Guyana · Wood Carving / Fine-Art-Adjacent Workshop Craft
Pakuri (the Lokono name for St. Cuthbert's Mission)
A contemporary indigenous wood-sculpture movement founded in August 1988 by Guyanese Lokono (Arawak) artist and trained archaeologist George Simon (1947–2020), who established a drawing and design workshop in his native St. Cuthbert's Mission — an Amerindian village on the Mahaica River regarded as Guyana's Amerindian "cultural capital" — to nurture the talents of fellow villagers. The resulting "Six Lokono Artists," including Simon's brothers Oswald "Ossie" Hussein and Foster Simon alongside Roland Taylor, Telford Taylor, and Lynus Clenkian, transformed carved wood — ranging from towering 20-foot totem poles to intricate small figures — into a recognized national and international art form exploring Arawak cosmology, myth, and the archaeological petroglyphs Simon himself studied professionally, evolving into the broader Moving Circle of Artists collective still honored today.
Risk level: Vulnerable · Not UNESCO-inscribed
The construction of the benab, a monumental conical communal meeting structure built entirely without nails or metal fasteners, using wallaba wood posts lashed together with natural rainforest vine cordage and thatched with palm leaves.
A fiber-processing and weaving craft using tibisiri, the leaf fiber of the Ite palm (Mauritia flexuosa) — the same palm species documented in this archive's Venezuela coverage as the moriche used by Warao weavers (CRAFT-2309), here…
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The hand-building of clay pots and utensils by Macushi artisans of Toka village in Guyana's North Rupununi, using only the hands and small stones as tools, without wheel or machinery.
A cotton hammock-weaving tradition of the Wapishana people of Guyana's southern Rupununi savannah, widely regarded as among the finest in South America.
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Woodcarving of the Mah Meri (Hma' Meri), an Orang Asli people of Carey Island, Selangor.
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The carving of pedra-sabão (soapstone, or steatite) — a soft, oily-textured metamorphic rock composed mainly of talc, found in abundance around the historic mining towns of Ouro Preto and Mariana, Minas Gerais — into sculpture, cookware,…
The carving of wood into sculptural figures, Alpine musical instruments, and decorative objects, documented as one of Liechtenstein's principal traditional crafts and a continuation of historical rural woodworking trades — basket weaving,…