United States · Woodcraft / Sporting Equipment
Wooden stick-making tradition (Onondaga, Mohawk, and other Haudenosaunee-language terms vary)
The selection, steaming, bending, and hand-webbing of a single hickory branch into a traditional wooden lacrosse stick for a sport the Haudenosaunee regard as both play and sacred medicine game, now sustained by only a small number of full-process makers after mass production shifted almost entirely to plastic sticks in the 1970s.
Risk level: Endangered · 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-coiled, stone-polished pottery painted with black and orange mineral pigments in geometric designs revived from 14th–17th-century Sikyatki ruins by the Hopi-Tewa potter Nampeyo beginning in the 1890s.
Carving of cottonwood-root figures representing katsina spirits, traditionally given to children as teaching objects and today also produced as fine-art collector pieces, with the range of appropriate subjects governed by religious…
Weft-faced tapestry weaving on a vertical, frameless loom, producing the geometric rugs and blankets that are the Navajo Nation's best-known textile art, still passed mother to daughter within extended families.
Hand-stamped and turquoise-set silver jewelry — concha belts, squash blossom necklaces, bracelets, and bolo ties — developed after Diné smiths learned metalworking from Mexican plateros in the mid-19th century.
Extremely thin-walled, hand-coiled pottery made from clay tempered with ground potsherds, prized for fine geometric and fine-line painted designs and for walls thin enough that a small clay impurity can cause a firing failure.
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…
Ornate wood carving is documented as one of Afghanistan's oldest crafts, decorating private houses, mosques, and furniture for millennia.
The creation of decorative pictorial or geometric surfaces by cutting and fitting precisely shaped pieces of contrasting wood veneers, bone, ivory, or shell into a ground — a tradition centered in Piedmont and associated with the…
The hand-carving of local Bahamian hardwoods — including wild tamarind, horse flesh, lignum vitae, yellow wood, and mahogany — into figurative sculpture, marine-life pieces, and portraits of Bahamian cultural icons, described by…
The carving of Buddhist scripture, prayer-flag designs, and mandala images in mirror-reversed relief onto wooden printing blocks, for mass xylographic printing and publication of sacred texts.
Gorga is the traditional wood carving and painting tradition of the Toba Batak — applied to the exterior and interior of the rumah adat (traditional house) and sopo (rice barn) in complex geometric and zoomorphic relief patterns painted in…
The making of jali — latticed wooden screens built from an ornamental geometric pattern — historically used throughout traditional Kabul domestic and public architecture, with surviving examples concentrated in the Murad Khani and…