Wampum the spoken language is. Records and treaties are kept in this manner, and individuals could write letters to one another in this way. Wampum belts were used as a memory aid in oral tradition, and were sometimes used as badges of office or as ceremonial devices in Indian culture such as the Iroquois. The 1820 New Monthly Magazine reports on a speech given by chief Tecumseh in which he vehemently gesticulated to a belt, pointing out treaties made 20 years earlier and battles fought since then. The National Museum of the American Indian repatriated eleven wampum belts to "Iroquois" chiefs
Prehistoric beads in the Philippines formed by percussion and grinding. Of the organic shell beads, a small percentage of them are cut shell beads and not all of them were as uniform as the microperforated cut shell beads; the beads that do not display the use of technologically advanced techniques were shells of Tridacna rolled into a barrel shape. The microperforated cut-shell beads are generally less than 2 mm in diameter, and thus appear to require a great amount of effort and technique to produce; these can thus be said to belong to the Metal Age. The microperforated cut shell beads were studied to have