The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths

An examination of the craft of silversmithing among the Navaho and Pueblo Indians, based on museum inspections, field work, interviews and a brief apprenticeship to a Navaho silversmith. Adair aims to relate the art to its social framework as well as provide an analysis of the economic aspects. Probably no Native American handicrafts are more widely admired than Navajo weaving and Navajo and Pueblo silver work. This book, which is now in its third large printing, contains the most important and complete account of Indian jewelry fashioned by the Navajo, the Zuni, the Hopi, and other Pueblo peoples. ""With the care of a meticulous and thorough scholar, the author has told the story of his several years' investigation of jewelry making among the Southwestern Indians,"" says The Dallas Times Herald. ""So richly decorative are the plates he uses ... that the conscientious narrative is surrounded by an atmosphere of genuinely exciting visual experience."" John Adair is a trained ethnologist who has lived and worked among these Indians. To prepare his book, Mr. Adair made an exhaustive examination of the principal museum collections of Navajo and Pueblo silver work, both early and modem, in Santa Fe, Colorado Springs, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. He visited trading posts in the Indian country and examined and photographed silver on the pawn racks and in important private collections. He lived for a time among the Navajo, watched them make their jewelry, and actually learned to work silver himself in the hogan of one of the leading artisans, Tom Burnsides. Many of the photographs he made at the time are used as illustrations in this book. He spent months among the Indians in New Mexico and Arizona and became personally acquainted with many of their silversmiths. Later,…