484 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 137 



Lawson, since he states that it required much more work than wam- 

 pum, would indicate that it was probably valued more highly. From 

 these accounts and various incidental notices of roanoke in the early 

 literature, it seems evident that the term was of general application. 

 There is, however, one marked point of distinction between wampum 

 and roanoke ; in beads of the first type the length exceeded the diam- 

 eter while the opposite was true of roanoke. The beads used in the 

 ornamentation of a purse in the Sloan collection reproduced by 

 Bushnell (1907, pp. 38-41, pi. 6) are probably typical roanoke. From 

 the catalog entries of this collection, it appears that the name was 

 applied equally to the Marginella shells. 



Lederer gives us some inkling of the distance to which roanoke had 

 penetrated by 1670, and contributes something regarding the money 

 standards of the time when he says that they purchased European 

 objects "either with their current coyn of small shells, which they call 

 roanoak or peack, or perhaps with pearl, vermilion, pieces of christal ; 

 and towards Ushery (the Catawba country), with some odd pieces of 

 plate or bullon, which they sometimes receive in truck from the Oes- 

 tacks" (Alvord, 1912, p. 171). This shows that by the date mentioned 

 wampum had already been introduced from the north. Before 1750 

 it was well known, at least by name, throughout most of the upper 

 Gulf region as far as the Mississippi. Adair says : 



Before we supplied them [the Chickasaw, Creeks, and Cherokee are particularly 

 meant] with our European beads, they had great quantities of wampum; (the 

 Buccinum of the ancients) made out of conch-shell, by rubbing them on hard 

 stones, and so they form them according to their liking. With these they bought 

 and sold at a stated current rate, without the least variation for circumstances 

 either of time or place ; and now they will hear nothing patiently of loss or gain, 

 or allow us to heighten the price of our goods, be our reasons ever so strong, 

 or though the exigencies and changes of time may require it. Formerly four 

 deer-skins was the price of a large conch-shell bead, about the length and thick- 

 ness of a man's fore-finger ; which they fixed to the crown of their head, as an high 

 ornament — so greatly they valued them. (Adair, 1775, p. 170.) 



Adair seems to be speaking of the period immediately after white 

 contact but before European beads had been introduced in any quan- 

 tity, and it will be noticed that he applies the term wampum to conch- 

 shell beads thereby indicating that at that time neither the true 

 wampum nor roanoke was known in the far interior. 



Evidently beads made from shells had attained local use as currency 

 before white contact in three centers : as wampumpeak, or sewan, about 

 Manhattan Island and along Long Island Sound as far as Narragan- 

 sett Bay ; as roanoak in the environs of Chesapeake Bay and the sounds 

 of North Carolina, and inland from the Gulf. In time wampum dis- 

 placed the others, but native wampum was almost immediately dis- 

 placed by wampum of European manufacture. 



