Wampum 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 white and purple beads made from the quahog or Western North Atlantic hard-shelled clam. It was used by the northeastern Indian tribes as a form of gift exchange, and the colonists adopted it as currency in trading with them. Eventually, the colonists developed more efficient methods of producing wampum, which caused inflation and ultimately its obsolescence as currency. Wampum was often kept on strings like Chinese cash. Before European
Puka shell Puka shell Puka shells originally were naturally occurring bead-like objects which can be found on some beaches in Hawaii. Each one was the beach-worn apex of a cone snail shell, a kind of seashell from a sea snail. "Puka" is the Hawaiian word for "hole" and refers to the naturally occurring hole in the middle of these rounded and worn shell fragments. These natural beads were made into necklaces. Numerous inexpensive imitations are now widely sold as puka shell necklaces. The majority of these are not made from cone shells, but from other shells, or even from plastic. In addition,