Wampum Belt
Wampum belts are woven from cylindrical shell beads, the purple from quahog clam shells and the white from whelks, strung and woven into belts that served Eastern Woodlands peoples, above all the Haudenosaunee, as records of treaties, laws and history. Because the patterns carried meaning that had to be read aloud, wampum worked as memory in material form: the Hiawatha belt records the joining of the Five Nations, and the Great Law of Peace was both encoded in and recited over the belts. Colonial governments and missionaries also used wampum for diplomacy, while European traders turned the she