Pomo: Counting costs

Take a clam shell (an empty one). Rub away the rough outer surface, use a stone to break the shell into rough discs, and chip off any pointed bits with a quartz blade. The discs that result are perhaps a centimetre across: you will be able to make up to forty from a single shell if you are careful.

Next, bore a hole in each disc with an implement much like a fire drill: a wooden shaft, tipped with quartz or flint, spun at speed by a taut string. This is the most specialised part of the work, and taboos surround those who perform it.

Then, group the beads, choosing a set of roughly the same size and threading half a dozen of them onto willow shoots. Roll them by hand on a sandstone slab lubricated with water, to take off any rough edges. (The combination of lime and water will wrinkle and seam the hands, so that a bead maker can be recognised at a glance.) A final polishing on deer skin is also possible.

Finally, thread the beads onto cords of wire grass, forming strings of up to two hundred. They will be stored in baskets or skin bags, or even buried to keep them safe.

The Pomo lived in what is now northern California, on the Pacific coast and perhaps as much as 150 kilometres inland. It was and is a varied terrain, with open country by the sea; there are mountains with belts of forest, sparsely wooded valleys, and lakes. Three thousand kilometres closer to the equator than the Yup’ik’s Arctic homeland, it was rich in natural resources, something close to ideal for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The climate was on the whole very mild, and rainfall was reliable but not excessive. Drought and famine, though known, were rare, and the area in historic times supported upwards of 8,000 people. Estimates of the date of first human habitation in the area range as high as 9,000 years before the present.

Pomo shell money.

MoneyMuseum Zurich.

The name ‘Pomo’ groups together the speakers of seven related languages. They lived in small groups or bands, and their villages numbered several hundred, in addition to more or less temporary hunting and fishing camps. Their foods were acorn bread, nuts, seeds, bulbs and roots, as well as mammals, birds and – for those on the coast – molluscs. Trout and salmon were fished from the rivers and lakes with spear and net; clams and mussels were gathered from the sea. Deer and other large mammals were hunted with bow and arrow; rabbits and squirrels were trapped.

Much of their world was wooden: skirts were of shredded bark, rafts of logs. Houses were contructed from slabs of redwood bark and wood. Their woven baskets are famous to this day. For ornaments they had – as well as feathers and tattoos – beads.

Beads were being made in the California area soon after humans populated it. Over time, a number of mollusc species – abalone, clams, tusk shells and the so-called dwarf olives, among others – were used for their shells by different groups. It seems to have been the Chumash on the islands of the Santa Barbara Channel who first made shell beads in quantity, mainland tribes at first obtaining them by trade. Their olive-shell beads were in fact one of the first objects to be traded over long distances in North America; they appear in the Mojave Desert at very early dates. But, in time, inland groups became makers of shell beads too. At first they traded to obtain the raw materials:

The Southeastern Pomo informant Wokox said that anciently clam shells … were obtained mostly through trade. Individuals seldom went for the shells for fear of trouble with the peoples along the long route … The Coast Miwok of Bodega bay sold the shells to the Russian River people, who in turn sold them to the Wappo of the Middletown region, they to the Lake Miwok of Coyote valley, and the Lake Miwok sold them to the Southeastern Pomo.

But after white contact disrupted the Coast Miwok and reduced their numbers, certain Pomo groups began to make journeys, once or twice a year, to Bodega Bay to collect clam shell – as well as seaweed, salt and sea foods – themselves. The journey was one of well over 100 kilometres, and could take up to three or four days, involving most or all of the available adults in the community. The clams were dug using a stick to make a hole, from which the clam was pulled by hand; as much as a hundred pounds of shell could be carried home by each person.

By the later nineteenth century, the Pomo were the main suppliers of beads to central California, with the Yuki, Lake Miwok, Wappo and Wintu all receiving them through trade or gift. Bead making was now a specialised craft: most men made some beads, but some did little else. Some reports say that those who drilled the shells were subject to special taboos, rising early in the morning, working away from the house or abstaining from meat.

These Californians used their beads first as ornaments, notably as personal ornaments such as bracelets, pendants, necklaces and earrings. Descriptions from the historical period tell of wide wristlets made of fine beads, and elaborate complexes of necklaces and pendants dangling to the knees. There were beaded belts up to 20 centimetres wide and over a metre long. Nose sticks could have strings of abalone shells dangling from them. Beads were also used to decorate objects such as baskets and bags, in combination for instance with vivid red woodpecker feathers. For ceremonies, special quantities of bead decoration might be used, including special ornamented belts and hair nets. The figure of the ‘bear doctor’ wore bead strings and belts as part of his armour.

Beads – and beads in quantity – could mark prestige as well as decorate a person; it is reported that a Pomo leader could designate a successor by transferring a quantity of beads. In some parts of California, the inheritance of shell beads was treated with much care. Huge quantities could accumulate in some cases; photographs of Bear River people from the nineteenth century show individuals wearing ten metres or more of strung beads, numbering well over a thousand pieces of shell.

By the nineteenth century, it was a matter of frequent comment among the Pomo and their neighbours that the main use of beads was as a general medium of exchange. Their use was not restricted by class or sex, nor was it limited as to what things or services could be bought and sold. They were used to pay for food and objects, to pay doctors, shamans and singers; they were exchanged during marriage negotiations and to discharge blood debts. A deer cost 1,200 beads; a hand-made bow, 2,000 or more.

That is to say, beads had become money. California is one of the relatively few places in the world to have independently invented money – artefacts used to store and exchange value – and it is not perfectly clear when or under what conditions the innovation took place. Estimates have ranged from about eight hundred to nearly 2,000 years before the present, and there are several theories about the combination of factors that led to the development of money in this particular place and time. One view is that increasing population density, and possibly environmental variability, made it more than usually difficult for human groups to obtain the resources they needed either directly, or by barter exchange with their neighbours. Money, in this scenario, enabled resource transfers among groups that were not willing to incur debts to one another. By making exchange easier, it improved the overall efficiency with which resources could be gathered from the environment. The fact that beads already existed in large numbers – and were portable and durable – made them a natural choice for this new use.

Trade feasts provided a system for exchanging beads for a village’s food surplus, and they illustrate the function money had in smoothing out variations in resources over time and place. A village with a surplus – of fish, say, or acorns – could invite others to a trade feast, setting the terms on which the surplus would be exchanged for shell money. The guests were allowed no choice as to the price paid. After the initial ceremonies,

the host chief divided up the presented [beads] into strings of hundreds. These he placed upon the ground in a spot agreed upon, after the chiefs had arranged in council upon the amount of produce they were willing to give for each string … After this the several family representatives of the selling party went to their respective stores and each brought forth measures of produce to the value of one string. [Each giver] took the string of a hundred beads to which he was entitled.

The process continued as long as the food surplus – or the beads – held out, after which the chief of the guests divided the food among his people.

There were in fact two or even three standards of bead money in this system. The ordinary clam shell discs were the lowest unit of value; above them stood beads made from the heels of clam shells, about the same diameter as the common beads but longer, cylindrical. No more than four could be made from a single shell, and they were worth from twenty to forty of the disc beads. At the top of the scale stood beads of magnesite, a mineral that had to be mined and was itself sold between tribes. It had to be prepared in a similar way to shell, but inevitably involved more work: after roasting it was ground, bored, and finally baked and polished. A single piece could be valued at 800 shell beads. Red and yellow in colour, like shell it had a decorative function as well as being valued in exchange.

Many Californian tribes measured shell money rather than counting it. The central Miwok, for instance, measured strings by the lua, the distance from the nipple to the thumb and forefinger of an outstretched arm. Others used reference marks tattooed on their bodies to standardise the lengths. The Pomo, however, and others in central California, counted the beads using words. They gained, as a result, a reputation for their facility at counting, even into the tens of thousands.

In fact, the Pomo had a special set of counting words for dealing with beads. Their normal way of counting was in tens, but beads were counted in groups of four; two fours made (in the Eastern Pomo language) a wedi. Ten wedi were called ‘one valuable’ (sometimes a small tally stick was used to represent this number of beads). Eight ‘valuables’ were the next unit up: dan ba’a. Twenty dan ba’a is normally quoted as the limit of the system: ethekai ba’a or 12,800 beads. After this, the cycle would be repeated if there was a need to count even more beads.

For all the thousands and tens of thousands of beads that are reported to have existed, and been exchanged, counted and measured, fewer survived into the historical period than might have been expected. Beads were offered, sacrificed and destroyed on a variety of occasions: particularly large quantities were destroyed at funerals. While some Pomo groups allowed goods to be inherited, others insisted on the burning of half – or even all – of the possessions of the deceased: house and all, in some cases. Furthermore, funerary offerings were also made by relatives and friends, frequently in the form of beads.

Cremation, face down on a pyre in a shallow pit, was the normal way of disposing of a human body. Practice varied in detail, but the corpse could be wrapped in strings of shell, or practically buried beneath loose shell beads before burning. In some traditions, a final scattering of beads might cover the ashes after the cremation was over. As one informant put it, ‘Two funerals in one month, week after week. That’s where all my nice beads go.’

The use of bead money continued well into the period when the Pomo and their neighbours had access to American dollars. Rates of exchange varied around $5 or $10, sometimes less, per yard of strung beads.

After about the 1920s, the beads’ function as money was lost, but beads did not cease to be made. Techniques evolved continuously; foot-powered grindstones were adopted, and drills powered by flywheels. Later, metal drills replaced the old stone ones. In the twenty-first century, some bead makers have adopted power tools: electric drills to perforate the beads and high-powered presses to shape them.

Like the Yup’ik far to the north, the Pomo wove counting into the texture of their lives, by adopting counting practices based on a combination of words and physical counters. They took the manufacture and exchange of counters to a high level of sophistication, arriving at a general-purpose money with only a handful of parallels elsewhere in the world.

Waxaklahun-Ubah-K’awil: The long count

Oxwitik, 9.15.5.0.0 10 Ahau 8 Ch’en (22 July, 736 CE). Heir to three hundred years of the city’s tradition, Waxaklahun-Ubah-K’awil, thirteenth ruler, divine lord, presides over the dedication of a new monument. Standing at the northern end of a 300-metre plaza that already contains one cycle of stelae, it will inaugurate a new series, binding heaven and earth, marking time and asserting the king’s lordship over it.

The stone is 4 metres high, the glyphs of its inscription up to 30 centimetres wide. The inscription calls it a ‘tree stone’. It specifies the date by saying that there are nine baktuns, fifteen katuns, five tuns, zero uinals, and zero kin completed; that the almanac day is 10 Ahau and that a certain god was lord of the night, while the position within the year is 8 Ch’en.

More than just a text, the inscription gives the date in a most elaborate visual form, each number represented by a humanoid figure and each unit of time by an animal that the person must carry: three birds, a toad, a monkey. The personified numbers employ tump lines, bands of cloth tied around the head, to bear the loads. They look like a row of porters in a caravan: merchants or pilgrims. Time, here, is a burden that the gods of number must laboriously carry through history; the stone is their resting place, where they can let their burdens fall.

Or some of them. Number five will be replaced by number six after this day, in time’s great relay; but the personified numbers fifteen and nine will walk much further before their successors take over. The interlocking cycles of time are large indeed.

The Long Count at Copan.

A. P. Maudslay, Archaeology-Biologia Centrali-Americana (London 1889–1902), vol. 1, plate 48. Public domain.

The city of Oxwitik was part of the Mayan world: a network of highland and lowland city states linked by trade, by competition and conflict, by shared or related languages and by shared assumptions and rituals. Speakers of Mayan languages lived across the Yucatan Peninsula, and in what are now Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. It was another abundant set of environments, and one of the handful of places in the world to have developed agriculture without outside influence. There were people living here perhaps 12,000 years ago; complex stratified societies by the start of the first century CE.

This is also one of the few places to have developed writing independently. Mesoamerica had at least three distinct traditions of logographs by the final centuries BCE; the relationship between them is poorly understood. By the third century CE, Mayan cities bore increasingly elaborate inscriptions on their monuments and buildings. The uses of text in this world were mainly for what might be called the propaganda or even the self-advertisement of the ruling elite: by contrast with early scripts in the Near East and East Asia, administrative and bookkeeping functions were strikingly absent. Not just carved on public monuments but painted on walls, fashioned in stucco or incised in pottery and even jewellery, the written messages highlighted key dates in the lives of rulers and cities: births, deaths, conquests, and the founding of cities. Writing that doubled as decoration was always capable of taking a wide range of forms, and artistic elaboration played a part in increasing the number of distinct glyphs: perhaps four hundred were in use at any one time, some standing for whole words and others for individual sounds.

Tantalising archaeological finds suggest there were also books, made of bark or animal hide folded concertina-fashion. They are depicted on pottery, and are occasionally found dissolved and unreadable in graves, but none survive in a legible state from the classic Maya period.

As well as symbols for words, the Maya had symbols for numbers, and they are justly famous for their seeming obsession with complex calendrical information, witnessed in many of their inscriptions. Many cultures have counted days, but few if any have counted them with the panache and sophistication of the classical Maya.

The Mayan languages had distinct words for the numbers from 1 to 12, and they formed the subsequent -teens as compounds with ‘ten’. In the related modern language of Yucatec, numbers from 1 to 5 are hun, caa, ox, can, hoo, while 10 is lahun and 13 – for instance – oxlahun. From twenty upwards, the counting words worked purely in base 20, and it is likely that there were words for both 400 and 8,000. Underlying meanings relating to ‘person’ for 20 and ‘sack’ for 8,000 have been reported, reflecting the full count of fingers and toes and the contents of a sack of cacao beans. Beans, or small stones, may have been used on the Mayan counting boards described by much later sources in Spanish, but no archaeological evidence for them has been found.

And of course, there were number symbols as part of the Mayan script. A dot meant 1, and could be repeated up to four times. A bar meant 5 and was repeated up to three times; bars and dots in combination thus counted as high as 19, the limit of this part of the system. (As with other counting technologies elsewhere in the world, no element in the system was repeated beyond the subitising limit of four times.) Like other glyphs, the number signs could be used as syllables, and they also appear in the names of divinities – ‘nine strides’, ‘ten sky’. Their use as syllables, indeed, resulted in Waxaklahun-Ubah-K’awil’s name being read for some time by archaeologists as ‘18 rabbit’.