Wood and Wampum: Transformative Expressions of Indigenous Power

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

While surveying wampum in museum collections, I encountered a unique category of ethnographic objects: Northeastern Native American wooden clubs and bowls embedded with wampum beads. These seventeenth century objects include beads that — from the obvious evidence of drilled holes and traces of fiber weft — appear to have been removed from a woven object (likely a collar or belt) and set into a wooden object. Heretofore, these wampum inclusions have been interpreted as merely adornment. Yet, the meticulous placement of these repurposed beads (e.g., inside a burl bowl, or along the spine of a war club) signals more than decorative purposes. The act of transforming a wampum belt (typically a tool of diplomacy) into a war club (typically a weapon of conflict) is best understood by considering the ontological and ritual details that inspire and inform the material expression of symbolic messaging in these and other objects of power.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 764