The Language of Jewellery: Dress-accessories and Negotiations of Identity in Scandinavia, c. AD 400–650/70

Author:
Ingunn M. Røstad (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway)

Synopsis

In the 5th–7th centuries AD, members of the female population in Scandinavia frequently wore a costume adorned with conspicuous items of jewellery. Many of the items, such as brooches and clasps, were dress-accessories used to fasten these garments. Some of them, moreover, were popular over an extended area of Europe, and have been found in Scandinavia, Anglo-Saxon England and on the Continent alike. This book provides an analysis of more than 1,800 such items of jewellery from Scandinavia. It explores the contextual and geographical distribution through time of four major types of dress-accessory: cruciform brooches, relief brooches, wrist-clasps and conical brooches.

Detailed analysis reveals distribution patterns and variations that provide new insights into the multifaceted reality of the Scandinavian pre-Viking period. The author argues that in a time characterized by social stress and upheaval, women played an important role in the negotiation of identities through the use of costume adorned with dress-accessories. These negotiations were part of a continuous, complex and ever-changing discourse of identity, in which different dimensions of multiple identities were generated, articulated and transformed. In some instances, a common identity is manifest even at a date which precedes by several centuries the unification of much the same areas into single medieval kingdoms, while social and political conditions could equally trigger either the material expression or the disappearance of shared identities at local, regional, and even pan-European levels.

This book also offers a more nuanced view of ethnic groupings during the 5th–7th centuries by examining the inter-connectedness of the flexible and mobile ‘warrior nations’ of the Migration Period, and the territorially rooted, often historically documented ‘peoples’, who are reflected in the practices of female dress.

Author Biography

Ingunn M. Røstad, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway

Ingunn Marit Røstad is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway. She works on topics concerning the Scandinavian Iron Age, and has a particular interest in jewellery and archaeological find complexes from the period c. AD 400–800.

Cover Image
Published
July 1, 2021


ISBN

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF
9788202696870

Details about the available publication format: Print on demand

Print on demand
9788202716202
Series
Online ISSN
2703-9161
Print ISSN
0333-127X