Jewellery and Adornment: What They Made and Wore

Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending

How to read this entry: Documented fact = archaeological record, museum collection record, or published scholarship (Sources). Tradition — the people's own account = oral history or Indigenous-organisation teaching, labelled as such. Debated / Claim = disputed point. No restricted meanings beyond the published record are described; where a meaning is held within a community, this entry records only that it exists. Scope note: a history in time — deep antiquity, the exchange eras, contact-era transformations, continuance. Contact-era materials (silver, glass beads, brass) are labelled as such. Copper at full depth is in the companion Crafts entry; here it is ornament level only, consistent with its dates. Wampum's trade economy in full is in the companion Trade entry.

Deep Antiquity

• Documented fact: Drilled shell, bone and stone beads, pendants and ear ornaments appear in Archaic burials millennia before contact, and marine shell far inland proves exchange networks moving adornment materials over hundreds of kilometres. Jewellery marked status, kinship, achievement and mourning, and strung valuables also served as exchange media — the shell-money traditions below (Pleger & Stoltman, 2008; Clarke Historical Museum, 2018; NEHGS, n.d.).

Shell I: Marine-Shell Gorgets of the Mississippian World

• Material and form. Documented fact: Mississippian gorgets — flat, perforated pendants worn at the chest or in headdresses — were cut principally from lightning whelk shell from the Gulf Coast and carried inland to centres on the Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Ohio rivers (Texas Beyond History, n.d.; Oklahoma History Center collections, reported in The Past, 2021).
• The Spiro record. Documented fact: At Spiro Mounds, Oklahoma (c. 800–1450 CE; Craig Mound chiefly c. 1200–1450 CE), 1930s commercial digging and later work recovered hundreds of engraved gorgets and cups, with copper plates, pearl-bead necklaces, stone earspools and shell-inlaid wood — among the richest pre-contact adornment assemblages in North America. Much was looted and dispersed before protection (Texas Beyond History, n.d.; Oklahoma Historical Society, n.d.).
• Engraved iconography — at the published level. Documented fact: Gorgets bear costumed figures, raptorial birds, serpents, spiders, hands, crosses and swirling motifs, in named regional styles (Texas Beyond History, n.d.). Scholarly interpretation: the hand-and-eye motif is interpreted as linked to the night sky and a portal between worlds, and long-nosed / short-nosed maskettes as the Hero Twins of later narratives (The Past, 2021). Older literature called this the "Southern Cult" / Southeastern Ceremonial Complex; current scholarship speaks of a shared iconographic sphere among Cahokia, Spiro, Etowah and Moundville. Debated / Claim: Spiro's linguistic identity — Caddoan most often proposed — remains unresolved (Texas Beyond History, n.d.).
• Mask gorgets and continuance. Documented fact: Small whelk-shell human faces, including the Tennessee–Cumberland "weeping eye" form, were worn as pendants in high-status burials including Hixon (published museum records; flagged below). The gorget form itself survived into the contact era remade in silver (Museum of Anthropology, UBC, n.d.).

Shell II: Wampum in the Northeast

• What it is. Documented fact: Wampum beads are small cylindrical (earlier also discoidal) shell beads: white from the columella of the channeled whelk, purple from the dark hinge edge of the quahog clam. Purple shell is scarcer per clam, and purple beads carried higher historic value (NEHGS, n.d.; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, n.d.).
• Production as documented. Documented fact: Before metal tools, beads were chipped, ground on stone and drilled with stone drills; pre-contact sites yield mainly small disc beads, while cylindrical beads in quantity followed European metal drills. Coastal Narragansett and Pequot makers are named in the colonial record as principal producers supplying inland nations (Hood Museum, Dartmouth, n.d.; NEHGS, n.d.).
• Adornment, record, diplomacy. Documented fact: Strung wampum was worn as necklaces, collars and bracelets; woven into belts, its patterns served, with trained keepers and spoken recitation, as records of laws, treaties and council proceedings (Hood Museum, Dartmouth, n.d.; Onondaga Nation, n.d.). Tradition — the people's own account: the Hiawatha Belt is held as the record of the Confederacy's founding under the Great Law of Peace, and the Two Row Wampum (Kaswentha) — two parallel purple rows on white — records the early-17th-century Dutch agreement as canoe and ship travelling side by side without steering one another (Onondaga Nation, n.d.). Belt meanings are carried by their keepers; only published teaching is recorded here.
• Contact-era transformation — stated plainly. Documented fact: In the 17th century Dutch and English colonists adopted wampum as fur-trade currency; Massachusetts Bay recognised it as legal tender in the 1640s–50s. European drills and later settler manufactories in New Jersey increased supply; overproduction and glass / porcelain imitations contributed to its collapse as currency by the later 17th–18th centuries, while diplomatic and ceremonial use continued. Belts remain in council use, historic belts were repatriated to Onondaga and other keepers in the late 20th century, and artists again cut wampum by hand (NEHGS, n.d.; Onondaga Nation, n.d.).

Shell III: Dentalium on the Pacific Slope

• Source. Documented fact: Dentalium (Antalis pretiosa) is a slender, naturally hollow tusk shell harvested from deep water off western Vancouver Island, principally by Nuu-chah-nulth harvesters with specialised gear worked from canoes (Clarke Historical Museum, 2018; Alaska Department of Fish and Game, n.d.).
• Money and ornament together. Documented fact: Strung by length — the standard fathom of roughly 40 shells — dentalium, haiqua in Chinook Jargon, was a widely accepted exchange medium and store of wealth, and was simultaneously worn in necklaces, ear, hair and nose ornaments, dress fringes and sounding dance regalia. Forearm measuring tattoos are recorded on parts of the coast. From its single source it moved north to Alaska, south to California, and inland across the Plains to the Dakotas and Great Lakes, appearing on Lakota and Dakota dresses far from salt water; interior recipients called it "Iroquois shell," assuming an eastern origin (Clarke Historical Museum, 2018; Nuytten, 2008, as cited in Knowing Home; flagged below). European and Hudson's Bay traders imported more in the 18th–19th centuries; its currency role faded with the cash economy, while regalia use continues (Clarke Historical Museum, 2018).

Copper Ornaments of the Great Lakes (Ornament Level)

See the companion Crafts entry for mining, cold-hammering and annealing, and the dating debate at full depth.

• Old Copper ornaments. Documented fact: In the western Great Lakes, Archaic-period peoples of the Old Copper tradition (conventionally c. 4000–1000 BCE) worked native Lake Superior copper by hammering and annealing — never smelting — into beads, bracelets, crescent ornaments, pendants and rings, frequently deposited in burials (Martin & Pleger, 1999; Pleger & Stoltman, 2008; Museum of Ontario Archaeology, n.d.). Debated / Claim: claims extending copper working earlier than c. 4000 BCE are actively debated; the range above is the published consensus range.
• Hopewell and Mississippian copper. Documented fact: Hopewell (c. 100 BCE–400 CE) and Mississippian (c. 900 CE–contact) artisans hammered Great Lakes copper into sheet for earspools, breastplates, gorgets and the repoussé plates of Cahokia, Etowah and Spiro, deposited overwhelmingly in elite mortuary contexts (Museum of Ontario Archaeology, n.d.; Texas Beyond History, n.d.).
• Contact-era note — stated plainly. Documented fact: From the 17th century, European brass and smelted copper kettles were cut up and reworked by Indigenous smiths into tinkling cones, beads and ornaments — a contact-era material, metallurgically distinct from native copper and distinguished from it in laboratory analysis (published archaeometallurgy summaries; Crafts entry).

Turquoise of the Southwest

• Mosaic tradition. Documented fact: Turquoise was worked in the Southwest for some two thousand years. Hohokam artisans of southern Arizona produced turquoise mosaics — shaped tesserae set in adhesive on shell, stone or wood — by the early centuries CE, and Ancestral Pueblo artisans carried the technique to its greatest scale, combining turquoise with shell, jet, argillite and, later, coral (Museum of Indian Arts and Culture [MIAC], Turquoise, Water, Sky, n.d.).
• Chaco-era turquoise as the record states it. Documented fact: Chaco Canyon (florescence c. 850–1150 CE) has yielded turquoise unmatched elsewhere in the pre-contact Americas — tens of thousands of pieces at Pueblo Bonito alone, with total Chaco assemblages commonly cited around 200,000 pieces, worked in canyon workshops into beads, pendants and inlay (National Park Service, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, n.d.; MIAC, n.d.). The exact total depends on fragment counting and is flagged below.
• Sources — a corrected record. Documented fact: Cerrillos, New Mexico, was long assumed to be Chaco's near-exclusive source. Isotope sourcing since 2014 shows a multi-source supply instead: Pueblo Bonito drew heavily on Cerrillos, other great houses on sources in present Nevada, Colorado, California and Arizona (Hull et al., 2014; Thibodeau et al., 2018). Debated / Claim (largely resolved against the older claim): Tenochtitlan and Mixtec-style mosaic tiles match Mesoamerican, not Southwestern, geology — a Southwest-to-Tenochtitlan pipeline is not supported (Thibodeau et al., 2018).
• Continuance. Documented fact: Pueblo lapidaries, Santo Domingo (Kewa) heishi and inlay workers prominently among them, maintained the work into the historic period; in the Depression era Santo Domingo makers substituted battery-case plastic and phonograph-record vinyl for jet in mosaic and "Thunderbird" necklaces when mine turquoise was scarce — a documented substitution now itself collected as historic work (MIAC, n.d.).

Silverwork I: Haudenosaunee Trade Silver (Contact-Era)

• A contact-era material — stated plainly. Documented fact: Silver had no pre-contact Northeastern source. From the late 17th century, and at scale c. 1760–1820s, ornaments of coin silver made by European and Euro-American smiths in Montreal, Quebec, New England and Philadelphia were traded and presented diplomatically to Haudenosaunee and other Eastern nations (Museum of Anthropology, UBC, n.d.; Beauchamp, 1903).
• The brooch at the centre. Documented fact: Brooches were the most numerous form — circular and heart-shaped, including the Scottish "Luckenbooth" crowned heart — worn in rows across the chest, in the hair, and on clothing and cradleboards, alongside silver gorgets, armbands, ear bobs, crosses and rings (Museum of Anthropology, UBC, n.d.; Beauchamp, 1903). Tradition — the people's own account: Haudenosaunee makers record that the crowned heart was read as an owl, a night-protection amulet, and that an engagement brooch was later pinned to a child's cradleboard for protection (Sapling & Flint, Six Nations, n.d., contemporary Haudenosaunee maker source).
• Indigenous smiths. Documented fact: By the 18th century Haudenosaunee smiths were themselves accomplished silversmiths with their own tools and engraved conventions. A. C. Parker (1910) documented the craft and feared its decline; instead it continued and revived strongly in the later 20th century (Parker, 1910, as summarised in Sapling & Flint, n.d.).

Silverwork II: Diné (Navajo) Silversmithing and Zuni Inlay

• A documented beginning. Documented fact: Diné silversmithing is a 19th-century, contact-era art. Atsidi Sani ("Old Smith") is named in the record as the first Diné silversmith, learning ironwork then silverwork from a Mexican smith in the 1850s (c. 1853 in many accounts) and teaching his sons and others. The transmission was Mexican/Spanish platero smithing; early work — bridles, buckles, buttons, plain bracelets — was made from melted coin silver (Adair, 1944; Brooklyn Museum, n.d.).
• Turquoise meets silver. Documented fact: Turquoise, worn as beads and pendants long before silver, was first set in Diné silver around 1880. The concha belt, squash-blossom necklace with crescent naja pendant (a form of Spanish/Moorish antecedent transmitted via Mexican and Plains use; deeper symbolic claims are later attributions, flagged below), sand-cast and stamped work, and cluster and row styles followed (Adair, 1944; Brooklyn Museum, n.d.; Baxter, 2000).
• Trading-post era. Documented fact: From the 1880s–1900s, traders including J. L. Hubbell at Ganado and J. B. Moore at Crystal, and the Fred Harvey Company, supplied turquoise and commercial silver, promoted tourist designs, and marketed Diné silver nationally; pawn — jewellery held as collateral — was central to the Diné silver economy well into the 20th century (Adair, 1944; Baxter, 2000).
• Zuni inlay — at the published level. Documented fact: Zuni (A:shiwi) lapidaries learned silversmithing in the 1870s–1890s; Keneshde is named as the first Zuni smith to set turquoise in silver, c. 1890, often in early Diné-smith / Zuni-setter collaboration (Baxter, 2000; Bassman, 1992). Zuni makers then developed channel inlay (Juan De Dios credited by 1920), mosaic and pictorial inlay in turquoise, jet, shell and coral — Knife Wing and Sunface figures among them — and 1930s–40s cluster, needlepoint and petit-point work, with trader C. G. Wallace supplying and marketing (Baxter, 2000; Bassman, 1992). Figure meanings beyond the published record are Pueblo-held, recorded here as existing only.
• Continuance. Documented fact: Diné, Zuni, Hopi (overlay, developed in the 1940s) and Pueblo silversmithing are living, artist-signed arts, centred in family workshops and markets including Santa Fe Indian Market (founded 1922) (Baxter, 2000; MIAC, n.d.).

Inuit Ivory, Bone and Antler Adornment

• Materials. Documented fact: Where metal and wood were scarce, adornment was carved from walrus ivory, bone, caribou antler, teeth and, in places, fossil mammoth ivory — the materials of tools, worked to the same standard (Mathiassen, 1927; National Museum of Ireland, n.d.).
• Labrets. Documented fact: Labrets (lip plugs) were worn by men, and in some western Arctic and Alaskan communities also by women, below the lip or at the mouth corners, enlarged over a lifetime, in ivory, bone, stone and coal, from "novice" forms to plugs over 5 cm. Distribution was regional — Alaska and the Mackenzie Delta, not universal in Inuit Nunangat (Mathiassen, 1927; National Museum of Ireland, n.d., AE:1890.960). One 1860s–80s Dublin ivory labret is inlaid with a blue glass bead — a contact-era material in an Indigenous form. The reading that paired labrets made the wearer resemble a walrus is scholarly interpretation (Peabody Institute label, 2005).
• Combs, beads, amulets — named as record. Documented fact: The record includes incised ivory combs, ivory and tooth beads, hair ornaments, and small carved bear, bird and human figures (Mathiassen, 1927). Amulets worn or sewn to clothing are named throughout the ethnographic record (Boas, 1888; Rasmussen, 1929); their specific meanings are community-held, recorded here as existing only. Carving continues today, within modern walrus-ivory and narwhal-tusk trade rules (Government of Canada / CITES, n.d.).

The Bead Economies: Glass Beads Arrive (Contact-Era)

• Arrival — stated plainly. Documented fact: Glass beads are a contact-era material. Venetian and later Bohemian beads reached the East Coast with 16th–17th-century trade, the Plains by about 1700 through Indigenous networks ahead of Europeans, and Alaska with 18th-century Russian and maritime trade (Illinois State Museum, n.d.; William & Mary Anthropology, n.d.; National Park Service, Lake Clark, 2014).
• Incorporation into older design languages. Documented fact: Makers first executed existing patterns in the new material: early Plains beadwork follows quillwork, tattooing and painted-parfleche geometry, and Woodlands work carried older symbols — Thunderbird, Underwater Panther, Horned Serpent among them — into glass. Steel needles and trade cloth, arriving with the beads, made embroidery faster than quill preparation (William & Mary Anthropology, n.d.; Alberta Historic Places, 2018).
• What changed. Documented fact: Over the 18th–19th centuries glass largely displaced shell, bone and quill beads — almost entirely replacing quillwork in parts of the Subarctic — while quillwork never wholly disappeared and has been revived. Floral styles developed by Northeastern and Great Lakes women, partly through Ursuline teaching from the 17th century, spread west with the fur trade. In the reservation era beadwork became for many Plains families both a primary art and income. Because bead types changed over time, glass beads date contact-era sites; no glass-bead work is pre-contact (Illinois State Museum, n.d.; William & Mary Anthropology, n.d.; National Park Service, Lake Clark, 2014).

Tattooing and Paint

• Documented record. Documented fact: Tattooing was practised across the Americas before contact — evidenced by tattooed remains, archaeological implements and consistent early European descriptions — marking maturity, achievement, kinship, mourning and protection in the published record, with women's chin and facial tattooing documented from the Arctic to California (Krutak, 2014). Inuit women's tattoos were applied by hand-poking and skin-stitching with soot-darkened thread (Krutak, 2014). The three-line "111" chin tattoo of Hupa, Yurok, Karuk and neighbouring peoples' women is documented in photographs, museum records and oral history (University of California Davis, California Model Curriculum, n.d.).
• Paint. Documented fact: Face and body paint — red ochre and other mineral pigments, charcoal and, in the contact era, traded vermilion — is documented in early accounts and burial archaeology from the Archaic onward, for ceremony, mourning, warfare and festivity (Krutak, 2014). Pigment rarely survives, so this record rests heavily on ethnohistoric description (flagged below).
• Suppression-era losses — documented. Documented fact: From the 19th century, missionary condemnation and the residential / boarding school systems suppressed tattooing with language and ceremony; in many nations practice ceased for generations and technique was lost with the last tattooed elders, surviving in photographs, collections and family memory (Krutak, 2014; UC Davis, n.d.). Tradition — the people's own account: contemporary artists describe the 21st-century hand-poke and skin-stitch revival as a practice that "slept" and has been re-awakened, in Iñupiaq artist Marjorie Tahbone's reported words (published interviews; flagged below). Revived marks' meanings are the wearers' own and are not catalogued here.

Continuance

• Documented fact: Every tradition above is practised today by named, living artists, taught within families and tribal programmes, and worn as both art and identity (MIAC, n.d.; NEHGS, n.d.; Onondaga Nation, n.d.).

Sources

• Adair, John (1944). The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths. University of Oklahoma Press.
• Alaska Department of Fish and Game (n.d.). "Shells as Money," Sounds Wild.
• Alberta Historic Places / Government of Alberta (2018). "Beading the Way: Adornment and the Quest for Cultural Survival."
• Bassman, Theda (1992). Zuni Jewelry. Schiffer.
• Baxter, Paula A. (2000). Encyclopedia of Native American Jewelry. Oryx Press.
• Beauchamp, William M. (1903). Metallic Ornaments of the New York Indians. New York State Museum.
• Boas, Franz (1888). The Central Eskimo. Bureau of American Ethnology.
• Brooklyn Museum (n.d.). Collection label, Navajo Wrist Guard (86.224.158).
• Clarke Historical Museum (2018). "Dentalium" mini-exhibit.
• Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (n.d.). Native American Art Teacher Resources: Wampum.
• Hull, Sharon et al. (2014). Isotopic sourcing studies of Chaco Canyon turquoise.
• Illinois State Museum (n.d.). "Trade Beads" online exhibit.
• Krutak, Lars (2014). Tattoo Traditions of Native North America. LM Publishers.
• Martin, Terrence & Pleger, Thomas (1999); Pleger, Thomas & Stoltman, James (2008). Old Copper Complex studies.
• Mathiassen, Therkel (1927). Archaeological Collections from the Western Eskimo. Fifth Thule Expedition.
• Museum of Anthropology, UBC (n.d.). Reciprocal Research Network record, Haudenosaunee silver brooch (D3.151).
• Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe (n.d.). Turquoise, Water, Sky exhibition site, incl. Depression-Era Mosaics.
• Museum of Ontario Archaeology (n.d.). "Copper in the Archaic."
• National Museum of Ireland (n.d.). Ethnographical Collection record, labret AE:1890.960.
• National Park Service (2014). Lake Clark, "Beauty and the Bead"; (n.d.) Chaco Culture National Historical Park summaries.
• New England Historic Genealogical Society (n.d.). Wampum Belt Exhibit.
• Nuytten, Phil (2008). On dentalium in the Pacific fur trade, as cited in Knowing Home (LibreTexts).
• Oklahoma Historical Society (n.d.). Spiro Mounds materials; The Past (2021), "Spiro: Renewing the World."
• Onondaga Nation (n.d.). "Two Row Wampum Belt — Guswenta"; Wampum pages.
• Parker, Arthur C. (1910). On Iroquois silverwork, as summarised in Sapling & Flint (n.d.), Six Nations.
• Peabody Institute of Archaeology (2005). Exhibit label, Inuit labrets.
• Rasmussen, Knud (1929). Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos. Fifth Thule Expedition.
• Texas Beyond History / Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (n.d.). "Spiro and the Arkansas Basin."
• Thibodeau, Alyson M. et al. (2018). "Was Aztec and Mixtec Turquoise Mined in the American Southwest?" Science Advances 4(6).
• University of California Davis (n.d.). California Model Curriculum: "Reviving Tradition: Women's 111 Tattoos in Northern California Tribes."
• William & Mary, Anthropology (n.d.). Beadwork collections context pages.

Flagged claims / weakest-sourced points in this entry: (1) Spiro iconographic meanings (hand-and-eye, Hero Twins) are scholarly interpretation, labelled in line, not settled readings. (2) Spiro's linguistic identity is unresolved. (3) Old Copper's c. 4000 BCE start is the conventional range; earlier claims are debated (Crafts entry). (4) Chaco turquoise totals (~200,000) vary by source and fragment counting; the order of magnitude is the documented point. (5) The naja's route is documented; deeper symbolic meanings in popular literature are later attributions. (6) "Iroquois shell" for dentalium rests on published ethnographic summary, not a single primary text quoted here. (7) Body paint rests disproportionately on ethnohistoric description, pigment rarely surviving. (8) The walrus-resemblance reading of labrets (museum label, 2005) and the "slept / re-awakened" revival wording (press interviews) are attributed accordingly, not peer-reviewed. (9) Keneshde's c. 1890 date and Juan De Dios's 1920 channel-inlay date rest on trader-record tradition compiled in Baxter (2000) and Bassman (1992) — the standard published dates, not independently dated by hallmarked pieces. (10) The Tennessee–Cumberland mask-gorget dating range varies across museum records and should be verified against a named collection record at publication.