Wampum is a traditional shell bead of the Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands of North America. The term first referred to white and purple beads made from the quahog or Western North Atlantic hard-shelled clam but has expanded to include white shell beads hand-fashioned from the North Atlantic channeled whelk shell.

In New York, wampum beads have been discovered dating from before 1510. Before European contact, strings of wampum were used for storytelling, ceremonial gifts, and recording important treaties and historical events, such as the Two Row Wampum Treaty and the Hiawatha Belt.

Northeastern Indigenous tribes also used wampum as a means of exchange, strung together in lengths for convenience. The process to make wampum was labor-intensive with stone tools. The coastal tribes had sufficient access to the basic shells to make wampum. These factors increased its scarcity and consequent value among the early European traders, who understood it as a currency and adopted it as such in trading with them.

Wampum artists continue to weave belts of a historical nature, as well as designing new belts or jewelry based on their own concepts.

The term wampum is a shortening of wampumpeag, which is derived from the Massachusett or Narragansett word meaning "white strings of shell beads". The Proto-Algonquian reconstructed form is thought to be (wa·p-a·py-aki), "white strings".

The term wampum (or wampumpeag) initially referred only to the white beads which are made of the inner spiral or columella of the channeled whelk shell Busycotypus canaliculatus or Busycotypus carica. Sewant or suckauhock beads are the black or purple shell beads made from the quahog or poquahock clamshell Mercenaria mercenaria. Sewant or zeewant was the term used for this currency by the New Netherland colonists. Common terms for the dark and white beads are wampi (white and yellowish) and saki (dark). The Lenape name for Long Island is Sewanacky, reflecting its connection to the dark wampum.

Wampum beads are typically tubular in shape, often a quarter of an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. One 17th-century Seneca wampum belt featured beads almost 2.5 inches (65 mm) long. Women artisans traditionally made wampum beads by rounding small pieces of whelk shells, then piercing them with a hole before stringing them. Wooden pump drills with quartz drill bits and steatite weights were used to drill the shells. The unfinished beads would be strung together and rolled on a grinding stone with water and sand until they were smooth. The beads would be strung or woven on deer hide thongs, sinew, milkweed bast, or basswood fibers.

The introduction of European metal tools revolutionized the production of wampum, and by the mid-seventeenth century, production numbered in the tens of millions of beads. Dutch colonists discovered the importance of wampum as a means of exchange between tribes, and they began mass-producing it in workshops.^[when?] John Campbell established such a factory in Passaic, New Jersey, which manufactured wampum into the early 20th century. Eventually the primary source of wampum was that manufactured by colonists, a market glutted by the Dutch.^{[citation needed]}