BARBARIAN JEWELLERY, SOCIAL SPACE, URBAN CULTURE. A CONTRIBUTION TO FASHION THEORY IN THE EARLY MIGRATION PERIOD (WESTERN EUROPE, CA. 400 – 480 CE)

Personal mobility and cultural transfer have been at the core of the archaeological research on Migration Period funerary assemblages since the 19th century. In the last few decades, a combination of progress in archaeological dating renewed theoretical approaches and consistent incorporation of archaeometrical and archaeobiological data has brought forward a much more accurate picture of the channels and players favouring the dissemination of manufactures, technologies and aesthetic tastes. However, regarding the latter, a substantial part of the scholarly contributions has focused its attention on the short-term perspective, thus privileging explanations based on historical events. This paper is an endeavour to explore the dissemination of fashion elements of Central and Eastern European origin in the late Roman West combining a short- and mid-term approach to the cemetery evidence with the examination of spatial and contextual data. The results show that the‘eastern fashions’ in the West had an autonomous evolution, deriving from the connections between production centres, distribution channels and personal networks as well as from the contacts with late Roman aesthetic tastes and values. It is argued that the exposure to a strong ‘mainstream’ culture is indeed not only a convincing explanation for the quick changes undergone by ‘eastern’ fashion in terms of production, accumulation and use of several fashion items, but also the main reason of its rather ephemeral character. The interaction between ‘Roman’ and ‘eastern’ fashions, it seems, developed according to a trickle-down model, which showed the Roman values having a noticeably dominant position. The peripheral position of the ‘easter’ fashions in the 5th century West is better mirrored by its general absence, or short-livedness, in cultural central places.