How Navajo Silver Is Cast: From Fire to Form

Q: How many pieces can be cast from one mold?

It depends on the mold material. A soft tufa block averages no more than five or six castings before it wears out (Turnbaugh, p. 44); a hard fine-grained rock mold takes far longer to carve but withstands greater heat and lasts indefinitely (Adair 1944, p. 13); sand molds built around a prototype are designed for repeated production (Bassman, Glossary p. 76).

Q: What is tufa, and why did Navajo silversmiths use it?

Tufa is a soft, fine-grained volcanic stone. The Navajo smith Grey Moustache described finding it near Sunrise Springs about 1898; his first piece was too soft and cracked, the second was just hard enough to cast a ketoh. Adair notes the workable fine-grained form is rare, occurring in only a few places on the reservation (Adair 1944, pp. 8-9, 13).

Q: Is Navajo cast jewelry still made this way?

Yes. Theda Bassman records the carved-stone two-piece mold method as in use today, not only historically (The Beauty of Navajo Jewelry, Introduction).

Casting is how molten silver becomes a finished form: a smith carves a design into stone or packs it in sand, pours melted silver into the mold, then files and polishes the result. Navajo smiths learned casting from Mexican metalworkers in the 1800s and still cast this way today.

Mateo's Field Notes

The oldest first-person account we hold of a Navajo smith finding his own casting stone comes from Grey Moustache, interviewed by John Adair in the 1930s. He was close to eighty then and had gone blind, but his memory of the material was exact. The Navajo learned casting from Mexican metalworkers, he said, who used clay molds — and the first Navajo smiths did not use the soft stone we associate with the craft today. That early rock “wasn't soft and powdery like that we use now but was hard, and darker in color.”¹

Then he described finding the other kind. On a trip up to Sunrise Springs — Adair dates it to about 1898 — he noticed white rock on a hillside and thought it might make good molds. The first piece he carried home was too soft and cracked to pieces. He went back a second time, found stone “just hard enough,” and cast a good ketoh in that mold. His brother-in-law Atsidi Chon asked where the stone had come from, went to the same hillside, and after that, Grey Moustache said, they always used that stone for their molds.¹

What I find useful in that story is how ordinary it is. A man walks past a hillside, notices a rock, and a material tradition follows. Adair adds the geology in his own commentary: almost any fine-grained sandstone in the region would serve, and a smith named Largo, who lived near Thoreau east of Gallup, made a buckle mold from exactly that kind of hard rock. The soft pumiceous stone Grey Moustache found is “quite rare, occurring in fine grain in only a few places on the reservation.”¹

The two-piece mold itself is simple to describe and hard to do well. The design is carved into a block of sandstone or tufa; a second, uncarved piece is tied tightly against the first; molten silver is poured in; and when it cools the piece is filed and polished. That is the method as Theda Bassman sets it out, and her closing note matters — this technique is used today, not merely remembered.³

Lost-wax casting before and after: a blue carved wax ring pattern beside the finished cast silver ring set with turquoise and coral, at the T.Skies Craft & Cast workshop — Casting in its simplest terms: a model becomes metal. This pair shows **lost-wax** casting at the T.Skies Craft & Cast workshop — a modern studio method in which the pattern is carved in wax rather than cut into stone. It is shown here to illustrate the general principle of casting, not as an example of Navajo tufa or sand casting, which are described above. From the T.Skies gallery.

How many pieces come from one mold?

This is the question the internet answers worst, and the sources genuinely disagree — so here is what each one actually says, rather than a number smoothed out of them.

The Turnbaughs, captioning a tufa mold carved by the silversmith White Eagle in the early 1970s for a ketoh or belt buckle, state that on average no more than five or six castings may be made before that type of tufa block wears out.²
Adair, writing about hard fine-grained rock rather than soft tufa, says the opposite trade-off applies: it takes much longer to carve, but the mold “can stand much greater temperatures and lasts indefinitely.”¹
Bassman's glossary describes sand casting as using a prototype mold designed so that many pieces may be produced.³

Read together, these are not contradictions so much as a single rule stated three times: the mold material sets the yield, not the word “cast.” Soft tufa carves quickly and wears out quickly. Hard sandstone resists the carver and then resists the heat. Sand packed around a prototype is built for repetition from the start. So when a seller tells you a cast piece must be one-of-a-kind because the mold was destroyed, that can be true — and it can also be a story attached to a mold that had five more pours in it. Ask which stone.

Hands carving a pink wax ring pattern with a wax pen on a steel jeweler's bench at the T.Skies Craft & Cast workshop — Carving the pattern — here in wax, at the T.Skies Craft & Cast bench. In tufa and sand casting the equivalent step is cutting the design directly into stone or packed sand, working in reverse so the finished silver reads correctly. From the T.Skies gallery.

The casting families, and what sits next to them

“Cast” is a family, not a single technique, and the Field Guide keeps a separate entry for each branch so the distinctions stay honest:

Tufa casting — the design cut into carved volcanic tuff, the stone leaving its own grain on the silver.
Sand casting compared with tufa — where the finer, more repeatable surface comes from.
Hand-wrought ingot work — the counterpart worth knowing, because it is not casting: silver melted into a bar and then hammered to shape. A cast piece and an ingot piece can look related and were made by opposite motions.

Scale is worth a sentence of its own. The Turnbaughs record a massive Navajo buckle of about 1950 hand cast from more than six ounces of silver, then finished with chisel work and stamping.² Casting rarely ends at the pour; what comes out of the mold is a blank that still has to be cut, filed, stamped and polished into a buckle or a ketoh.

Casting at the bench today

The T.Skies Craft & Cast workshop runs on lost-wax casting rather than carved stone — a different road to the same destination, and the easiest way to watch the principle work in person. Naming it plainly matters: a lost-wax studio ring is not a tufa-cast Navajo piece, and no honest guide should let the two blur because both begin with molten silver.

Workshop participants around a steel jeweler's bench with green and blue wax ring models, carving tools and design sketches at the T.Skies Craft & Cast workshop — A Craft & Cast session at the T.Skies bench — wax ring models, carving tools and design sketches, before anything is poured. From the T.Skies gallery.

Collector's Handbook

Ask which stone, not just “is it cast.” Tufa, hard sandstone and packed sand behave differently and yield different numbers of pieces. A seller who knows the mold material usually knows the piece.¹²
Treat “one-of-a-kind because the mold broke” as a claim, not a fact. A soft tufa block may give five or six pours; a hard-rock mold may last indefinitely.¹²
Expect finishing work. Period cast pieces were routinely completed with chisel work and stamping after the pour — a cast surface with no after-work is worth a second look.²
Weight is evidence. Heavy cast work is documented in the record — a mid-century buckle of more than six ounces — so heft alone neither proves nor disproves age.²
Cast is not the same as hand-wrought. If the question is how the metal was moved, poured and hammered are opposite answers. See ingot work.

Common questions

How many pieces can be cast from one mold?

It depends entirely on the mold material. A soft tufa block averages no more than five or six castings before it wears out;² a hard fine-grained rock mold takes far longer to carve but withstands greater heat and, in Adair's words, lasts indefinitely;¹ sand molds built around a prototype are designed for repeated production.³

What is tufa, and why did Navajo smiths use it?

Tufa is a soft, fine-grained volcanic stone. Grey Moustache described finding it near Sunrise Springs about 1898; his first piece was too soft and cracked, the second was “just hard enough” to cast a ketoh. Adair notes the workable fine-grained form is rare, occurring in only a few places on the reservation.¹

Where did Navajo silversmiths learn to cast?

From Mexican metalworkers, according to Grey Moustache, who used clay molds; Navajo smiths adapted the method to stone.¹ For the wider origin story see the origins of Navajo silversmithing.

Is cast jewelry still made this way?

Yes. Bassman records the carved-stone two-piece mold method as in use today, not only historically.³

We strive for accuracy. This entry is continuously updated with new information from the artists, their families, and the community. If you can correct or deepen anything here, please get in touch — corrections are welcomed and credited.

References

Adair, John. The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths. University of Oklahoma Press, 1944, pp. 8–9 (Grey Moustache's account) and p. 13 (Adair's commentary on mold stone).
Turnbaugh, William A. & Sarah Peabody Turnbaugh. Indian Jewelry of the American Southwest. Schiffer, Atglen PA, © 1996 and 2007, p. 44 (plate captions).
Bassman, Theda. The Beauty of Navajo Jewelry. Kiva Publishing; photography by Gene Balzer. Introduction, and Glossary p. 76. (No publication year is legible in the copy we hold.)