CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Vargha, Mária |
|---|---|
| Title | DRESS ACCESSORIES AND JEWELLERY FROM TWELFTH- AND THIRTEENTH-CENTURY HUNGARY TYPOCHRONOLOGY AND SOCIAL-ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION BASED ON FINDS FROM KANA VILLAGE |
| Summary | This research focuses on different approaches to dating and evaluating the social and economic relations of dress accessories in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Dress accessories and jewellery are good base material for studying society and economy as their personal nature and relatively high value reveal information about the social/economic situations of their owners. In the framework of this project, the whole settlement was excavated: 200 houses, 4 large storage pits, a large number of different archaeological features, the church and churchyard of the village, with nearly 1100 burials. This is an exceptional situation, as no other previously excavated site offered the opportunity for a complete investigation of an entire village. In the case of Kána, the situation is even more fortunate, as not only the village, but also some parts of the nearby abbey of Kána were excavated. Mainly because of the impacts of the Bijelo Brdo debate on the research, and also in consequence of the impoverishment of (churchyard) cemeteries, which in most cases were the bases for such studies, the dating of twelfth- and thirteenth-century jewellery, and also its socio-economic interpretation is still not clear. To gain as precise results as possible, this work uses a new, complex methodology; it compares finds from burials of churchyard cemeteries, with hoards and destroyed settlements from the age of the Mongol invasion. To avoid the danger of a circular argument I used a control dating for the artefacts that relied on the chronology of the cemetery at Kána, distinguished by cemetery analysis and the finds of the settlement, and also hoards that can be connected with the Mongol invasion which provide a stable chronology for the artefacts in them. The investigation of the material from Kána village is an ideal starting point for this research, as according to the present knowledge it is the largest, or rather the most completely excavated, Árpádian-age village in the Carpathian basin. Applying this methodology on the jewellery of the twelfth and thirteenth century this research revealed chronological issues of the artefacts, and modified their dating in many cases. Besides that, it also exposed two important phenomena in burial customs; the lack of thirteenth-century artefacts in graves, and thus, the disappearance of thirteenth century graveyards. The other important issue is the appearance of coins in graves. The research here revealed that coins in the second half of the twelfth and the thirteenth century are not necessarily reliable, as there could have been as much as a hundred years between the actual age of the grave and the one indicated by the coin. All this might have a connection with the silver famine that occurred during this period. The situation seems to have changed at the end of the thirteenth century, when contemporary dress accessories – belts – appear first in graves. This implies a change in burial customs which became widespread in the fourteenth century. Furthermore, present research was able to make the value of such jewellery more precise and together with it the identification of the owners of diverse hoards by investigating the jewellery types, the number of coins, and in certain cases the environment of such finds. |
| Supervisor | Laszlovszky, Jozsef |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/vargha_maria.pdf |
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