Mexico · Mining / Lapidary Carving
Ámbar chiapaneco
The hand-mining of amber — fossilized tree resin roughly 23 to 27 million years old — from narrow, dangerous vertical shafts dug into the mountains around Simojovel, Chiapas, followed by hand-cutting, carving, and polishing into jewelry and figurative pieces, a combined extraction-and-craft tradition historically traded by the Maya to Aztec kings as tribute and today the primary livelihood of a genuinely impoverished mining town.
Risk level: Vulnerable · Not currently inscribed on a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list; Mexico is a State Party to the UNESCO 2003 Convention (ratified 14 December 2005) and could nominate this technique in the future.
A pre-Hispanic Purépecha copper-hammering tradition in which red-hot copper is shaped entirely by hand with hammers and anvils into vessels and decorative pieces bearing fret, rhombus, floral, and zoomorphic motifs, nearly extinguished by…
A nearly 500-year-old woodworking tradition in a Purépecha pine-forest town assigned to stringed-instrument making by Michoacán's first bishop, Vasco de Quiroga, in the 16th century, sustaining a town where an estimated 90 percent of the…
The construction of suspended woven sleeping nets on a simple standing loom using a tight double or triple knotted weave, historically made from henequen (sisal) agave fiber and now most often cotton or nylon, centered on the town of…
A counted-thread cross-stitch embroidery tradition decorating the hipil, Yucatán's distinct pre-Hispanic-lineage traditional dress, combining a Spanish-introduced cross-stitch technique with at least one embroidery stitch — the xmanikté,…
A backstrap-loom weaving tradition of the Tzotzil and Tzeltal Maya of highland Chiapas, using a supplementary-weft brocade technique to weave cosmological and botanical symbolism directly into cotton and wool huipiles (blouses), with each…
The carving of fantastical, brightly painted animal and hybrid-creature figures from freshly cut copal wood, a technique that adapted Mexico City artist Pedro Linares' 1930s papier-mâché dream-creature invention into a distinct Oaxacan…
The excavation of precious opal by hand-dug horizontal tunneling into steep volcanic valley walls, practiced by artisanal miners of the Delanta area, South Wollo, and the wider Welo (Wollo) and Shewa provinces of the Ethiopian highlands.
The hand-splitting of Rhenish slate (Mayen-Kottenheimer Schiefer or Moselle slate) into roofing tiles — a tradition central to the visual character of the Rhine and Mosel valley historic townscapes, whose steep-roofed slate-tiled historic…
The stone masonry tradition of Canton Ticino — the Italian-speaking Swiss canton whose master masons (Maestri Comacini) exported their skills across all of Europe from the medieval period, building churches, palaces, and fortifications…
The dry-stone retaining wall construction of the Mosel Valley's steep vineyard terraces — built from the same blue Devonian slate that characterizes the Mosel wine terroir, stacked without mortar to retain the thin soil on slopes exceeding…
Balochistan contains Pakistan's primary onyx deposits — a banded green-white translucent stone distinct from the black Western onyx and the yellow Afghan onyx — quarried near Quetta and carved into decorative objects, vessels, and chess…
Pounamu (greenstone — New Zealand nephrite jade) is the most sacred material in Māori culture — the only gemstone of Aotearoa, found exclusively on the West Coast of Te Wai Pounamu (the South Island).