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Nineteenth-century Navajo and Pueblo silver jewelry

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1998 by Paula A. Baxter

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Museums and private collections became the first repositories for pre-commercial Navajo and Pueblo silver jewelry. Some of it was gathered in major ethnographic collecting expeditions between 1875 and 1910, but documentation on the pieces acquired is rare. More typical are observations about objects seen in the field, such as the Navajo proclivity for silver bracelets noted by Edward Palmer of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.(12) He led expeditions to the Southwest from 1876 to 1879. The Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., also led collecting expeditions. Other institutions with significant collections of early Indian silver are the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and the University Museum of the Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. Anthropologists became concerned about privately organized collecting ventures because prime artifacts from the nineteenth century and earlier were being sent abroad or disappearing into private collections.

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Silver jewelry was a problematic category for institutions wanting to collect Indian artifacts because its manufacture had been instigated by contact with non-Indian culture. Those museums that did collect Indian silver made before 1900, known as first-phase jewelry,(13) valued most highly those pieces of unquestionable provenance or those that demonstrated significant changes in design or technique. One of the most important of these collections, now in the Heard Museum in Phoenix, was started in 1899 by Herman Schweizer, a buyer for the Fred Harvey Company. He deliberately began the collection to provide a benchmark for future Indian silver jewelry design. In fact most museums with collections of this silver displayed pre-1900 silver in order to demonstrate its integrity of design and craftsmanship before commercialization overtook it in the twentieth century.

There is a certain irony in the perception that nineteenth-century Navajo and Pueblo silver jewelry, instigated by non-Indians, was a purer form of adornment than its twentieth-century counterpart. The argument is that since this jewelry was made solely for Indian consumers it reflected their true sense of aesthetics better than later pieces that embodied commercial compromises [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED]. Even the changes that came with improved lapidary tools, allowing jewelry makers to embellish pieces with more and smaller stones, were measured according to the standards perceived by Indian arts enthusiasts, and thus consumers, to be genuine native design.

Navajo and Pueblo jewelry of the first thirty years (c. 1868-1900) was known as traditional, a description soon replaced by the term classic. Harry P. Mera at the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, analyzed this jewelry extensively, and his most important book, volume one of Indian Silverwork of the Southwest, published in 1959, molded scholarly opinion and collectors' attitudes. His influence can be seen in subsequent publications that attribute a significant design role to early jewelry.(14)

Nineteenth-century Navajo and Pueblo silver jewelry

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1998 by Paula A. Baxter

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