Get your Unique Wampum studs now •Free genuine wampum bead included with every purchase! •Free silver polishing pad included with every purchase! •Full satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. I made this so you can have High Quality handmade jewelry. The wampum as well as the silver settings are handcrafted by myself If you want to request something like a certain shell characteristic please feel free to contact me. This is an authentic hand crafted piece of jewelry handcrafted entirely by myself start to finish and the wampum is made from fresh uncooked shell that my family and I harvest from the Pawtuxet estuary region of Narragansett Bay. What makes my wampum unique is the method I use to give my wampum the high mirror like finish which is essentially the same process that was handed to me from my mother and can only be accomplished by hand finishing and not by mass produced tumbling. When tumbled the surface of the shell or stone is imperfect because the aggregate wares it imperfectly causing unevenness on the microscopic level and so the light when reflected is scattered and causes an unsharp finish. The shell I use is uncooked because when the quahog is cooked to open it it loses its rich color, has hairline fractures and is weakened by the process. I learned how to silversmith from the late Onondaga chief William Lazore. A little about the word Wampum. The word wampum can refer to the cylindrical beads white or dark made out of the quahog shell, the shell itself and also now jewelry that is made from these shells. The word is from wampumpeag from the indigenous languages in what is now Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts and probably nearby Connecticut and which translates to the white or light bead, the colonists wrote it down on a paper and now is generic for both white and dark or purple beads and also nowadays for whatever is made from this species of clam. Wampum also refers to the belts and strings made of these beads which are used traditionally by natives (and also used by the colonial settlers when they entered into contracts with natives in the colonial period) for record keeping and ceremonial purposes. The beads were also monetized in colonial times by colonists. On my business, wampum basically refers to the jewelry I make from this shell. In interesting fact… the quahog is an animal with the oldest age known, one of them that was recently found was born in the 1400s as they live for hundreds of years and some are very ancient. 90% of my shell is a gift from nature, raw shell that we find not living- already eaten by animals so I do not kill these magnificent beautiful creatures for the sake of commercial activity, the %10 we catch live for food we do giving thanks in the most respectful manner in in accordance with our traditions.
