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JEWELRY

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Almost universally, individuals adorn themselves with jewelry that may indicate rank, gender, age, marital status, ethnicity, and religious beliefs—and barbarian Europe was no exception. Jewelry gives an important view into how peoples of the early medieval period from A.D. 400 to 1000 identified themselves and their groups. In the absence of stone architecture and sculpture, jewelry making was a primary art and sometimes is the only medium that has survived from these cultures. Though much of barbarian jewelry comes from loose or undocumented finds, whether accidentally lost or deliberately hidden, examples found in inhumation graves allow archaeologists to re-create details of costumes, since jewelry was used to fasten clothes together as well as to adorn the elite. Some jewelry, such as buckles and brooches, was functional, regardless of the degree of decoration, whereas other types, such as pendants and earrings, were more ornamental and symbolic, distinguishing individuals from each other.

Knowledge of various groups, such as Anglo-Saxons, Burgundians, Franks, Goths, Langobards, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Vikings, and Visigoths, has sometimes been based on spatial distributions of jewelry styles, since these "tribes" had diverse clothing fashions that required distinctive jewelry types to fasten and adorn them. Thus it has sometimes been assumed that peoples can be identified from jewelry found in graves; however, it is difficult to distinguish groups based on artifacts dating to this proto-historic age. As Helmut Roth points out in From Attila to Charlemagne (edited by Katharine Brown, Dafydd Kidd, and Charles T. Little), it is often difficult to establish that an object was produced by, for instance, a Frank, just because it was found in an area later associated with the Franks. Issues of "ethnic" identification are also discussed by Herbert Schutz in the introduction to his Tools, Weapons, and Ornaments (2001). Finally, extra caution is necessary when making assertions about ethnicity based on classifications of jewelry without documented provenance.

JEWELRY TYPES

Common jewelry types included hair ornaments and headdresses, straight pins to hold veils and hair ornaments, necklaces of beads and pendants, earrings, brooches, belt buckles, strap ends, bracelets, wrist clasps (cuff fastenings), finger rings, and thin metal plaques sewn to clothing. In particular, brooches (or pins) have been studied and classified according to their myriad forms, including annular (ring), penannular (broken ring), quoit (flattened ring), disk, saucer, bow, cruciform, square-headed, equal-armed, oval, trefoil, bird, and animal types. Several brooch types derive from the Roman fibula, whose name recalls its formal resemblance to the human leg bone. Its function is based on the principle of the modern safety pin; it uses a wire spiral to provide flexibility for opening and shutting and usually has ornamentation on the enlarged head and foot plates that conceal the coiled spring and the catch plate for the pin. Certain types of jewelry were appropriate for particular clothing styles, and as fashions changed, so too did jewelry.

RAW MATERIALS

Late Roman styles influenced the types of jewelry that were made, and the gold used in much early jewelry originated from melted down Roman coins. In the Viking Age, silver became more common than gold, as the supply of late Roman coins had long since died out and the source of metal by this time was Arabic silver coins. Copper, bronze, and iron were also used, particularly for functional jewelry. Bone and walrus ivory were carved for pins and rings. Glass, amber, and semiprecious stones (particularly quartz, rock crystal, jet, and garnet) were made into beads and also inserted into metal jewelry. Glass was produced in provincial Roman workshops in the Rhineland, and garnets came to Europe through Roman trade.

CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUES

The techniques used to produce barbarian jewelry also derive from Roman methods and changed very little throughout the early medieval period, except for the introduction of the draw plate to produce wire (discussed below). The best source of information about production methods often is an examination of the artifacts, though some conclusions can be based on archaeological discoveries of tools and workshop debris. Important early medieval jewelry workshops have been discovered in Scandinavia at Helgö, Birka, Ribe, and Hedeby.

The most common method of jewelry construction was fabrication, which entails mechanical manipulation and joining of sheets of metal by hammering, folding, and soldering. Inscriptions, patterns, and images can be made on sheet metal by chasing or engraving, that is, using a pointed tool to displace or gouge out metal. The sheet can also be impressed with a stamp or die having a relief design, worked in repoussé by having designs hammered from the reverse, or embellished with small hammered punches. The central designs on Scandinavian Migration period (A.D. 450–600) gold pendants called bracteates were stamped with a die, but punches were used around the perimeter of these objects.

Casting was the other major method of jewelry construction. During the early medieval period, a two-piece mold was used rather than the ancient "lost-wax" technique. In casting, metal is melted in a crucible and then poured into the mold; used crucibles with residue as well as broken molds were found at workshop sites such as Birka in Sweden. After casting, rough edges must be filed away and polished; after this cleanup, the piece of jewelry might receive additional embellishment. Often jewelry cast in bronze or silver would be coated with silver or gold respectively to give an impression of a more valuable material.

DECORATIVE TECHNIQUES

Jewelry made by either casting or fabrication may be further adorned by surface decoration, including granulation, filigree, and inlays of stones or glass. Filigree, also known as wire work, consists of patterns of plain or decorative beaded wires soldered to the surface of a piece of jewelry. In the fifth and sixth centuries, wire was made by techniques called strip twisting and block twisting, in which a strip of metal is twisted, rolled, and hammered until it is approximately circular in section like a drinking straw. Drawn wire, manufactured by pulling a thin metal strip through a series of successively smaller round-sectioned holes in a draw plate, gradually replaced strip- or block-twisted wire from the seventh through the ninth centuries in northern Europe.

A decorative technique called granulation consists of soldering small spheres of gold or silver onto the jewelry surface. Granules are simple to produce by heating small pieces of metal until they roll up due to surface tension, but they are difficult to solder into place accurately. They were often used in large quantity and in combination with filigree, so individual mistakes are difficult to see without a microscope while the overall effect is impressive. Both filigree and granulation created glittering effects that are impressive by firelight.

Enameling and inlay of colored stones and cut glass were also used to enhance the surface appearance of jewelry with color, or polychrome, effects. Cloisonné, a technique in which materials are set into small cells (cloisons) fabricated by soldering upright strips of metal onto the surface of the jewelry, was often used in the early medieval period. Garnet cloisonné was used extensively on Merovingian jewelry. Well-known Early Anglo-Saxon examples are the shoulder clasps from Sutton Hoo, in which cut garnets as well as millefiori glass, composed of colored glass rods fused together and sliced into thin sections, are placed in cell work. Enameling during the early medieval period was achieved by placing broken or powdered glass within cells, which were then heated, and the glass was allowed to melt and fuse with the metal jewelry surface. Finally, glass was also used to make colorful, patterned beads, as evidenced from workshops at Ribe in Denmark.

See also La Tène Art (vol. 2, part 6); Sutton Hoo (vol. 2, part 7).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arrhenius, Birgit. Merovingian Garnet Jewellery: Emergence and Social Implications. Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1985.

Axboe, Morten. "The Scandinavian Gold Bracteates: Studies on Their Manufacture and Regional Variations." Acta Archaeologica 52 (1981): 1–100.

Bayley, Justine. "Anglo-Saxon Non-Ferrous Metalworking: A Survey." World Archaeology 23, no. 1 (1991): 115–130.

Brown, Katharine Reynolds, Dafydd Kidd, and Charles T. Little, eds. From Attila to Charlemagne: Arts of the Early Medieval Period in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000.

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Suzuki, Seiichi. The Quoit Brooch Style and Anglo-Saxon Settlement. Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2000.

Vida, Tivadar. "Veil Pin or Dress Pin: Data to the Question of Avar Period Pin-Wearing." In Pannonia and Beyond. Edited by Andrea Vaday, pp. 563–573, 811–815. Budapest, Hungary: Archaeological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1999.

Whitfield, Niamh. "Round Wire in the Early Middle Ages." Jewellery Studies 4 (1990): 13–28.

Wicker, Nancy L. "On the Trail of the Elusive Goldsmith: Tracing Individual Style and Workshop Characteristics in Migration Period Metalwork." Gesta 33, no. 1 (1994): 65–70.

Youngs, Susan, ed. "The Work of Angels": Masterpieces of Celtic Metalwork, Sixth–Ninth Centuries A.D. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

NANCY L. WICKER