On the Edge of Empire: Society in the south-west of England during the first century BC to fifth century AD

This volume explores the relationship between people and material culture in the south-west peninsula of England from the first century BC to the fifth century AD. This is achieved through the analysis of the ceramics, personal adornment items and coins found in the region, gathered from excavation reports and from data recorded through the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

Conclusions: Agency and Constraints

The extant evidence for imperial women reveals their general powerlessness and silence, starkly contrasting with anecdotes about their abuse of resources, influence, and privilege. Their relation to the emperor put them at the center of power, yet their gender, and the princeps’ dominance, prohibited them from exercising control. At the principate’s beginning, some disclosed their resources through patronage or personal adornment. Such displays were increasingly censured. Imperial women’s diminishing visibility in Rome, including at religious functions, paradoxically correlates with their increasing portrayal on central coinage. Although their roles in Rome’s imperial cult had positive effects for women in the empire, their own gains are harder to detect and their personal agency cannot be discerned in the available sources. Their investigation, however, uncovers a remarkable history that illuminates individuals and the principate as a whole, including its obstinate misogyny.

Women, Sheep, and Textiles: The social significance of ram’s head beads in Early Iron Age Slovenia

Ram’s head beads are well-known items of personal adornment in the Dolenjska Hallstatt cultural group. Recent analysis has demonstrated that they are the most common zoomorphic artefacts in this region with 187 currently known. This article updates the list of known beads and contextualizes their significance in the Dolenjska Hallstatt cultural group. It is argued that the sheep imagery of these beads and their distribution in female graves is related to local textile production. It is proposed that beads signalled aspects of personal and economic identity for Dolenjska Hallstatt women related to the production of high-quality textiles. In addition, the distribution of these beads demonstrates Iron Age community networks on the western frontier of Dolenjska, and perhaps even reflects the movement of women between communities.

Belt Buckles and Burials in Southwestern Gaul

Objects recovered through mortuary archaeology are often incomplete, and yet they are presented as whole. In particular, items of personal adornment appear in illustrations or photographs either in a restored form or with outlines indicating what would or should have completed the items. Fragmentation, as such, is explained away as the result of degradative processes or of grave robbing. In the case of the ornate belt buckles of fifth- to seventh-century southern Gaul, the relative frequency of apparently intentionally broken objects invites further investigation. As part of the memorialization process, fragments of belt sets may have at once drawn a line between the deceased and those responsible for their burial, as well as serving as public proclamations of familial alliances that surviving kin claimed through the dead. Focusing on fragmentation as an intentional act likewise opens new possibilities for understanding the means by which objects of personal adornment moved across regions. While objects did not move without the intervention of people, the presence of incomplete belt sets in southern Gallic graves implies that belt sets circulated as a means of forming networks of allegiance.

Forging a New Spain

Histories of the conquest often end with the fall of Tenochtitlan, but the forging of New Spain required decades of continued military invasions in which central Mexicans, in particular, played leading roles. This chapter examines how the Tlaxcalteca and other Native allies petitioned the Spanish Crown for certain rights and privileges, as a form of negotiation within a system of domination and oppression, even sailing across the Atlantic to Spain multiple times to do so in person. Imperial rule and religious conversion could occasionally be challenged or proactively shaped by Mesoamericans, generating hybrid forms of religious belief, public spectacles, art, architecture, diet, and personal adornment, all inscribed on Mexico’s natural and cultural landscape. Such exchanges also crossed the Atlantic, and eventually the Pacific, to begin a truly global world history.

OLD RUS HOARD OF 2017 FROM THE OUTSKIRTS OF PEREIASLAV

The article analyses the history of the discovery of hoards of the 11th—13th centuries in the Pereiaslav city and its vicinity. It is customary to consider that their list has been contained until recently only four hoards found in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Pereiaslav (1884), Vitovtsi (1898), Pereiaslav (1912), Denysy (1912). For most of the twentieth — early twenty first centuries, no case of the hoard finding was officially recorded. But according to unofficial information such finds has indeed taken place. In 2017 the hoard of silver women’s adornment was accidentally found on a plowed field near Pereiaslav. The location of the find is at the low hill 40 meters from the left bank of the Alta river and 3.5 kilometers from the Annalistic Pereiaslav. In 2019 the hoard was transferred to the collection of the National Historical and Ethnographic Reserve «Pereiaslav». The hoard consists of 30 items: 2 temple rings, 4 lunulae, 6 beads, 7 coin pendants (cupic dirhams), 2 bracelets, 2 finger rings, 3 belt plates and 4 plaques. All items of the hoard dated to the 10th—11th centuries. The hoard was hidden, apparently, at the end of the 11th century. It significantly differs from all hoards used to be found in Pereiaslav Region. This is the set of personal adornment of one noble woman from Pereiaslav. The items allow you to ascertain the standard set of jewelry of a wealthy woman who did not belong to the princely rank. The hoard was hidden in the moment of danger but the owner never could take it back.

Casting the Net Wider: Network Approaches to Artefact Variation in Post-Roman Europe

This paper explores the stylistic variability of fifth- and sixth-century brooches in Europe using network visualisations, suggesting an alternative means of study, which for more than a century has been dominated by typology. It is suggested that network methods and related theories offer alternative conceptual models that encourage original ways of exploring material that has otherwise become canonical. Foremost is the proposal that objects of personal adornment like brooches were a means of competitive display through which individuals mediated social relationships within and beyond their immediate communities, and in so doing formed surprisingly far-flung networks. The potential sizes of these networks varied according to their location in Europe, with particularly large distances of up to 1000 km achieved in Scandinavia and continental Europe. In addition, an overall tendency toward the serial reproduction of particular forms in the mid-sixth century has broader consequences for how we understand the changing nature of social networks in post-Roman Europe.