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A Field Guide to Southwest Jewelry · by Mateo James

Cochiti Pueblo Silversmithing: The Eustace Family and the Quintana Record

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Cochiti Pueblo, a Keresan-speaking pueblo on the Rio Grande southwest of Santa Fe, produced a small but documented community of silversmiths whose work followed Navajo design conventions. John Adair found five silversmiths working at Cochiti in 1938–1939, including Joe Quintana—whose surname is documented in museum collections—earning a thousand dollars a year by working nine to ten hours a day at jewelry designed after Navajo forms and sold through a Santa Fe firm.

Mateo's Field Notes

Bedinger's account of Cochiti silversmithing is brief but precise. Father Noel Dumarest's 1919 article, probably written before his death around 1900, describes a Cochiti wedding where the bride arrived "her neck loaded with necklaces of shell beads and of turquoise, a little silver crosses, besides a necklace made of silver balls with pendant of a double cross of silver." The bridegroom wore a leather belt "ornamented with six or eight large round silver plaques of Navajo workmanship"—the silver was Navajo made, not Cochiti (Bedinger 1973:176, citing Dumarest 1919:149, 155).

By 1938, Adair found the five smiths at Cochiti working for a Santa Fe firm, bringing in their product periodically. "One of the most successful was Joe Quintana, who earned $1,000 in 1939 by working nine to ten hours a day. The jewelry these smiths made was designed after Navajo work" (Bedinger 1973:176). J. H. Quintana is documented in museum collections: a Cochiti bracelet from the 1930s is held in the University of Colorado Museum's Wheat Collection (Bedinger 1973:176, illustration).

Cochiti is better known in cultural scholarship for its drums and pottery than for silversmithing, and the silver tradition is genuinely thin by comparison with Navajo, Zuni, or Hopi work. The Eustace family represents the silversmithing lineage with the most documentation across our directory, with four Eustace names appearing in the corpus.

Collector's Handbook

  • Cochiti silver from the 1930s follows Navajo conventions. Pieces from the documented Adair-era smiths are Navajo-style work; they are not typically distinguishable from Navajo work by form alone. Hallmark attribution, where present, is the primary identification tool.
  • The Quintana surname is documented in both Cochiti and Zuni silversmithing contexts. Jerry Quintana (Cochiti, our directory) and Joe/J. H. Quintana (Cochiti, Adair's documentation) share a surname with Zuni craftspeople of the same name—attribution requires hallmark verification, not surname alone.

Cochiti Silversmiths in Our Directory

4 Cochiti artists are documented in the T.Skies Co-Op Silversmith Directory:

Eileen Eustace · Felicita Eustace · Jerry Quintana · Nelson Eustace

See the full A–Z directory for all Cochiti profiles. Community corrections and additional documentation for Cochiti smiths are welcomed through our contact page.

Primary Sources

  • Bedinger, Margery. Indian Silver: Navajo and Pueblo Jewelers. University of New Mexico Press, 1973. P. 176.
  • Adair, John. The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths. University of Oklahoma Press, 1944. P. 208.
  • Hougart, Bille. Native American and Southwestern Silver Hallmarks, 5th ed. (2022).

Related Entries

Kewa / Santo Domingo · Navajo / Diné Silversmithing · Stampwork · Field Guide Hub