Petroglyph Arrowhead Pendant Necklace

Cut to the silhouette of a knapped stone point, with broad notched shoulders narrowing to a sharp tip, the pendant carries a vertical column of figures down its hammered face: a hunter drawing a bow above a file of running animals, each rendered in dark oxidized outline as if scratched into rock. The form quotes a projectile point directly, and the imagery turns the silver into a small panel of prehistoric rock art worn at the throat.

This pre-Columbian and prehistoric vein runs through Antonio Pineda's work, an inheritance he traced to his early years alongside William Spratling, from whom, as Morrill records, he acquired his appreciation for ancient Mexican art and culture. Where the Taxco school more often reached for flowers and figures, Pineda distills an entire iconography of the hunt into outline and negative space.

The pendant is worked in 970 silver and struck with Pineda's Antonio-Taxco crown mark and the inventory code YY592. Its ground is hand-hammered into a field of shallow dimples that catches and scatters light, throwing the blackened figures into sharp relief; it hangs from a black velvet cord finished with small silver bead terminals.

Conceived as the centerpiece of a small suite with matching earrings, it is Pineda treating an ornament as a fragment of ancient stone: old imagery carried in a sober, modern hand.