Peru · Metalwork / Goldsmithing / Repoussé and Surface Gilding
No securely documented Moche-language name survives
Moche metalsmiths on Peru's North Coast made large nose ornaments, usually suspended from the nasal septum and often covering part of the mouth, from thin hammered sheets of gold, silver, copper and gilded or silvered copper. Surviving works show exceptional control of cutting, repoussé, embossing, openwork, engraving, mechanical tab-joining, soldering and hammer-welded joins. At sites such as Loma Negra, copper sheets could receive extremely thin gold or silver surfaces through electrochemical replacement plating; Moche workshops also used depletion gilding/silvering of copper-rich precious-metal alloys. Nose ornaments combined color, reflectivity and movement with status and identity, sometimes joining gold and silver in the same object and adding stone or shell inlay.
Risk level: Extinct · Not applicable as a living ICH element; Moche archaeological heritage is protected under Peruvian cultural-heritage law
The hand-carving of alabaster (calcium sulfate), known locally as piedra de Huamanga, into devotional religious sculptures, miniature nativity scenes, and decorative reliefs.
The communal harvesting of table salt from a terraced network of thousands of shallow, hand-built evaporation pools cut into a mountainside in Peru's Sacred Valley, fed by a naturally salt-rich spring.
The carving of locally quarried stone by families of stone carvers in Huambocancha Alta and the Porcón area, a few kilometers north of the city of Cajamarca in the northern Peruvian Andes.
A dual textile tradition on Taquile Island, Lake Titicaca — women spin wool and weave the wide, patterned chumpi belts on backstrap looms, while men, uniquely, do the fine hand-knitting, producing the iconic chullo hats using wire-thin…
The manual extraction and carving of sillar — a white, porous, easily worked volcanic ignimbrite stone formed by ancient eruptions of the Chachani, Picchu Picchu, and Misti volcanoes over two million years ago — which has built and defined…
The harvesting, drying, and hand-bundling of totora reed (Schoenoplectus californicus subsp.
Tamta copper craft is the traditional coppersmith tradition of the Tamta community — the hereditary coppersmith caste of the Kumaon hills — producing utensils, ritual vessels, and decorative objects entirely from sheet copper using…
The forging of kaskara, straight double-edged iron swords several feet in length, by Beja blacksmiths of eastern Sudan, sold and worn today primarily by Beja merchants at Daim Arab Market in Port Sudan.
The Alpine variants of Friulian knife-making distinct from the Maniago industrial district (CRAFT-0763) — smaller-scale workshop traditions in the Friulian mountain valleys producing folding knives, hunting knives, and pastoral tools with…
Traditional silver jewelry of the Bishariya, a nomadic tribe of the eastern desert south of the Red Sea spanning southern Egypt and northern Sudan, distinguished within regional Muslim tribal jewelry traditions by their notable use of…
The hand-twisting, plaiting, and soldering of fine silver wire into lace-like filigree jewelry by silversmiths of Omdurman, Sudan's largest city and traditional craft-market center across the Nile from Khartoum.
The Swedish pewter casting tradition — the production of the distinctive Swedish functional and decorative pewter objects (tankards, plates, candlesticks, baptismal fonts) that were the defining luxury household metal of the Swedish middle…