Wampum beads are small beads made out of shellfish, typically the quahog clam, which were traditionally used by various First Nations in acts of ceremony, memory, and exchange. Often placed together on strings or woven into large belts displaying patterns, wampum was exchanged among various Indigenous nations of the Eastern Seaboard and beyond. It became a very important trade object with Europeans, who spread its use across colonial economies. For British writers in the eighteenth century, it was a perplexing material; for some it was understood as a form of currency, roughly translatable to a European economic system of monetary exchange.  Others understood wampum as writing, not legible to the European but which contained in its strings of beads a cultural history or account of a treaty negotiation, or more simply a pledge of fidelity. Its additional use as an object of adornment further complicated any stable understanding; as both text and commodity, sacred pact and ornament, wampum conflated systems of meaning and challenged European epistemologies. This chapter will look at various interpretations of wampum and will assess the epistemological challenges it placed to a society in which the lines between finance and culture were becoming increasingly blurred.

Chapter 2 provides a concise history of writing, from ancient times to the present day. The chapter begins with proto-writing and then the first writing systems, which arose independently in different corners of the world. The discussion shows evidence of the earliest roots of writing from the Egyptian and Mesopotamian areas, as well as in China and Mesoamerica. The chapter then covers cuneiform writing, drawing on examples from the Middle East, like Ancient Sumerian. Other early writing systems discussed include Egyptian hieroglyphics and the first alphabets, like the Phoenician one, from which came the Aramaic script, followed by the Greek and Latin alphabets. Following an overview of writing in the Middle Ages, the focus shifts to the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. Insights from European developments are integrated with some references to the influence of East and South Asian writing. The chapter also discusses the changes in writing brought about by a series of modern events and inventions, from the Industrial Revolution to the Internet.