaga Nation, as Keepers of the Central Fire, looked after the records.
Names travelled the same way. When someone of high office died, a string bearing the name was placed on the successor's shoulders; the person could shrug it off and refuse. Accepting could bring the dead holder's obligations too, such as caring for their family. Anthropologist David Graeber classed this kind of wampum among objects used mainly to rearrange relations between people rather than to buy everyday goods.
Colonists had other ideas. The Dutch began trading with it in 1622, and metal tools let workshops churn out tens of millions of beads by the mid-17th century, flooding the market. After New England stopped accepting it, the beads kept circulating in New York until 1673, where eight white or four black beads equalled one stuiver. Because dark beads were rarer and worth more, some people dyed white ones to pass them off.
Source: Wampum
