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CHAPTER 16
Fashion and Jewelry
Daniela RovinaThe 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 acces-
sories 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 popula-
tion, 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 barbar-
ian 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).