Rather than attempting to equate charmstones with shell beads as a reliable factor in determining temporal sequences, it seems useful to suggest that charmstones are uniquely representational of special relationships between cultures of two or more localities, no matter how distantly separated they may be from each other. Shell beads and ornaments can distinguish reliably certain social usages or vogues at a given phase in time within a "complex whole" (Bennyhoff 1986:68). Geographic distributional patterns of a whole range of shell bead and charmstone types resemble each other, and the latter especially point to some sort of spiritual unity with a wide area in central California.