Wampum at the Onondaga Longhouse Six Nations Reserve in New York. These belts dated to the late 18th century and are sacred to the Longhouse religion. They had been away from their tribes for over a century. The Seneca Nation commissioned replicas of five historic wampum belts completed in 2008. Artists continue to weave belts of a historical nature, as well as designing new belts based on their own concepts. Wampum Wampum is a traditional shell bead of the Eastern Woodlands tribes of American Indians. It includes the white shell beads fashioned from the North Atlantic channeled whelk shell and the
Prehistoric beads in the Philippines of the shell beads found in sites were actually cut beads. This shows that there was a significant development of technique and method to be able to design these shell beads, as modification after the cutting process would have been substantially difficult. Francis discussed in his study of the Philippine shell bead collection, that the beads may have been around since the Late Neolithic period and were later replaced by glass and other inorganic beads from about 200 BCE – 1200 CE. Glover and Henderson place the date of glass bead trade in Southeast Asia at no later than 400