Clothing accessories from the early Visigothic regnum (5th-6th centuries)

Metal clothing accessories are one of the main archaeological sources to approach social, cultural and economic aspects of the population of the Late Antique Mediterranean. Many documentation problems have prevented the researchers to develop all the potentialities of 5th and 6th century finds in south-western France and the Iberian Peninsula, both in the fields of typology and chronology and in the ulterior interpretative phase. Thus it was necessary to endeavour a new monographic study able to update the general picture outlined by former studies and to convey data from the newest research. This study catalogues, dates and classifies typologically over for thousand brooches and belt fittings from almost five hundred sites in present day Portugal, Spain, Andorra and France. The results enable a new approaching to the production areas and modalities of circulation and using of each defined type. About twenty distinct clothes have been identified; they are defined by combinations of different types of clothing accessories recorded in funerary backgrounds. Some of them form part of the main basis for a chronological system organized in six periods, stretching from the last decades of the 4th century to the last decades of the sixth century. The integration of such accessories and of the cloths related to them in the Late Antique landscape of Spain and Gaul is also a main aspect of this research. As a result, some regional-based sequences of clothing evolution are identified, and the links between different typologies of funerary and settlement contexts and the previously defined types of clothes are explored. The collected data enables thus a new regard on clothing accessories and its position in the everyday life of many inhabitants of the Visigothic early regnum.