Note: a shorter version of the foregoing appeared as a two part article in the August 2014 and September 2014 issues of the Indian Trader newspaper.
Sometimes it’s important to take a step back and look at the events preceding a particular situation to understand how it came about. For hallmarks used by deceased American Indian silversmiths, it can be a road map to discovering where misattributions began. The following is a complete chronology of books that depict hallmarks used by American Indian silversmiths.
Over forty years ago, in December 1972, Margaret Wright’s groundbreaking book Hopi Silver: The History and Hallmarks of Hopi Silversmithing was published by Northland Press. It included the first visual representations of hallmarks used by Hopi silversmiths, over 150 marks were depicted in the first edition. Margaret Wright’s research started in the archives of the Museum of Northern Arizona and took her to the Hopi mesas where she recorded on sheets of copper the hallmarks used by all of the living silversmiths she could find.
In 1975 Barbara and Ed Bell published volume one of Zuni: The Art and the People with volumes two and three following on its heels. These volumes each profiled approximately fifty silversmithing families then working at Zuni and either discussed or illustrated their hallmarks.
Mark Bahti’s excellent book Collecting Southwestern Native American Jewelry was released in 1980 and included twenty-two pages of hallmarks used by American Indian silversmiths, for the first time from more than a single tribal group, as well as a page of shop marks.
Also in 1980 Gordon Levy published Who’s Who in Zuni Jewelry profiling sixty-eight silversmiths working at the time.
In 1989 Barton Wright, in association with the Indian Arts and Crafts Association, published Hallmarks of the Southwest with 140 pages of biographical entries and illustrated hallmarks for American Indian artists, mainly silversmiths.
These five volumes laid the groundwork for the current understanding of American Indian jewelry hallmarks.
Margaret and Barton Wright’s books have both been revised and expanded over the years as more information became available.
A Second Edition of Hopi Silver was released in October 1973, with a Third Edition published April 1982, which included additional hallmarks; the first three editions of this book featured blue covers.
The Fourth Edition of Hopi Silver came out in 1982, ten years after the original. This expanded edition, with a new burgundy color cover, contained additional pages of hallmarks.
Then in 1998 came the Fifth Revised Edition of Hopi Silver, with a complete design makeover of the contents and a cover featuring Hopi silversmith Pierce Kewanwytewa. It not only included over 100 new hallmarks but also an index of hallmarks by type, and new images of never before published jewelry (full disclosure: some of that jewelry was from our personal collection).
After Northland Press folded the Fifth Edition of Hopi Silver: The History and Hallmarks of Hopi Silversmithing was reissued in 2003 by University of New Mexico Press with a new cover.
Also notable in 2003 was the publication of Hopi Silver in Japan with a completely different cover but retaining the same information and interior photos as the English language edition.
Barton Wright’s Hallmarks of the Southwest was significantly expanded for the second edition in 2000, and this has become the industry standard for hallmark identification. It remains in print almost two decades later.
In 2011 Bille Hougart self-published The Little Book of Marks on Southwestern Silver: Silversmiths, Designers, Guilds & Traders. The inclusion of actual images of hallmarks makes this book stand out from Hallmarks of the Southwest. However, many of the errors that occurred in Wright’s book are carried on in this volume.
Hougart released a revised edition in 2014 with the publication of Native American and Southwestern Silver Hallmarks.
Gregory and Angie Schaaf published the first volume of the American Indian Jewelry series in 2004 with updated volumes 2 and 3 appearing in 2013 and 2014 respectively.
American Indian Jewelry I: 1,200 Artist Biographies
American Indian Jewelry II: A-L: 1,800 Artist Biographies 
American Indian Jewelry III: M-Z
These are excellent resources for the work and hallmarks of living artists, but are unfortunately replete with errors for many of the deceased silversmiths; errors which, in our opinions, have muddied the waters. For instance, in the first volume they write that Navajo silversmith Mark Chee, “worked as a bench smith for Frank Patania,” at the Thunderbird Shop. However our research found no link between Chee and the Thunderbird Shop, though we could confirm employment in Santa Fe with Julius Gans at Southwest Arts & Crafts before WWII and with Packard’s at Chaparral Trading Post after the war.
This is not intended as a shameless plug, but omitting Reassessing Hallmarks of Native Southwest Jewelry: Artists, Traders, Guilds, and the Government might seem like an oversight on our part. This was the biggest project we have ever undertaken, and are grateful for the opportunity to make crucial corrections; we also hope the book opens the door to further research.
Before the publication of Hopi Silver in 1972 the individual artists received little attention from the buying public. Therefore it was generally believed that Indian jewelry wasn’t hallmarked before the 1970s. This mistaken perception persists to this day, as some collectors and dealers are adamant that if a piece is hallmarked it must have been made after the 1970s because they are convinced artists did not sign their work before that time.
Yet individual silversmiths began to sign their work in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Navajo Fred Peshlakai has often been cited as one of the first silversmiths to hallmark his work. But it has also been documented that Juan De Dios of Zuni Pueblo used a chisel to stamp his initials on the back of some pieces in the late 1920s. Also Grant Jenkins, a Hopi silversmith, signed some of his pieces during his short career from 1924 until his death in 1933. Perhaps prompted by their Anglo employers, many silversmiths who worked in urban areas began signing their work in the 1930s, using symbols or their initials as identifying marks.
Most of these early hallmarks were not documented at the time because jewelry was usually considered as little more than curio items. This is why the research done in the 1970s and 1980s is so valuable today; it would be nearly impossible to reconstruct the information that was gathered three and four decades ago. Not only did it call attention to individual silversmiths for the first time, it also laid a foundation for further research.
Barton Wright was well aware his book contained mistakes, as he stated in the introduction to his first edition of Hallmarks of the Southwest:
Foremost among the points that must be kept in mind is the fact that this is not an exhaustive work but one, it is hoped, to which additional information may be added. Secondly the fact that there are errors in the data is fully recognized. However the impossibility of removing such errata is apparent when it may require a year to check out a single mark. The elimination of these mistakes requires the cooperation of craftsmen and those who work with them.
It’s unfortunate that later publications did not heed Barton’s warning of the mistakes in his book, because as Mark Bahti has observed, “Over time some writers have simply repeated what earlier writers said about artists, and in doing so, they unwittingly, even carelessly, repeated incorrect information. Factual information about some artists that was generally known in the 1940s and 1950s, even the 1960s, began to dissipate in a wave of digital repetition of errors.”
Some of the more pervasive mistakes in Hallmarks of the Southwest were misconstruing Austin Wilson for Ike Wilson (we blame C.G. Wallace for starting that confusion), attributing Ambrose Roanhorse’s stick horse figure hallmark to Fred Peshlakai (with the legs erroneously forming the initials FP), and the unfortunate mash-up of Ambrose Roanhorse and Ambrose Lincoln into one individual. While Mark Bahti in his 1980 book correctly identified the hallmark of a capital A in a keystone figure to Ambrose Lincoln, Wright later misconstrued these two Navajo silversmiths as the same individual who used the A in a keystone mark. Roanhorse actually used a stick figure of a horse whose legs formed the initials AR. This error has caused the work of Ambrose Lincoln, often consisting of cast pieces with Zuni style inlay, to be sold and priced as if the master silversmith Ambrose Roanhorse had made it.
It’s not hard to imagine how these mistakes came about in a time before the Internet. In the 1970s and 1980s the only way to communicate with traders and artists was by writing letters and hoping for a reply, or by traveling to their business or residence. As Barton wrote in his introduction, quoted above, it may have required a year or more for verification of a single hallmark. It was difficult, mind-numbing research, and one incorrect attribution from a trader with a faulty memory could have been the only attribution available at the time.
These are the kinds of inaccuracies that have haunted Indian jewelry for a very long time. During the past few decades new information has been uncovered, in large part due to the availability of historic documents on the Internet, which have contributed to the broadening of the knowledge of hallmarks applied to Indian jewelry. For instance, it is now possible to properly identify the hallmark used by Navajo silversmith Ike Wilson from a 1942 newspaper article about his accidental death at the hands of his wife Katherine; and by an advertisement placed in a 1976 issue of American Indian Art Magazine that shows Katherine was still using a bow-and-arrow hallmark long after her husbands’ death.
However, there are more corrections still to be uncovered and many unknown hallmarks that need to be identified. We will never cease researching hallmarks, even though our magnum opus has been published, we hope to continue to contribute to the research in the field.
In the summer of 2016 the publication of the Third Edition of Native American and Southwestern Silver Hallmarks, by Bille Hougart, provided the most accurate, reliable and comprehensive hallmark identification guide at that time.
However it was surpassed in March 2019 by the publication of the Fourth Edition, which is even more the most comprehensive, accurate and reliable hallmark reference ever published. Read why the following blog: The Definitive Hallmark Reference Guide and Why You Should Own It.
Postscript: One of the reasons we made a chronology for ourselves of hallmark books is so we could comprehend how accurate each publication might be. For instance with the Zuni books published in the 1970s by the Bells and Levy’s book from 1980, the authors went right to the Zuni artists currently working and asked how they signed. This means they had primary sources and there is no refuting their research. The same for Margaret Wright’s Hopi Silver concerning the artists who were alive during her periods of research, she had primary sources. However, it gets tricky for any researcher of hallmarks when the silversmith is deceased by the time they start their research. Then the researcher must rely on the memory of the artists family members or traders/dealers or the database of museum collections to determine accuracy of hallmark attribution.
Originally published on Goodreads.com December 20,2014, with revisions reflecting current information.