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
Prehistoric beads in the Philippines BCE. Alastair Lamb states that the most common type of bead for around that time was the Indo-Pacific beads. According to Francis, the beads could be named “Indo Pacific Monochrome Drawn Glass Beads”. These Indo-Pacific beads can be found to occur everywhere in Southeast Asia. Other than these, there could be found at that time, Chinese beads (which were traded generally either by non-Han Chinese, other Southeast Asians, or Westerners depending on the time period), Muslim beads, Java beads, and Indian beads. Clues as to the nature of bead trade in South East Asia could be found in the Pandanan