While contemporary Indian jewelry has followed many paths, the work most closely linked to the jewelry creations of ancestral Puebloans is the stone and shell necklaces, pendants, rings and bracelets produced at Santa Domingo Pueblo in New Mexico. Ray Lovato’s heishi necklaces and flat stone earrings provide one of the best modern examples of how ancient Puebloan jewelry looked.
When stone merchants come to the village, competition for turquoise and other materials is fierce. Using five-gallon cans for chairs, Santa Domingo women arrange themselves around tables piled with stones and shells to individually pick the raw materials they will shape into their jewelry.
Discoidal bead necklaces known as heishi require rough-cut stones which are first drilled, usually with electric drills and grinding machines, and then strung on a wire. Next the artist holds both ends of a wire strand and carefully draws the beads back and forth across a grinding wheel or other rough surface, shaping the heishi. The diameter of the beads can be very fine or more substantial. The artist then strings the beads on a softer cord such as cotton. Formed this way, good Santa Domingo heishi should feel uniform and smooth to the touch when running your fingers along the beads.
Be aware that some stone merchants provide polished and drilled stones with foreign-made shell beads for stringing. The unscrupulous will simply string these materials and offer the result as authentic handmade jewelry. Beware of necklaces where beads do not fit into each other and feel rough when you run your hands down the string of disks. They do not demonstrate the fit of a proper Santa Domingo necklace.
Mosaic inlay is still prevalent among several families at Santa Domingo Pueblo. Traditional backings - wood or shell - gave way to experimental materials such as phonograph records or car batteries in the early half of the twentieth century. Today shell is widely used as a backing. Santa Domingo artists may leave the shells in their natural form or trim them to a certain shape. As with other types of Puebloan mosaic inlay, the artist then creates a design or pattern on the backing with many varied-sized stones. Santa Domingo mosaic work tends to be more abstract in design than the geometric and pictorial mosaics of Zuni artists.
