Shinnecock Indian Nation western Connecticut, the lower Hudson River Valley, through present-day New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania. Like the other Native peoples of Long Island, the Shinnecock made "wampumpeag" (wampum), shell beads strung onto threads that were used as currency, for record-keeping, for aesthetic purposes, and to symbolize a family. These shell beads have been found at Native American-inhabited sites as far west as the Rocky Mountains, showing their value in a trade. Although other New England tribes produced "wampumpeag", the Indians of Long Island are reputed to have made the best. Paumanac, one of the many names given to Long Island, means
Two Row Wampum Treaty is no expectation that early belts should have survived had they in fact been exchanged in the early seventeenth century. In any event, by 1870 the image of the two-row wampum belt had come to symbolize for the Haudenosaunee their ongoing treaty and "kaswentha" relationship with the Dutch crown. Diana Muir Appelbaum has written that: Indeed, no documentary evidence (including wampum, which is very fragile) survive from the original treaty negotiations of 1613. But, as Parmenter points out: Onondaga leaders state that the oral tradition which accompanies the wampum belts is evidence that an agreement was made in 1613. Andy