Heishe or heishi (pronounced "hee shee") are small disc- or tube-shaped beads made of organic shells or ground and polished stones. They come from the Kewa Pueblo people (formerly Santo Domingo Pueblo) of New Mexico, before the use of metals in jewelry by that people. [1] The name is the word for shell bead in the Eastern Keresan language of the Santo Domingo Indians. [2]
The oldest specimens of heishe date back to around 6000 BCE, although the same technique was used in northern Africa 30,000 years ago, using ostrich eggshell. [2]
Modern heishe beads are commonly mechanically mass-produced; however, some artists still handmake beads. The beads are hand-chipped, with holes drilled through their centers using pointed stones. [2]
A bead is a small, decorative object that is formed in a variety of shapes and sizes of a material such as stone, bone, shell, glass, plastic, wood, or pearl and with a small hole for threading or stringing. Beads range in size from under 1 millimetre (0.039 in) to over 1 centimetre (0.39 in) in diameter.
Jewellery (UK) or jewelry (U.S.) consists of decorative items worn for personal adornment, such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants, bracelets, and cufflinks. Jewellery may be attached to the body or the clothes. From a western perspective, the term is restricted to durable ornaments, excluding flowers for example. For many centuries metal such as gold often combined with gemstones, has been the normal material for jewellery, but other materials such as glass, shells and other plant materials may be used.
The Puebloans or Pueblo peoples, are Native Americans in the Southwestern United States who share common agricultural, material, and religious practices. Among the currently inhabited Pueblos, Taos, San Ildefonso, Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi are some of the best-known. Pueblo people speak languages from four different language families, and each Pueblo is further divided culturally by kinship systems and agricultural practices, although all cultivate varieties of maize.
Sandoval County is located in the U.S. state of New Mexico. As of the 2020 census, the population was 148,834, making it the fourth-most populous county in New Mexico. The county seat is Bernalillo.
Cochiti is a census-designated place (CDP) in Sandoval County, New Mexico, United States. A historic pueblo of the Cochiti people, one of the Keresan Nations, it is part of the Albuquerque Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 528 at the 2010 census. Located 22 miles (35 km) southwest of Santa Fe, the community is listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places.
Kewa Pueblo is a federally-recognized tribe of Native American Pueblo people in northern New Mexico, in Sandoval County southwest of Santa Fe. The pueblo is recorded as the Santo Domingo Pueblo census-designated place by the U.S. Census Bureau, with a population of 2,456 at the 2010 census.
Pueblo music includes the music of the Hopi, Zuni, Taos Pueblo, San Ildefonso, Santo Domingo, and many other Puebloan peoples, and according to Bruno Nettl features one of the most complex Native American musical styles on the continent. Characteristics include common use of hexatonic and heptatonic scales, variety of form, melodic contour, and percussive accompaniment, melodic range averaging between an octave and a twelfth, with rhythmic complexity equal to the Plains Indians musical sub-area.
The Mitchell Museum of the American Indian is a museum in Evanston, Illinois that focuses exclusively on the history, culture and arts of North American native peoples. It is a Core Member of the Chicago Cultural Alliance, a consortium of 25 ethnic museums and cultural centres in Chicago.
Zuni fetishes are small carvings made from primarily stone but also shell, fossils, and other materials by the Zuni people. Within the Zuni community, these carvings serve ceremonial purposes for their creators and depict animals and icons integral to their culture. As a form of contemporary Native American art, they are sold with secular intentions to collectors worldwide. Prior to the establishment of a non-Native market for fetishes, Hopi, Navajo, and other Pueblo peoples, especially at Kewa Pueblo also carved and used fetishes.
Enkapune Ya Muto, also known as Twilight Cave, is a Late Stone Age site on the Mau Escarpment of Kenya. Beads made of perforated ostrich egg shells found at the site have been dated to 40,000 years ago. The beads found at the site represent the early human use of personal ornaments.
Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas encompasses the visual artistic practices of the indigenous peoples of the Americas from ancient times to the present. These include works from South America and North America, which includes Central America and Greenland. The Siberian Yupiit, who have great cultural overlap with Native Alaskan Yupiit, are also included.
Native American jewelry refers to items of personal adornment, whether for personal use, sale or as art; examples of which include necklaces, earrings, bracelets, rings and pins, as well as ketohs, wampum, and labrets, made by one of the Indigenous peoples of the United States. Native American jewelry normally reflects the cultural diversity and history of its makers, but tribal groups have often borrowed and copied designs and methods from other, neighboring tribes or nations with which they had trade, and this practice continues today. Native American tribes continue to develop distinct aesthetics rooted in their personal artistic visions and cultural traditions. Artists may create jewelry for adornment, ceremonies, and display, or for sale or trade. Lois Sherr Dubin writes, "[i]n the absence of written languages, adornment became an important element of Indian communication, conveying many levels of information." Later, jewelry and personal adornment "...signaled resistance to assimilation. It remains a major statement of tribal and individual identity."
The Canyons of the Ancients Visitor Center and Museum located in Dolores, Colorado, is an archaeological museum of Native American pueblo and hunter-gatherer cultures. Two 12th-century archaeological sites, the Escalante and Dominguez Pueblos, at the center were once home to Ancient Pueblo peoples. The museum's permanent and special exhibits display some of the 3 million mostly Ancestral Puebloan artifacts curated at the facility. The center also houses a public research library, educational resources and a museum shop. Wheelchair-accessible facilities include a picnic area and an interpreted nature and cultural trail.
Huichol art broadly groups the most traditional and most recent innovations in the folk art and handcrafts produced by the Huichol people, who live in the states of Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas and Nayarit in Mexico. The unifying factor of the work is the colorful decoration using symbols and designs which date back centuries. The most common and commercially successful products are "yarn paintings" and objects decorated with small commercially produced beads. Yarn paintings consist of commercial yarn pressed into boards coated with wax and resin and are derived from a ceremonial tablet called a neirika. The Huichol have a long history of beading, making the beads from clay, shells, corals, seeds and more and using them to make jewelry and to decorate bowls and other items. The "modern" beadwork usually consists of masks and wood sculptures covered in small, brightly colored commercial beads fastened with wax and resin.
Villalobar de Rioja is a municipality of the Autonomous region of La Rioja, (Spain), with no more than 100 inhabitants. It is located in a privileged location between Santo Domingo de la Calzada and Haro.
Art of the American Southwest is the visual arts of the Southwestern United States. This region encompasses Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of California, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Utah. These arts include architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, and other media, ranging from the ancient past to the contemporary arts of the present day.
Shell jewelry is jewelry that is primarily made from seashells, the shells of marine mollusks. Shell jewelry is a type of shellcraft. One very common form of shell jewelry is necklaces that are composed of large numbers of beads, where each individual bead is the whole shell of a small sea snail. Numerous other varieties of shell jewelry are made, including bracelets and earrings.
The Keres people are one of the Pueblo peoples. They speak English, Keresan languages, and in one pueblo Keresan Sign Language.
The Muisca calendar was a lunisolar calendar used by the Muisca. The calendar was composed of a complex combination of months and three types of years were used; rural years, holy years, and common years. Each month consisted of thirty days and the common year of twenty months, as twenty was the 'perfect' number of the Muisca, representing the total of extremeties; fingers and toes. The rural year usually contained twelve months, but one leap month was added. This month represented a month of rest. The holy year completed the full cycle with 37 months.
Bernalillo Public Schools is a school district headquartered in Bernalillo, New Mexico.