Wampum

Before contact with Europeans, the Haudenosaune, a group of nations in northeastern North America also known as the Iroquois, had been developing a form of communication, primarily for political purposes, that used wampum, a bead carved from seashell. Most historians have insisted that wampum was primarily a form of money. While wampum distinct nations. Over time wampum came to be used to record and convey key sociopolitical messages.

Wampum came in two colors, white and deep purple. Loose beads constituted the simplest and oldest form of wampum. Even in the form of loose beads, wampum could represent certain basic ideas. For example, white was associated with the sky-yearning spirit, Sapling, whose terrestrial creations, such as trees, were often beneficial to is thought that string wampum was used to send simple political messages such as truce requests.

It was, however, the formation of the Haudenosaune Confederacy from a group of warring tribes, believed by some to have occurred around 1451, that supplied the major impetus for making wampum a deliberate system of both arbitrary and pictorially derived symbols designed primarily for political purposes. This is evident in the invention it served to effectively frame and enforce the law of the confederacy for hundreds of years.