We begin a study of mth Chern classes and mth characteristic symbols for Iwasawa modules which are supported in codimension at least m. This extends the classical theory of characteristic ideals and their generators for Iwasawa modules which are torsion, i.e., supported in codimension at least 1. We apply this to an Iwasawa module constructed from an inverse limit of p-parts of ideal class groups of abelian extensions of an imaginary quadratic field. When this module is pseudo-null, which is conjecturally always the case, we determine its second Chern class and show that it has a characteristic symbol given by the Steinberg symbol of two Katz p-adic L-functions.In the language of the classical main conjectures, an element f ∈ Q × such that ν 1 (f ) = c 1 (M ) is a characteristic power series for M when R is a formal power series ring. A main conjecture for M posits that there is such an f which can be constructed analytically, e.g. via p-adic L-functions.The key to generalizing this is to observe that Q × is the first Quillen K-group K 1 (Q) and ν 1 is a tame symbol map. To try to relate c m (M ) to analytic invariants for arbitrary m, one can consider elements of K m (Q) which can be described by symbols involving m-tuples of elements of Q associated to L-functions. The homomorphism ν 1 is replaced by a homomorphism ν m involving compositions of tame symbol maps. We now describe one way to do this.Suppose that η = (η 0 , . . . , η m ) is a sequence of points of Y with codim(η i ) = i and such that η i+1 lies in the closure η i of η i for all i < m. Denote by P m (Y ) the set of