Wampum

You probably all know what wampum is, those strings or belts of shell beads made by Indians of the northeastern US. Traditionally they were made of two species of mollusks, quahog clams (purple) and channeled whelks (white). Individual beads were sometimes used as decoration, but the height of the art was making long "belts" that encoded particular messsages or stories. The one above, by contemporary Wampanoag artist Donald “Slender Birch” Widdiss, tells the story of the Wampanoag people on Martha's Vineyard.

The most famous piece of wampum is the Hiawatha Belt, which commemorates the formation of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois League. (This event has been dated everywhere from the 1100s AD to 1600; I belong to the school that puts it around 1450 AD.)

Here's another famous piece, which commemorates the Great Treaty between William Penn and several Indian nations.

And here is a photograph from 1870 that shows several Haudenosaunee chiefs holding wampum belts that record important events in Iroquois history.

Making shell beads is ancient, perhaps one of humanity's oldest art forms, and we know that making Wampum predates European arrival in New England. But how far back the practice goes is a hard question. If the Hiawatha belt dates to 1450, that would make it the oldest specimen known; the oldest archaeological evidence dates to the 1500s. 

Almost all the surviving Wampum in the world, and, most likely, most of the Wampum that has ever been made, dates to after 1600. This is for two reasons. First, it is far, far easier to make the beads with metal tools. These tools (awls, drills) seem to have been one of the first things Natives sought from European traders, since there are shell beads dated by archaeologists to the mid 1500s that were made with metal tools.

Second, the creation of the fur trade economy with its far-reaching merchantile ties made it much easier for Native craftspeople to focus their time on particular tasks. From the late 1500s down to at least 1750, these beads circulated across New England as money. They could be traded for anything. So the Penobscots, who lived around Long Island Sound, began to specialize in Wampum manufacture. Wampum could be traded to the Iroquois or other inland groups for furs or corn, and it could be traded to Europeans for metal tools, guns, cloth, or salted fish. The amount of Wampum being made skyrocketed. Its use also spread, as far as North Carolina to the south and northward into the St. Lawrence Valley.

The "George Washinton Belt", recording  the 1794 treaty between the United States and the Iroquois League.

In the 1700s its use declined, because of the destruction of the coastal tribes and the spread of other trading media, like money. But it never disappeared. The Iroquois continue to make belts to commemorate important events, and it is a major focus of some Native craftspeople.

I wanted to write about this because I am fascinated that so much of what we think of as American Indian culture actually arose from the encounter between Native peoples and Europeans.