Die-making is the craft of cutting decorative patterns into hardened steel so the die can be pressed into sheet silver to transfer its design as a stamped impression. Stamps — the finished dies — are the tools that produce stampwork, the most widely practiced surface decoration in Navajo silversmithing. The earliest Navajo smiths made their own dies from scrap iron; by the late nineteenth century, traders supplied commercially made stamps, and by the Guild era of the 1930s and 1940s, the Indian Arts and Crafts Board was standardizing die forms for the hallmark program.
Washington Matthews documented the earliest die-making at Fort Wingate in 1880–81, describing the tools of the day: "homemade cold chisels, awls, dies, and matrices made out of scrap iron." (Adair 1944, ~p. 16, via Matthews) The smith made what he could not buy. Matthews also noted how files were repurposed: "the shanks serve as punches and the points as gravers, with which figures are engraved on the silver." A file handle end pressed into a silver surface leaves an impression; the same logic produces a stamp. The transition from improvised punches to purpose-cut dies is one of technical refinement, not conceptual change.
Adair's appendix Table V, titled "Basic Die Forms," documents the range of stamp designs in use during his 1940s fieldwork — the first systematic catalog of the die vocabulary Navajo smiths had accumulated. The table is a snapshot of a tradition that had been developing since the 1870s, when Navajo smiths first obtained steel dies from Mexican craftsmen and adapted leather-working tools for use on silver. (Adair 1944, Appendix Table V)
Ambrose Roanhorse is documented in the corpus as a key figure in the IACB era. Hougart's records place Roanhorse at the center of the Navajo Arts and Crafts Guild program that emerged from the Indian Arts and Crafts Board's 1930s–1940s efforts — a program that included the development of standardized prototype dies and hallmark stamps as part of quality control and authentication. (Hougart, Bille. Native American and Southwestern Silver Hallmarks, 5th ed. (2022), Ambrose Roanhorse entry) The relationship between official die programs and individual smith practice is documented through the hallmark record: early IACB stamps — "US NAVAJO" and related marks — are themselves die-struck impressions, products of the same technology adapted to authentication rather than decoration.
The die vocabulary in Navajo stampwork is extensive: crescents, rainbirds (also called thunderbirds in the trade, though the corpus uses both terms with different precision), whirling log variants, arrowheads, wave and zigzag borders, fluted edges, and geometric fills. The corpus does not document a single inventor for most of these individual die forms; they appear in the record as part of the common vocabulary smiths shared, traded, and copied from each other.
Ambrose Roanhorse (Navajo) · Grey Moustache (Diné — eyewitness to the pre-stamp era) · Atsidi Sani (Diné — founding era)
Stampwork · The Hallmark Story · File and Chisel Work · Hand-Wrought Ingot Work