Fashion and Jewelry

CHAPTER 16 Fashion and Jewelry Daniela Rovina The study of personal ornaments dating from the early to late Middle Ages offers interesting clues, not only for reconstructing the history of apparel in Sardinia, but also for enhancing knowledge about the island’s relations with the rest of the Mediterranean, its traditions and customs, and its internal social organization. The sources available for Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages are ex- clusively archaeological, as written documents from the period are scarce and do not address the subject at hand. Most of the jewelry and garment accessories discovered archeologically have emerged from the excavation of burial sites. Although in this period the dead were often laid to rest without personal ornaments, because of rigid ecclesiastical regulations and, more notably, the limited means of a large sector of the population of the entire Mediterranean basin, who suffered from a grave economic crisis. As a result, only a small num- ber of modest accessories, such as iron belt buckles, simple bronze rings, and hoop earrings, which were the possessions of the lower strata of the population, are known. On the other hand, burials of the more affluent social classes, whose members were interred with jewelry and garments appropriate to their social status and the roles they occupied in life, offer evidence of the diffusion of the period’s fashion and taste for jewelry, which reflects the luxury of the Byzantine court and the influence of barbarian artisanal traditions. In Sardinia, as in continental Italy and Europe, the period from the fifth to the eighth centuries was rather unstable. Annexed into the Eastern Roman Empire, the island was conquered in 476 by Genseric’s Vandals, who ruled it for nearly a century until 535, the year of its definitive return to the Byzantine Empire after the Battle of Tricamari. Sardinia also encountered the barbarian world during the island’s brief conquest by the Ostrogoths between 552 and 553,1 and throughout the attempted invasions of “Lombards and other barbarians,” who were rebuffed by the Sardinians under the leadership of the 1 On the political, economic, and social history of Byzantine Sardinia, see Pier Giorgio Spanu, La Sardegna bizantina tra VI e VII secolo (Oristano, 1998); Paola Corrias and Salvatore Cosentino, eds, Ai confini dell’Impero: storia, arte e archeologia della Sardegna bizantina (Cagliari, 2002). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi ��.��63/978900434��4�_0�8 418 Rovina “dux Constantinus,” who is celebrated in a seventh-century Byzantine epigraph in Porto Torres (Sassari).2 Several early medieval cemeteries have been found on the island. They often pertained to small military garrisons, in which the warriors were buried along with their family members, including women with rich personal grave goods. In northern Sardinia, the collective tombs of Laerru, San Pietro di Sorres-Borutta, San Pietro in Murighe in Cheremule, and Santa Maria di Mesumundu in Siligo, were archaeologically investigated between the mid-1800s and the mid-1900s, with most of the findings being collected in the National Archaeological Museum G.A. Sanna in Sassari. In southern and central Sardinia, the findings from the burials of Cornus in Cuglieri, Santa Vittoria di Serri, Santa Maria della Mercede in Norbello, and San Giovanni Battista in Nurachi are exhibited in the National Archaeological Museum of Cagliari.3 The most common military clothing elements from these cemeteries are bronze buckles for sword belts, rings, and open-ended armils. The so-called brachiati warriors were named for the distinctive bracelets that were a defin- ing element of their gear.4 Archaeological studies at various early medieval cemeteries on the island have brought to light different types of belt buckles.5 Those most widely disseminated between the sixth and seventh centuries are made of molded bronze, with a kidney-shaped ring, a beaked tongue, and a U-shaped movable plate impressed with a wide assortment of decorations: 2 Letizia Pani Ermini, “Ancora sull’Iscrizione bizantina di Turris Libisonis,” in Queritur inven- tus colitur: Miscellanea in onore di Padre Umberto M. Fasola (Vatican City, 1989), pp. 513–527. See also Corrado Zedda, “Bisanzio, Islam e il mondo mediterraneo tra VII e XII secolo,” in Archivio Storico Sardo di Sassari n.s.10 (2006), pp. 39–112. 3 The two main national archaeological museums in Sardinia were born during the 1800s from important donations by private collectors. Both the museums were then enriched and re- organized to accommodate the findings from these early, poorly documented excavations and then more recently updated with material from archaeological surveys and stratigraphic excavations. 4 Paolo Benito Serra, “L’armamento,” in Corrias and Cosentino, Ai confini dell’Impero (2002), p. 153. 5 Most of the manufactured objects are preserved in Cagliari’s and Sassari’s national archaeological museums; regarding the latter, see Roberto Caprara, “Tarda antichità e alto medioevo,” in Il Museo Sanna in Sassari, ed. Fulvia Lo Schiavo (Milan, 1986), pp. 169–184; and Daniela Rovina, La sezione medievale del Museo “G. A. Sanna” di Sassari (Piedimonte Matese (CE), 2000). On the former, see Letizia Pani Ermini and Mariangela Marinone, Catalogo dei mate- riali paleocristianii e altomedievali del Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Cagliari (Roma, 1981); see also Salvi Donatella and Paolo Benito Serra, “Corredi tombali e oreficerie nella Sardegna altomedievale,” Quaderni didattici della Soprintendenza Archeologica per le provincie di Cagliari e Oristano 3 (1990). On buckles, see Serra, “L’armamento,” pp. 152–153..

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