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To: Ramsey Su who wrote (44192)	1/2/2004 9:42:32 AM
From: Louis V. Lambrecht	Respond to of 74559

So are we getting back to carrying seashells? Nope: has been tried before ex.ac.uk Wampum came to be used extensively for trade by the colonists as well as the natives, e.g. in 1664 Stuyvesant arranged a loan in wampum worth over 5,000 guilders for paying the wages of workers constructing the New York citadel (page 458). Like more modern forms of money, wampum could be affected by inflation. Some tribes such as the Narragansetts specialized in manufacturing wampum (by drilling holes in the shells so that the beads could be strung together) but their original craft skills were made redundant when the spread of steel drills enabled unskilled workers, including the colonists themselves, to increase the supply of wampum a hundredfold thus causing a massive decrease in its value. A factory for drilling and assembling wampum was started by J.W. Campbell in New Jersey in 1760 and remained in production for a hundred years. Fiat money, printing presses, drilling machines... <vbg>