United States · Musical Instrument Making (Lutherie)
Dulcimore; hog fiddle; music box (regional nicknames vary)
The building of a fretted, hourglass-shaped lap zither played flat across the knees, adapted in the early 19th-century Appalachian Mountains from European scheitholt, langspil, and épinette des Vosges instrument traditions brought by Scotch-Irish and German settlers, and refined into a distinctly American folk instrument with a diatonic fret pattern suited to modal Appalachian ballad tunes.
Risk level: Vulnerable · Not Applicable — the United States is not a State Party to the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage; no US technique can be formally ICH-inscribed regardless of significance.
Hand-forged decorative wrought iron gates, fences, balconies, and window grilles rooted in a documented African and African American blacksmithing tradition brought to the Lowcountry through slavery, later transformed from utilitarian…
The hand-knotting of circular weighted throw nets used by Gullah Geechee fishers to catch shrimp, fish, and crab in Sea Island tidal creeks, a foundational subsistence craft historically often accompanied by work songs sung in the Gullah…
A West African coiling technique carried across the transatlantic slave trade and adapted in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, originating as bulrush fanner baskets used to winnow threshed rice on plantations and evolving, as rice…
An extremely fine miniature coiling technique using horsehair rather than plant fiber for the stitching material, developed by Tohono O'odham weavers as an innovation on older willow, yucca, and devil's-claw basketry, producing baskets…
Three-rod coiled basketry using willow foundation rods and black devil's-claw and red yucca-root splints for pattern, producing burden baskets, deep storage ollas, and trays that are among the most technically demanding coiled basketry…
Matte-on-glossy black pottery achieved through a smothered, oxygen-reduction outdoor firing, developed by Maria and Julian Martinez in the early 20th century after study of ancient black-on-black sherds and now a defining San Ildefonso…
The carving of a cow's horn into the abeng, a side-blown signal horn used by Jamaica's Maroon communities — descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped Spanish and British plantations to form independent free settlements in Jamaica's…
The building of the three-drum Nyabinghi ensemble — the bass (thunder), funde, and repeater (akete) — central to Rastafari ceremonial drumming, from carved or coopered wooden shells headed with natural goatskin.
The sanshin (三線) is Okinawa's three-stringed lute, the ancestor of the mainland shamisen.
The precision watch movement making tradition of Glashütte — the small Saxon town that became Germany's watchmaking center from 1845 when Ferdinand Adolph Lange established his workshop there, and where the Glashütter quality standard…
The Liège gunsmithing tradition and its associated Banc d'Épreuve (proof house) — the most historically significant arms-making center in continental Europe since the 16th century, whose proof house (established 1672, the oldest active…
The automata making tradition of Neuchâtel — specifically in the lineage of Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721–1790), whose three surviving automata (The Draughtsman, The Writer, and The Musician, all at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire Neuchâtel)…