About the Author — Mateo James

Mateo is the name my grandmother's line gave me — Spanish and Yaqui, carried down and kept. I've been at the bench since 2007, working in the Southwestern tradition, and the marks a silversmith leaves have been my study for most of that time.

This directory is a reference, not a storefront. Every bio here is built from documented hallmarks and the published record — Hougart's Native American & Southwestern Silver Hallmarks, Margaret Nickelson Wright's Hopi Silver, and the scholarship of Adair, Bedinger, Rosnek and Stacey, Schaaf, Dubin, and Lowry. Where a mark is unsourced, I say so. Where the paper trail stops, I stop.

I read a hallmark the way a smith reads it: what it's struck into, where it sits, what it tells you and what it can't. A stamp on the back of a cuff is a signature and often a date, and sometimes a lineage — a teacher's hand standing behind a student's. My work here is to render that plainly, credit each maker for what they made, and leave the guesswork out of it.

Of Spanish and Indigenous descent. Southwestern by training. At the bench since 2007.

Sources

The directory is built from the published record. Principal references:

• Bille Hougart — Native American & Southwestern Silver Hallmarks (5th ed.).
• Margaret Nickelson Wright — Hopi Silver: The History and Hallmarks of Hopi Silversmithing (1974; rev. 1998).
• John Adair — The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths (1944).
• Margery Bedinger — Indian Silver: Navajo and Pueblo Jewelers (University of New Mexico Press, 1973).
• Carl Rosnek & Joseph Stacey — Skystone and Silver: The Collector's Book of Southwest Indian Jewelry (Prentice-Hall, 1976).
• Gregory Schaaf — American Indian Jewelry (Vol. I, 2003; continuing A–Z volumes).
• Lois Sherr Dubin — North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment (Harry N. Abrams, 1999).
• Lowry — turquoise and Southwestern jewelry scholarship.

Full annotations: the reference books we use.