The Yup’ik people counted in words, too. The language of Agaligmiut was the Central Yup’ik of the Yukon and Kuskokwim area. The group of five Yup’ik languages, of which this is one, were spoken across Alaska and the Russian Far East; its Inuit sibling is spoken further north in northern Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Together, the Yup’ik and Inuit languages – with the Aleut tongues of the Aleutian archipelago – make up one of the few really large language families of the North American continent, called Eskimo-Aleut.
The number words of Yup’ik correspond closely to a practice of gesture counting on the hands and feet: from left thumb to left little finger, continuing from the right little finger to the right thumb, and then similarly across the toes from right to left. The expression for ‘five’, tallimat, derives from the word for ‘arm’, taliq. That for ten, qulit, seems to mean ‘top’: that is, the digits of the top half of the body. The word for twenty, yu-i’-nik, meant ‘a man is completed’.
Up to twenty, the count was in fives: albeit with some irregularities, so that expressions for nine and nineteen meant literally ‘almost ten’ and ‘almost twenty’. Objects for counting seem regularly to have been grouped in heaps of five. Beyond that, the system worked in twenties, with the multiple of twenty given first, followed by the extra numbers. One situation where the larger number words were particularly important was when storing and counting fish.
Early in contact with outsiders, a word for ‘thousand’ was adopted from Russian – tiisicaaq – and its half used to denote five hundred, complicating the system further for larger numbers. During the twentieth century, the word forms also gradually changed, obscuring the relationship with body parts and on the whole making the system more regular, with a base of 5 for low numbers, and a base of 20 for larger ones. Central Yup’ik has over 25,000 speakers today, and its number words in this form are likely to survive into the future.
After its loss, Agaligmiut was rediscovered. Changes in the shoreline meant that the burned and buried village began to be eroded by the sea, its artefacts deposited in a trail along the beach: ‘whittled bits of wood, sharpened stakes, and fragments of cut birch bark that were thinly distributed among more modern flotsam along the high tide line’. The site itself was emerging from the ground: ‘Protruding from the dark soils were shaft fragments, pieces of bentwood bowls, and the trimmed timber supports of collapsed sod houses.’ From 2009, it was dug by archaeologists with the consent and participation of the local people at Quinhagak. The cold, dry conditions meant that wooden, bone and antler artefacts – even woven grass – survived in staggering numbers. Some still bore traces of paint despite their centuries in the ground.
The set of thirty-eight tally sticks was excavated in July 2018. How were they used? There are many possibilities. For a game of darts, perhaps, or to report numbers of animals taken or keep track of the days. Perhaps they saw more than one type of use over the years. For they bear witness to an Arctic world in which counting was a part of everyday life; in which numbers, as at other times and places, were something to handle, grasp and manipulate.
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.’
