lementary crops of pumpkins, beans, and tobacco and later of orchard fruits such as apples and peaches. They made fine pottery, splint baskets, and mats of corn husk and used wampum as a medium of exchange. Public records were woven into the designs of large wampum belts (http:www.oneida-nation.net). Each town contained several long, bark-covered communal houses, which had both tribal and political significance; along their inner sides the families of a clan lived in semiprivate compartments, and the central areas were used as social and political meeting places.
All of the Iroquoian tribes, although displaying considerable diversity, shared certain cultural and linguistic characteristics and these were all true of the Oneida as well. All were agricultural, with corn as their chief crop. They all lived in sizable towns of large communal houses around which they erected log palisades. Tribal organization was totemic and matrilineal, with interlocking political and religious clan organizations within tribes and tribes within large confederacies or leagues, of
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