Saturday, January 9, 2010: 9:20 AM
Manchester Ballroom C (Hyatt)
The history of seventeenth-century Rhode Island is well documented but few scholarly works have explored the colony’s ecological relationship with its marine and estuarine environments. Focusing on the ecological relationship between Native Americans, European settlers, Narragansett Bay, and the broader Atlantic World, this paper examines the cultural and environmental implications of the wampum trade.
Home to some of the richest clam beds in southern New England, Narragansett Bay was an important source of wampum, produced largely from the hard-shell clam, or quahog, Mercenaria mercenaria. Cut, polished, and drilled into beads, quahog shells (in addition to the Northern Whelks, Busycon canaliculatum and Busycon carica) were assembled by the thousands into intricate belts and traded amongst Indians and Europeans often across long distances into the continental interior.
By framing an examination of wampum in an ecological context, the paper promises to shed light on the changing settler conceptions of inland environments, estuaries, and the sea. The value placed on wampum illuminates the ways in which Native American and European cultures placed value on nature itself. What led settlers to readily accept the transformation of a simple clamshell into tangible money? By contrast, what was the Native American conceptualization of currency, and did it change over time?
Drawing from traveler narratives, southern New England colonial records, and the records of New Netherland and New York, this paper examines these cultural assumptions about land and sea to broaden our understanding of the tidal zone in between. It argues that the use of estuarine shells as currency forged physical, conceptual, and economic continuities between the ocean and inland environments. Born of the estuarine exchange between ocean and inland, the quahog, in its cut and polished form, was the cultural manifestation of webs of commercial exchange between the coast, continental interior, and the broader Atlantic world.
Home to some of the richest clam beds in southern New England, Narragansett Bay was an important source of wampum, produced largely from the hard-shell clam, or quahog, Mercenaria mercenaria. Cut, polished, and drilled into beads, quahog shells (in addition to the Northern Whelks, Busycon canaliculatum and Busycon carica) were assembled by the thousands into intricate belts and traded amongst Indians and Europeans often across long distances into the continental interior.
By framing an examination of wampum in an ecological context, the paper promises to shed light on the changing settler conceptions of inland environments, estuaries, and the sea. The value placed on wampum illuminates the ways in which Native American and European cultures placed value on nature itself. What led settlers to readily accept the transformation of a simple clamshell into tangible money? By contrast, what was the Native American conceptualization of currency, and did it change over time?
Drawing from traveler narratives, southern New England colonial records, and the records of New Netherland and New York, this paper examines these cultural assumptions about land and sea to broaden our understanding of the tidal zone in between. It argues that the use of estuarine shells as currency forged physical, conceptual, and economic continuities between the ocean and inland environments. Born of the estuarine exchange between ocean and inland, the quahog, in its cut and polished form, was the cultural manifestation of webs of commercial exchange between the coast, continental interior, and the broader Atlantic world.