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Going back to as early as 300 BC, near the Salt and Gila rivers in what is now southern Arizona, the Hohokam Culture had its beginnings. The making of personal objects for adornment had been in existence for some time and was a major ‘industry’ among the people indigenous to the area. All of the members of the tribes wore a variety of jewelry fashioned from bone, shell, turquoise, and other materials. These included bracelets, pendants, earrings, rings, and beads. Jewelry, then, as it is now, was clearly a highly valued commodity.
Sea shells were used quite often. One of the most preferred shells that the indigenous peoples used to fashion their jewelry was a marine bivalve called Glycymeris. It was brought in to the area by either trade with the population that lived in the area surrounding the Gulf of California or in travels to that region to collect the shells themselves. After the shell halves were separated, the central portion of one of the shell halves were cut or broken out. This would leave the remaining rim, like a large ‘O’. The outside edges would then be ground down to make a fine bracelet. As time went on many of these bracelets began to show distinctive, finely etched geometric designs on them.
Pendants and charms were also common from these early times as simple pieces of turquoise, and/or carved bone, or simple shells that had holes drilled into them. Elaborately carved figurines soon appeared, such as the Hohokam's frog, with eyes of inlaid turquoise. Early techniques of creating jewelry also included overlaying a shell or piece of bone with beautifully shaped pieces of turquoise or other stones to create a mosaic, which was held together with pine pitch.
From the Hohokam, jewelry-making techniques and materials spread quickly to the Anasazi people to the north and the Mogollon people to the east. Shells were imported from the Pacific, these included the abalone and spiny oyster. These two shells were added as raw materials to be used for the fashioning of jewelry and remain favorites to this day. Multi-colored stones and minerals have become widely used. Stones of argillite, banded travertine, and many other semi-precious minerals were used with great skill to make objects of adornment. From those ancient times until the present, all types of jewelry has been imported, made, traded, and worn throughout the Southwest for various purposes. Copper bells imported from the northern regions of Mexico, appear to have been worn only for ceremonial dances. Of all ancient jewelry, the most common were beads, made from bone, shell, clay, various stones, and turquoise, all of which had to be hand drilled and ground down into the desired shape.
Drilling such materials, several of which were very difficult to cut and drill, was of course a time-consuming process. The process of hand drilling was accomplished by one of three methods; the first involved having a drill point attached to a straight shaft and rotated back and forth between the palms of both hands. A more efficient method was something called a ‘pump’ drill, in which the vertical pumping of a crossbar caused leather ropes to unwind and wind up, thus turning the drill bit. Lastly, was the ‘bow drill’, it was similar to the pump drill, but used a sideways motion of a bow with a bowstring looped around the vertical shaft to produce the drill to rotate.
Many of these and other old jewelry styles and jewelry-making methods are still in use today. Then in the sixteenth century the Spanish introduced the European form of silversmithing to the native tribes. These techniques influenced their styles of jewelry-making as has a host of new techniques and materials introduced in the nineteenth and twenty centuries. But in any case, whether using the ‘old’ methods of fashioning jewelry or by using some of the newer techniques, there still remains an unbroken chain of excellence linking the earliest crude pendants of the ancient people of the Salt River to the array of Southwest Indian jewelry that we have available to us today.
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