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 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