Keeping the hammer’s voice alive

PI: Emilia Ferraro | Collaborator: Sandra Wilson
Project ID: 2021LG02 | Location of Research: Quito, Ecuador
Host Institution: Duncan of Jordanstone College of Arts and Design, University of Dundee

This project recorded and investigated the artisanal knowledge system of contemporary silversmithing in Ecuador. Silversmithing is the craft of creating three-dimensional objects from a flat sheet of usually, but not exclusively, silver. The metal is ‘raised’ by hammering the silver sheet over steel anvils to make vertical vessels, or to be used to construct other objects.

The Ecuadorian silversmith knowledge system is a hybrid system produced by the colonial encounter, but its ancient pre-Hispanic roots are still traceable within contemporary practice. Andean metallurgy was colour and surface-oriented; it developed around cultural understandings of the inherent properties of metals which were embedded within specific objects through techniques and alloys that conveyed such meanings onto their surfaces. In contemporary Ecuador, silversmithing also includes work with other metals such as gold.

Ecuadorian silversmithing falls into the category of “heritage craft” as much as a “critically endangered” one, i.e., at serious risk of no longer being practiced. In the last 20 years, Ecuadorian silversmiths have suffered heavily from the changes in international and national economic policies. The neoliberal experiment that led to the worst financial crisis ever, in 1999-2000, forced many Ecuadorian silversmiths, among others, to migrate to Europe in search of work, taking with them their centuries-old knowledge of silversmithing. In January 2000, the Ecuadorian government responded to this crisis by adopting the US dollar as the Ecuadorian national currency. This provoked an immediate rise in the prices of both raw materials and manufactures. At the same time, globalization policies opened the way to the arrival both of cheaper silver objects from neighbouring countries (such as Peru and Mexico), and machines for mass production that shorten the time and costs. This has resulted in a dramatic decrease in the demand for hand-made silver objects.

The economic decline of the trade is having several negative consequences. Firstly, there has been a shift from silversmithing to jewellery making, since jewellery is more commercially viable. Secondly, the trade has moved from “making” to “repair”. Thirdly, very few children now take over from their parents thus, fourthly, there is a dramatic break in silverware production and, especially, knowledge transmission. In fact, traditional workshops—family-based workshops that have been running for at least two generations—were the sole locus of training and learning of the trade. As they disappear, they are not replaced by other forms of training; hence the whole centuries-old silversmith knowledge system (techniques, tools, tool-making expertise, belief system, and relationships) is rapidly disappearing.

This project has produced 514 assets that includes videos, annotations, pictures, and texts recording the making process and the chaîne opératoire that goes into raising silver objects in contemporary Ecuador. The project documents the Ecuadorian way of constructing, finishing and decorating metal objects, by recording in three Ecuadorian silversmiths’ workshops:

• Materials involved in making, decorating, and colouring: metals, mixtures for moulding and casting; silver alloys, paste, and recipes (e.g., for repoussé); hot pitches, etc.
• Tools: types of stakes, hammers, chisels; files; and any others used; and the tool making process where appropriate.
• Fabrication Techniques: raising vessels; melting; forging; moulding; casting and the likes.
• The cultural matrix in which the above work takes place (i.e., approaches to materials and practice; relationship materials-makers).
• The role of the senses and emotions in material exploration.
• Evidence of continuity with pre-Hispanic metalwork practices and worldviews.

The richness of the material produced contributes significantly to wider debates in Anthropology over technological continuity and change over time, and to scholarship in Silver Studies over the cultural-embeddedness of silversmithing methods. The project specifically brings to the fore the unique Ecuadorian/Andean way of raising silver vessels. So far, the scholarship on silver and goldsmithing has identified three ways of raising metal vessels from a single flat sheet of metal worldwide. This project contributes a fourth method of raising vessels that is uniquely Ecuadorian/Andean and has remained unknown to the silversmithing community of scholars and practitioners alike beyond the Andean region Locally known as embutido, and unlike the three previously known methods, the unique Ecuadorian method raises vessels by hammering “from the inside” and from the centre towards the maker. It has clear pre-Hispanic origins, as descriptions of this process can be found in some of the first European chroniclers’ writings.

In conversations with the Ecuadorian silversmiths, we have been able to understand that embutido comes almost “naturally” from the process of hand-stretching the silver ingot by hammering on it. This method would allow the masters to have more control over the thickness to be achieved in different places of the single metal sheet to fit the design of the object to make. In other words, they could produce different thicknesses in the same single sheet of metal. So, in the case of a bowl, for example, the centre of the piece would be left thicker and hammered to raise it into a bowl. Embutido was then the second step of process of making an object. This was the case until the 1950s when the first modern rolling machine was imported in Ecuador. It replaced the step of hand-stretching the silver sheet and established a separation with the successive stage in the process, i.e. the hand-raising of a vessel by hammering which, instead, remained intact until now. Hence, this project can confirm the continuity with pre-Hispanic times when it comes to some of the techniques still used in contemporary Ecuadorian. Therefore, this project adds to several existing lines of evidence—archaeological findings, early Chroniclers’ writings, archival documents, contemporary silversmiths’ lore—that suggest an historical continuity with pre-Hispanic practices.

Methodology

The project methodology included ethnography in three silversmiths’ workshops in Quito, complemented by apprenticeship, video-recordings of the process, and in-depth semi-structured interviews. Head-strapped cameras were used by the silversmiths to capture the “master’s perspective’ of the process of making. The combination of head cameras and external cameras allowed to capture the swift and seamless coordination of bodily gesture, sensory perception, attention and intention. 360-degree pictures and still photography recorded the process of making in the environment where it takes place.

Together, these varied methods record the several dynamics between masters, apprentices, materials and tools in the creation of form. In-depth interviews with individual masters in their workshops, together with conversations during the video-recording of the process of making, provided “thick” ethnographic descriptions of subjective and genealogical trajectories of this disappearing practice, and contribute to enriching the understanding of the wealth of knowledge, relationships and beliefs of this fading world.

Selected Assets

The following assets provide an overview of the project’s topics.

Acknowledgements

The success of this project is indebted to its team members: Juan F. Serrano Dueñas for research assistance, Diarmid Weir and Camilla García Peñaherrera for audiovisual capture, Jazmin Buitrón Ochoa for photography, and Kuai Shen Auson Ortega for annotations and translations. Thanks also to Gabriela Andrade Pallares, local collaborator, for her assistance in Quito and her support in the preparing assets for the digital repository. Staff of the Casa del Alabado Museum of pre-Columbian Art were instrumental in the development and delivery, namely Executive Director Lucía Durán, Curator-Researcher Carlos Montalvo, Education Coordinator Estefanía Carrera, and Special Projects Coordinator Saralhue Acevedo.

The EMKP further thanks the following knowledge-holders and their families for their generous participation: Luis Fernando Buitrón Benítez, Luis Fernando Buitrón Almeida, Angel Mario Maila Andrade, Paul Alejandro Cerón Buitrón, Mathías Nicolás Buitrón Solano, Gabriela Andrade Pallares, and Germán Campos Alarcón.