Wampum. Description and manufacture[edit] The white beads are made from the inner spiral of the channeled whelk shell. In the area of present New York Bay, the clams and whelks used for making wampum are found only along Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay. The Lenape name for Long Island is Sewanacky, reflecting its connection to the dark wampum. Typically wampum beads are tubular in shape, often a quarter of an inch long and an eighth inch wide. One 17th-century Seneca wampum belt featured beads almost 2.5 inches (65 mm) long.[2] Women artisans traditionally made wampum beads by rounding small pieces of the shells of whelks, then piercing them with a hole before stringing them.
Wooden pump drills with quartz drill bits and steatite weights were used to drill the shells. The unfinished beads would be strung together and rolled on a grinding stone with water and sand, until they were smooth. Care must be taken while crafting or incising wampum. Origin[edit] Uses[edit] Currency[edit] See also[edit] Quipu. Quipus (or khipus), sometimes called talking knots, were recording devices historically used in the region of Andean South America. A quipu usually consisted of colored, spun, and plied thread or strings from llama or alpaca hair.
It could also be made of cotton cords. For the Inca, the system aided in collecting data and keeping records, ranging from monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and military organization.[1] The cords contained numeric and other values encoded by knots in a base ten positional system.
A quipu could have only a few or up to 2,000 cords.[2] The configuration of the quipus have also been 'compared to string mops.'[3] Archaeological evidence has also shown a use of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps more sturdy, base on which the color-coordinated cords would be attached. [4] Objects that can be identified unambiguously as quipus first appear in the archaeological record in the first millennium CE. Wampum; History and Background. NativeTech: Native American Technology & Art Wampum from Middle and Late Woodland periods (beginning around AD 200) had a robust shape, about 8mm in length and 5mm in diameter, with larger stonebored holes of more than 2mm.
Wampum beads of the mid-1600's average 5mm length and 4mm diameter with tiny holes were bored with European metal awls average 1mm. Seneca's in New York after European contact during the late 1600's had increasing numbers of shell beads which measured approximately 7mm length and 5mm diameter, having metaldrilled holes with a diameter of just under 2mm. The word "Wampum" comes from the Narragansett word for 'white shell beads'. Wampum beads are made in two colors: white ("Wòmpi") beads ("Wompam") from the Whelk shell ("Meteaûhock"), and purple-black ("Súki") beads ("Suckáuhock") from the growth rings of the Quahog shell ("Suckauanaûsuck").
There are several types of Whelk used to make the white beads and pendants with the Latin name 'Busycon'. World Poverty Map. Example of application of the SOM: The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) can be used to portray complex correlations in statistical data. Here the data consisted of World Bank statistics of countries in 1992. Altogether 39 indicators describing various quality-of-life factors, such as state of health, nutrition, educational services, etc, were used.
The complex joint effect of these factors can can be visualized by organizing the countries using the self-organizing map. Countries that had similar values of the indicators found a place near each other on the map. The different clusters on the map were automatically encoded with different bright colors, nevertheless so that colors change smoothly on the map display. The poverty structures of the world can then be visualized in a straightforward manner: each country on the geographic map has been colored according to its poverty type. Countries organized on a self-organizing map based on indicators related to poverty: Dictionary of Victorian London - Victorian History - 19th Centur.
History. Social structure. Medieval.